CHAPTER 9
In 1890 the Bureau of the Census announced that the frontier was closed, that is, there was no longer any discernible demarcation between frontier and settlement. Across the continent, the density of non-Indian population was two persons per square mile.
Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.
According to this pronouncement, westward expansion was now complete. Manifest Destiny had been fulfilled. Realization that the Golden West was no longer open had a considerable psychological effect on Native Americans and immigrants alike. In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner, then a professor at Wisconsin and subsequently at Harvard, wrote his brief, seminal article, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” published by the American Historical Association in 1894. He argued that the development of the New World had run a very different course from that of the Old because of “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward.” The frontier acted as a safety valve for the East and helped to make American society more fluid than European. Outposts stimulated the spirit of individualism and inventiveness, putting a special premium on democracy and versatility. American society, moreover, owed to the frontier its special characteristics of earthiness and practicality.
In his Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) extolled two icons of the Old West: roisterous cowboys ready for a spree and small towns that existed to provide banking and commerce, rest and recuperation for pioneers of all sorts following weeks in the hinterland. After studying at Yale and in New York, Remington traveled widely west of the Mississippi. He recorded and romanticized scenes of everyday life with such panache that his characters seem to race across the page with effervescent abandon. (Library of Congress.)
The final settlement of the West was one of the most dramatic stories of the Gilded Age. According to the map little changed. The continental boundaries of the United States were almost the same in 1901 as they had been in 1865. Yet in 1865 there were very few settlements between the Mississippi Valley in the Midwest and California and Oregon on the Pacific—apart from a few pioneers around Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Mormons in Utah. The great prairies between Kansas and Nebraska in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West had previously been considered unsuitable for settlement. They were sometimes called the Great American Desert owing to their inhospitable terrain and climate. These central plains had the most extreme temperature range in the United States: the mean temperature in Bismarck, North Dakota, fell to minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, whereas in Phoenix, Arizona, the mean temperature was 117 degrees in summer.
Nevertheless, this last frontier of nineteenth-century America was invaded by three successive waves of pioneers—miners, ranchers, and farmers. In three decades they settled more land in America than their eastern predecessors had done in 250 years. Between 1607 and 1870, 409 million acres of land had been settled and 189 million acres were cultivated, but between 1870 and 1900, 430 million acres were settled and 225 million acres were cultivated. The foundation of this final settlement was new technology, which improved communications, and the laying of transcontinental railroads.
The settlers were both Native Americans from the states of the Mississippi Valley and the Old Northwest and immigrants from Europe. Native Americans moved West because they felt that the pressure of increasing population in the East was narrowing their opportunities. The immigrants were attracted by advertising campaigns run by states and steamship companies. They were dispersed throughout the West by railroads and labor bureaus. Indeed, it was the revolutions in transportation and communication of railroad and telegraph that made possible the superhuman endeavor of taming a wilderness.
Mining and Ranching
It was not agriculture but mining that first provided the incentive for settling the mountains and desert and ranching that led to the opening of the Great Plains. In 1859 gold was discovered in Pike’s Peak, Colorado, and silver in Nevada. The gold rush of 1859 soon died away, for the precious lodes in Colorado were particularly heavy and required special, expensive machinery for the extraction of ore. However, silver was a different proposition, and the rush to exploit the Comstock Lode reached its climax in the Big Bonanza of 1873. Between 1859 and 1880, $292 million of silver bullion was mined. Silver and copper were also discovered in Montana at Butte in 1875 and 1876. The mines of Colorado yielded gold and silver at Silverton (1873), Leadville (1873), Ouray (1875), and Cripple Creek (1878). Idaho yielded gold in the Caribou Mountains in 1870; gold at Bonanza in 1875; and silver, lead, and zinc at Coeur d’Alene from 1882. Nevada yielded gold, copper, and lead in Eureka from 1872. In Arizona mines were opened at Prescott (1862), Lordsburg (1870), Globe (1873), and Tombstone (1879) for the extraction of gold, silver, and copper. Most dramatic of all, prospectors discovered gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874. In 1876 the Homestake mine was opened. It became the largest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere.
As to miners’ methods, prospectors used placer mining, collecting pans or cradles of sand and gravel from the bed of streams and shaking or rocking them in running water. The heavier gold nuggets and dust sank to the bottom of the pan while the lighter sand was washed away. Lode mining was more complex and involved the use of stamp mills to pulverize veins of quartz containing gold. Gold was extracted after mercury had been poured into the pulverized material and formed an amalgam with it. Lode mining on federal lands necessitated the use of heavy machinery and more permanent occupation than placer mining. Accordingly, in the Mineral Land Act of 1866 (amended 1870 and 1872), Congress granted miners property rights for $5 an acre along lodes no more than 1,500 feet by 600 feet. It also allowed miners to claim a patent for placer mining of deep gravel deposits, old river beds that had dried out and risen, at $2.50 an acre for no more than forty acres and no fewer than ten.
Since the prospectors were usually migrants from the Pacific Coast, the mining frontier moved from west to east. This transient society was almost exclusively made up of men working in remote areas without their families. They wanted to make a lucky strike and then enjoy their new wealth back home. The usual local community was a rowdy camp that sometimes became a ghost town, deserted after a local mine had proved barren. Fortunes were made and lost by individuals who struck lucky and squandered their money. Sandy Bowers was one who discovered silver and used the earnings of his mine to build a splendid house costing $407,000, and to take his wife on a tour of the world. On their return to Nevada they threw open their home and entertained parasites in a lavish way. When their mine petered out, they had nothing to fall back on. Sandy returned to prospecting, and his wife took in washing to sustain them.
Mark Twain, who spent a couple of years in Virginia City, provided a memorable account of the silver boom in Roughing It (1872). The rude manners of the frontier are illustrated in an anecdote about Jim Baker, a western scout. He was not used to city spittoons and simply spat out his tobacco on the carpet of a hotel lobby in Denver. Each time the porter moved the cuspidor closer to his range, he spat in a different direction. Finally the porter placed the spittoon right under his nose. Jim looked up and said, “You know, if you keep movin’ that thing around I’m li’ble to spit in it.”
At the end of the Civil War the ranching frontier was based in Texas. Its climatic conditions were ideal for raising cattle and its land policy suited the owners. Texas had never ceded its public domain to the federal government and now it allowed ranchers to acquire land for grazing at 50 cents an acre. This generous policy encouraged mammoth ranches such as the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle that contained over 3 million acres. The staple breed of cattle was the Texas longhorn, which was so numerous and extensive as to threaten crops growing in Arkansas and Missouri as it roamed or was being driven north to market. In 1867 Joseph McCoy devised a route whereby cattle would be driven north from southern Texas to Abilene, Kansas, along Chisholm’s trail to the west of any settlement. The journey was known as the long drive. From Abilene, the Kansas and Pacific Railroad transported cattle to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Between 1866 and 1885 a total of 5.71 million cattle went north by this route.
In 1868 Philip D. Armour established a meatpacking business in Chicago, and he was followed by Gustavus Swift and Nelson Morris. Meatpacking made use of the assembly-line process long before it was adopted in industry. Each worker had a particular task on the line. In the Armour plants each part of the animal was processed. Besides meat, the hogs and cattle provided glue, sausage casings, fertilizer, and pepsin. Armour once claimed, “I like to turn bristle, blood, bones and the insides and outsides of pigs and bullocks into revenue.”
After the Civil War it seemed that ranching was one route to fortune. Calves bought for $5 or $10 each in Texas and raised on the northern plains could fetch above $25 when they were sold. The grass they ate cost nothing, and the expense of the drive was estimated at less than a cent per head per mile. But the long drive was not really cost-effective. Many cattle lost weight or died. Indians obstructed drives and sometimes charged levies for passage through the Indian Territory. Ranchers discovered that the more northern plains were rich in grass and that their cattle could, after all, withstand the hazards of the winter there. Thus, by the early 1870s, the open range had replaced the long drive in Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. By the end of the decade it had spread to Montana and Dakota. This, too, was a passing phase in livestock farming. Herds multiplied quickly and ranges became overcrowded. The winters of 1885 and 1886 were especially severe. In January 1887 the West from the Dakotas to Texas experienced its worst blizzard to date with a temperature of minus 68 degrees. Ranchers could not round up their cattle, and thousands died.
During the heyday of the long drive and open range, cowboys were kings of the road. They were itinerant workers whose striking clothes were really a protective uniform for their work. The wide-brimmed hat shielded head and eyes from the glare and heat of the sun and served as a bucket at waterholes. The bandanna around his lower face masked the cowboy’s mouth and nose from the dust raised by cattle on the move. Chaps (chaparajos) or leather leggings around his denim trousers guarded him from the stings and thorns of brush and cactus, and high-heeled boots gave him a firm grip in the stirrup and on sand. His most precious possession was not a gun but a saddle. It was often said that a cowboy rode a “forty-dollar saddle on a ten-dollar horse.”
Because there were no boundaries and cattle wandered freely, the open range led to various problems of ownership that were resolved by branding cattle. Herds were rounded up in the spring and fall and divided among their owners. The calves, which followed their mothers, were then branded in special pens. Roundups were the most celebrated and arduous of the cowboys’ duties, with work lasting twelve or fifteen hours a day in grueling heat. The great freeze of 1887 ended the open range. Ranchers returned to more traditional methods of raising livestock, restricting their herds and fencing them in.
The Farming Frontier
The third wave of pioneers, the farmers, survived numerous catastrophes and were, as a group, perhaps the most permanent settlers. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed prospective farmers, on payment of a small registration fee, to settle on a plot of 160 acres (a quarter of a section). They were granted full title to the land after five years of continuous farming. However, whereas a farm of 160 acres in the Ohio Valley would be large enough to sustain a family, it would be insufficient for ranching or farming in the trans-Mississippi West. Nevertheless, at the end of the Civil War pioneers began moving from Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri along rivers and streams with rich soil and timber and, after 1870, ever westward across the plains on land opened up by railroad routes and by the rout of Native Americans.
New inventions and new processes made it possible to farm where no crop had been raised before. Although the soft winter wheat farmed in the East died on the Great Plains, scientists discovered that two varieties of hard wheat could be grown there: spring wheat from northern Europe, which was sown in Dakota and Minnesota, and Turkey Red wheat from the Crimea, which was grown in Kansas and Nebraska. However, the traditional American method of milling soft wheat would not do for hard wheat. In 1870 E. W. Croix, a Frenchman, invented a machine to recover the rich glutinous part of the wheat kernel, or middlings. This “gradual reduction” process was perfected by Washburn Mills of Minneapolis in 1871. It improved the quality of flour and made it possible to use spring wheat more widely than before. As a result, wheat production in areas where the crop could be killed by harsh weather, such as Montana and North Dakota, expanded greatly and led to a bonanza of farm settlement along the Red River Valley. Between 1880 and 1887 wheat production in the Dakotas increased from 3 million to 62 million bushels.
A new method called dry farming made use of water below the soil in arid territory. By plowing a deep furrow that loosened the upper soil, the farmer brought water to the surface by capillary attraction. After it had rained he harrowed the field to create a mulch that slowed down the process of evaporation. In 1878 John F. Appleby invented the “twine binder.” Historian T. N. Carver explains, “It was the twine binder more than any other machine or implement that enabled the country to increase its production of grain, especially wheat.”
The results of the new expanded agriculture were truly phenomenal. American production of wheat increased from 211 million bushels in 1867 to 599 million bushels in 1900. The Department of Labor calculated that whereas it took thirty-five hours of labor in 1840 to produce fifteen bushels of wheat, it took only fifteen hours in 1900. American wheat exports rose from 6 million bushels in 1867 to 102 million bushels in 1900.
Miss Dakota woos Uncle Sam, as Dakota campaigns for immigrants and announces the attractions of life in the Far Northwest. She is also trying to persuade Uncle Sam that she is worthy to take her place in the Union as a fully-fledged state. A lithograph of the Forbes Lithograph Company, 1887. (Library of Congress.)
In the absence of timber to make fences, a simple invention, barbed wire, patented by Joseph F. Glidden of Illinois in 1874, made it possible to define ownership of land in the West. In 1876, in cooperation with an eastern wire manufacturing firm, Glidden produced and sold 3 million pounds of barbed wire. In 1880 he sold 80 million pounds. The invention made the development of the ranching and farming frontiers somewhat smoother than it might otherwise have been because it greatly reduced disputes over territory.
The expansion of agriculture was recognized by Congress as being as important a development as the Industrial Revolution. All kinds of legislation were passed to assist western settlement. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 granted 160 acres to any settler who undertook to plant a quarter of his land with trees within ten years. The Desert Land Act of 1877 awarded 640 acres of land at 25 cents an acre to any settler who attempted to irrigate some of it within three years. Once the land was irrigated, the settler could gain full ownership on payment of $1 an acre. The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 allowed a settler to buy 160 acres at $2.50 an acre for the sake of its timber and stone, provided the land contained no valuable minerals.
The federal government also promoted agricultural research. By the two Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, Congress granted land to the states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges and then began to provide them with regular financial assistance. In the Hatch Act of 1887 it provided federal funds for a national system of agricultural research stations. In 1889 the Department of Agriculture was established and given cabinet status.
No matter how great was the assistance pioneers received from government and industry, their lot was arduous in the extreme. Their homes were primitive. Settlers first made a dugout by excavating a hole in the side of a hill and building an outer wall with blocks of turf and sod. Later they would erect a sod house from strips of thick turf around a wooden frame. These crude homes were warm in winter, cool in summer, and safe from fire. But they were open to flood and damp from floor and roof. For fuel settlers used wood and hay and buffalo dung. Their water came from local streams, handmade wells, and rainwater stored in barrels. It was often the toughness and resourcefulness of their womenfolk that saw the settlers through. The wives had to provide everything the family needed in the primitive home, preserving enough fresh meat in summer to last all winter and boiling down fat to make soap.
Pioneer farmers started under difficult circumstances, and adverse weather often turned their only security into a liability. Editor William Allen White writes of climatic conditions in Kansas in the 1880s:
The pioneers had seen it stop raining for months at a time. They had heard the fury of the winter blast as it came whining across the short burned grass and cut the flesh from their children huddling in the corner. These movers have strained their eyes, watching through the long summer days for the rain that never came. . . . They have tossed through hot nights, wild with worry, and have arisen only to find their worst nightmares grazing in reality on the brown stubble in front of their sunwarped doors.
Plagues of grasshoppers sometimes came in clouds, obscuring the sun and devouring the vegetation until there was nothing left of the farm but the mortgage. In 1874 the worst invasion ever devastated the plains from Dakota to Texas. Prairie fires in summer and fall also devastated farms and property. Autumn storms swept across the prairies, their raging winds whipping everything outdoors. Winter blizzards penetrated houses, leaving furniture and food covered by icicles and snow. The heads of cattle grew so great with ice they had to be lowered to the ground. To protect their precious livestock pioneers opened their family homes to horses, calves, poultry, and pigs, for weeks on end.
The 1880s were years of dramatic westward expansion supported by eastern investors who considered farms in the Golden West to be the safest form of investment. The panic of 1873 and the subsequent depression had discredited banks and industry. Nevertheless, an expanding population needed to be fed. Between 1875 and 1877 investors launched scores of mortgage companies to capitalize on the rising price of farmland. Farmers and prospective farmers responded with alacrity to the temptations of mortgages at 6 or 8 percent interest. A noted historian of westward expansion, Ray Allen Billington, explains, “Few farmers could resist the pressure. Newcomers to the West mortgaged their homesteads to buy farm machinery, mortgaged the farm machinery to provide money until the first crop was harvested, mortgaged the first crop to carry the family through the winter.” In Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Dakota there was at least one mortgage for every family. In Kansas alone mortgage debts tripled between 1880 and 1887. The price of land did rise just as investors had predicted. In Kansas land that cost $15 an acre in the early 1880s was sold for $270 an acre at the end of the decade. In one year alone town lots in Omaha, Wichita, and elsewhere rose from $200 to $2,000. In 1887 forty-two sections of prairie outside Wichita were sold for a total of $35 million.
What was the sum total of these three waves of settlement? The mining districts were accepted as territories shortly after the first strikes, but apart from Nevada in 1864 and Colorado in 1876, none was admitted as a state until 1889. In 1880 both Kansas, which had been admitted as a state in 1861, and Nebraska, which had been admitted in 1867, were settled as far west as the 98th meridian. Kansas claimed a population of almost 996,000; Nebraska, more than 452,000.
Owing to unusually clement weather, bumper crops, and railroad penetration by the Illinois Central to Sioux City, Dakota Territory (organized in 1861) enjoyed a boom of settlement from 1868 to 1873. Each additional line to touch the territory—the Chicago and Northwestern at Watertown, the Northern Pacific at Bismarck, and the St. Paul at Wah-peton—attracted and distributed settlers in ever greater numbers. Thus, in 1870 Dakota had a population of about 12,000. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills led to a gold rush of 10,000 prospectors to Dakota in 1875. But the second boom began in earnest with the success of Oliver Dalrymple, a wheat farmer from Minnesota, hired by the Northern Pacific Railroad to prove that Dakota was fertile. Using new methods Dalrymple cultivated eighteen sections of land in the Red River Valley, harvesting 25 bushels of wheat per acre at a cost of only $9.50 and making a profit of more than 100 percent at market prices. Roused by Dalrymple’s successful experiment, eastern investors from 1878 began to put their capital in bonanza farms along the Red River Valley. This led to the second Dakota boom of 1878 to 1885, which was furthered by the advance of two railroads across the territory—the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, and the Chicago and Northwestern.
In 1879 James J. Hill organized the Great Northern Railroad, which laid track to Devil’s Lake in 1883 and from there to Seattle in 1893. Because the Great Northern had no land grant, Hill ran it on a strictly commercial basis, which encouraged genuine settlement rather than land speculation. Homestead grants rose from 213,000 acres in 1877 (before the second boom) to 1.37 million in 1878 and then successively to a peak of 11.08 million acres in 1884. By 1885 all Dakota east of the Missouri was settled. Between 1880 and 1890 its total population rose four times, to 540,000.
Mountain regions developed more slowly. In 1867 speculators settled the towns of Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, confident that they would become stations of the projected Union Pacific. In 1868 Wyoming became a territory. However, farmers were deterred from moving there because of its mountainous and arid terrain, and when it finally became a state in 1890, Wyoming had only a sparse population of 62,255. Farmers settled in Montana to feed and service the prospectors in Butte and other mining towns, and their path of settlement followed the tracks of the Northern Pacific. In 1890 Montana had a population of 143,000.
The rapid settlement of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming prompted these new territories to seek admission to the Union as states. Their demands were resisted by Democrats in Congress because all three were Republican. But the election of 1888 gave the Republicans a slender majority in Congress, which they decided to use to their future electoral advantage by passing an omnibus bill in 1889 that admitted North Dakota and South Dakota as separate states on November 2, Montana on November 8, and Washington on November 11. Not to be left out, Idaho and Wyoming devised constitutions and demanded statehood in 1890, which they were awarded, respectively, on July 3 and July 10. In Utah, which became a territory in 1850, the population was 211,000 in 1890. The Mormons formally abandoned polygamy in 1890 and devised a constitution, and the territory was received into the Union as a state in 1896.
The admission of these new, sparsely populated states affected the composition of the Senate, to which every state—no matter how tiny its area or how small its population, sent two representatives—and, to a lesser extent, the House. Some argued that the Golden West was thus afforded a disproportionate influence in the federal government, which emphasized agrarian interests at the expense of the urban masses.
The Tragedy of Native Americans
Westward expansion contained as bitter a tragedy as any in the New South. Indians and bison were eliminated together. There were two subspecies of bison: the plains buffalo and the larger, woods buffalo, sometimes called the mountain buffalo because they took to the mountains in the winter. In the sixteenth century they roamed across North America from what became Mexico to what became Canada. They were massive, shaggy creatures with humped shoulders and dangerous horns. They looked clumsy but could sprint at 30 miles per hour for a quarter of a mile. Indians ate their meat fresh in summer and smoked in winter, using the hides of the bulls for tents, the hides of the cows for robes, and the hair of both for ropes.
At the end of the Civil War there were about 15 million bison west of the Mississippi. An observer estimated that there were 4 million in a single herd by the Arkansas River in 1871. A train crossing the Great Plains was once delayed for eight hours while a huge herd crossed the track. In the interests of speed and efficiency, expanding railroads decided to eliminate the bison. The laying of the Union Pacific Railroad by 1869 divided the herd in two. In 1871 a tannery in Pennsylvania discovered that bison hides could be used commercially. Every bison was now worth between $1 and $3. Bison offered the hunter a tempting opportunity to serve the railroads and commercial interests in exterminating the buffalo. Within four years about 3.7 million bison had been killed. By 1875 the entire southern herd had been destroyed. The northern herd was more isolated and took longer to eliminate, yet ten years later this had been accomplished. In 1886 a member of the Smithsonian Institution had great difficulty in tracing and rounding up twenty-five, the last that remained.
The main tragedy of Native Americans took place before 1865. From the sixteenth century they had been swept ever westward by the advance of whites. What happened in the Gilded Age was a final catastrophe, perhaps more harrowing than earlier elimination because the Indians were now fighting for survival without hope. The successive removal of Indians from the East onto the Great Plains had already made the Indian community as a whole less dependent on farming for food and more dependent on the bison. Thus, the decimation of the bison had a political purpose. With their source of food gone, Indians would be obliged to settle down and accept rations on a federal reservation.
From June 1876, when he experienced a remarkable vision after enacting the Sun Dance for two days, Tatanka Iyotake, or “Sitting Bull” (circa 1831-1890), chief of the Hunka-papa or Western Sioux, was regarded as a remarkable shaman. Bleeding profusely from the wounds to his shoulders and arms where he had torn off and given away 100 pieces of skin, he saw white soldiers falling from the skies upon the Sioux. Thus he prophesied the destruction of the Indian way of life: thus it was to be. (Library of Congress.)
In 1866 the United States extorted new treaties from the Five Civilized Tribes of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. This was in retaliation for their enforced cooperation with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Their reservations in the Indian Territory were reduced in size. They were also obliged to admit Plains Indians to their land and to permit railroad access through it. Between 1865 and 1889 the central Indian Territory received at least twenty-five different tribes. The reservation was undermined from without by white rapacity and from within by shortages of food and medicine.
The Plains Indians farther west resented the invasion by white miners of Colorado, and during the Civil War attacked their camps. The most notorious white reprisal was the massacre by Colonel J. M. Chivington, a Methodist minister, of about 500 Cheyenne men, women, and children in a surprise attack on their camp at Sand Creek on November 28, 1864. In their barbarity militia and frontiersmen clubbed children and disemboweled pregnant women. Miraculously, the Cheyenne leader, Black Kettle, survived. In Denver, Chivington later showed a collection of 100 scalps as a vaudeville act at a local theater. He was hailed as a public benefactor.
Partly in revenge, northern Sioux then massacred a small detachment of soldiers on the Bozeman Trail, a wagon route devised by John Boze-man from the Platte River to the mines of Montana. On December 21, 1866, Captain William J. Fetterman and eighty men were lured from Fort Phil Kearney, Wyoming, and overwhelmed by Red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux. The Fetterman massacre led to an emotional outburst from eastern reformers who blamed the disasters on the contradictory nature of government policy regarding the Indians, especially the division of federal authority between the Departments of Interior and War.
The Interior Department, created in 1849, had charge of Indian affairs but always relied on the army to execute its unpopular, poorly planned policies. It was staffed by ignoramuses. Sometimes they had not even set eyes on an Indian until they took up their posts at some remote spot. They received a pittance of only $1,500 per annum but had every expectation of a sound political future. Graft, corruption, and theft were rife among Indian agents. One agent sold the government blankets and material supplied for Apaches to local merchants and stole government cattle for his own ranch. Another devoted his energy to his mine at San Carlos and used federal funds to improve and extend it.
Because of mounting public pressure Congress proposed a more responsible policy toward Native Americans. The Indian Act of 1867 established a peace commission of four civilians and three generals to end the Sioux War. The commission was instructed to persuade Native Americans to abandon the life of nomadic hunters for a protected existence on reservations. By October 1867 the commission had completed arrangements for the southwestern tribes to settle on various reservations. Yet war continued in the midst of peace. In 1868 Black Kettle and the Cheyenne who had survived the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 were defeated by General Philip H. Sheridan and his rising officer, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, by the Washita River in Indian Territory. Black Kettle was slain. In the north Chief Red Cloud of the Sioux signed a peace treaty at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, on November 6, 1868. It recognized the Black Hills or Paha Sapa of Dakota as a giant Sioux reservation. The government now decided to pretend that the Indian problem no longer existed. On March 3, 1871, Congress forbade further treaties with tribes in a law declaring that henceforth “no Indian nation or tribe . . . within the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power.”
There followed a final generation of Indian wars before the extermination of the bison, the coming of the railroad, and the introduction of rapid-fire weapons, which put an end to the vicious cycle of attacks and retribution. The Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne fought the Red River Wars of 1874 and 1875 in which Quanah Parker, the son of a Comanche war chief and a white captive, led an abortive attack on bison hunters in the Battle of Adobe Walls in Texas, on June 24, 1874. But after his defeat in 1875, he decided to persuade the Comanches to enter reservations and thus was instrumental in bringing peace to the plains of the Southwest. The fearless Apache leader Geronimo, who emptied much of Arizona of whites, also sued for peace in 1875. By then his force, reduced to 36 braves, was hopelessly outnumbered by 5,000 federal soldiers. Whites also defeated the Modocs and the Nez Perces under Chief Joseph. All accepted small and undesirable reservations.
Native Americans’ ability to survive the final onslaught of predatory whites was undermined by their own chronic internecine warfare. Nevertheless the chiefs, in conducting the wars of the Great Plains, managed to persuade Cheyenne and Comanche to join forces with Arapahoe and Kiowa in what might have been a successful guerrilla retaliation had it not been for the decimation of their food supply, the defection of many of their people to the enemy as soldiers and scouts, and the superior resources of the federal army. In 1876 the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe astounded white society with an overwhelming attack on George Armstrong Custer and 266 men of the Seventh Cavalry. Despite the treaty of 1867, white prospectors had invaded the Indian lands of Dakota in their search for gold. Custer was the miners’ self-appointed protector. He and his small force were annihilated by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and their people at Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. This was Custer’s last stand. Despite their victory, the Indian braves were intimidated by the arrival of increased numbers of federal troops. Sitting Bull and his followers retreated into Canada. Crazy Horse and the Oglala Sioux surrendered at Fort Robinson in May 1877. To prevent his escape his captors bayoneted him to death in a guardroom that September. The other Indians were assigned to reservations.
Ulysses S. Grant’s policy of allowing religious denominations to supervise reservations was called a “Peace Policy.” It failed. The churches disputed their rights with one another. The agents they appointed as managers were often incompetent or corrupt. Moreover, their attempts to convert Native Americans to Christianity crushed their culture. Christian missionaries not only tried to convert Indians to their religion but also insisted on adherence to their standards of social behavior. In particular, they wanted Indians to give up hunting for farming. The quality of Christianity on the frontier was no inducement. As an Indian remarked to Bishop Henry Benjamin (“Straight Tongue”) Whipple of the Episcopalians, when he heard him speak against alcoholism and adultery among Indians, “My father, it is your people, who you say have the Great Spirit’s book, who bring us the fire-water. It is your white men who corrupt our daughters. Go teach them to do right, and then come to us and I will believe you.”
Several organizations promoted the Indian cause, including the National Indian Association in Philadelphia; the Indian Citizenship Committee of Boston; and the Indian Rights Association, founded in Philadelphia by Herbert Welsh and Henry S. Pancoast. The National Indian Defense Association, organized by Dr. T. A. Bland, was different from the others. It opposed policies of white acculturation aimed at destroying Indian tribes. The most effective propaganda was by Helen Hunt Jackson in two remarkable books, A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884).
As a result of these various efforts, the government was shamed into financing Indian education. In 1870 Congress appropriated funds for Indian schools, and by 1899, $2.5 million was being spent each year on 148 boarding and 225 day schools for 20,000 children. Indian schools emphasized industrial and agricultural skills. In 1879 Capt. Richard H. Pratt, who favored assimilation, established the most famous Indian school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 1878 Congress appropriated funds for an Indian police and Courts of Indian Offenses, not only to maintain law and order on the reservations, but also to assist in acculturation. The Indian police and judges were expected to conform to white standards of behavior and to act as a counterweight to the power of the traditional tribal chiefs.
In 1887 Native Americans still held some 138 million acres of land. Although the system of landholding on Indian reservations worked well enough, conservatives and reformers alike were agreed on a policy of severalty—dividing tribal areas among families as private property. The Dawes Severalty Act of February 4, 1887, named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, gave legal form to a piecemeal practice of many years’ standing. It allowed the president discretion to allot reservation land to Indians that would be held in trust for them for twenty-five years. Heads of families were to receive 160 acres of land; other Indians were to be awarded smaller amounts. The act conferred American citizenship on Native Americans who accepted the allotment. The idea was not humanitarian. The plan was to turn nomadic hunters into sedentary farmers and to break up the tribes once and for all. But the policy was doomed to failure at a time of agricultural depression. Besides, no care was taken to provide Indians with arable land. After the awards had been made the surplus land was sold commercially. Most Indians had little understanding of what the act entailed, since the idea of private property was strange to their culture. Those who did understand the act recognized the snares inherent in the scheme and protested against it. In 1891 an amendment to the Dawes Act ended the policy of awarding 160 acres to heads of families. In the future individual Indians, regardless of status, were to be allotted 80 acres each.
After the Dawes Act conditions on remaining reservations deteriorelated to the extent that they became scandalous. As historian Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., attests:
Indian life was marked by poverty, squalor, disease, and hopelessness. In general, Indians received little or no education and were still treated as wards, incapable of self-government or making decisions for themselves. Whatever revenues the tribes received from land sales were dissipated, with virtually none of them going to assist the Indians to create sound foundations for the development of the human and economic resources of the reservation.
Native Americans sought bizarre consolation in religious cults. The most important were the Peyote cult and the Ghost Dance movement. The Peyote cult was the consumption of a mild narcotic found in the roots and buttons of a certain cactus. It induced hallucinations, and some Peyote groups used it in Christian services. The Ghost Dance religion was a further disillusioning experience for those Plains tribes crushed by the extermination of the bison. It was led by Wovoka, or Jack Wilson, a Paiute of Nevada. He was an Indian medicine man. In 1888 he recovered from a serious illness and claimed he had received a message from the Great Spirit who had appointed him prophet. He prescribed fastings, dances, and songs (the Ghost Dance) and encouraged secret ceremonies to herald the appearance of a messiah who would revive the bison. Ironically, the movement was spread through the South and West by the universal medium of white education. Apprehensive whites interpreted it as a prelude to another Indian rebellion. Their erroneous suspicions grew after Kicking Bear, a Sioux chief, paid a visit to Wovoka. Moreover, Sitting Bull had returned from Canada in 1881. Indian police decided to arrest him to prevent him from becoming leader of the supposed insurrection. Sitting Bull had long believed that he would die at the hands of his own people, the Sioux. On the night of December 14, 1890, forty Indian police were assigned to dispatch him. He was shot dead by a Sioux, Red Tomahawk.
The death of Sitting Bull did not, of course, result in an Indian uprising. Three hundred Teton Sioux did leave a reservation at Standing Rock but mainly as a conservative protest against the Ghost Dance movement. They were overtaken by the Seventh Cavalry. Some refused to surrender their arms. The troops then fired without provocation and either killed outright or fatally wounded the pathetic band of travelers. This was the notorious massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, of December 29, 1890. According to David Murray, the Indian population in 1890 was about 248,253—a fragment of the number before white contact.
There now remained but one last “unsettled” territory in the Midwest. The first designs on the Indian Territory were shown by railroads, which began petitioning Congress to open some lands for extra lines as early as 1874. In 1879 the Missouri, Kansas and Texas hired a malcontent Cherokee, Elias C. Boudinot, to claim in the Chicago Times that there lay 13 million undesignated acres within the territory, which by rights really belonged to the American people. This encouraged squatters from Kansas and Missouri to stake claims in the Oklahoma district. In 1880, led by David L. Payne of Kansas, a former homesteader and Indian fighter, they invaded the territory and were repulsed. He founded an Oklahoma colony in Kansas pledged to open the territory. After a series of unsuccessful forays into Oklahoma, he died in November 1884 and was succeeded as leader by W. L. Couch, who continued his policy of invasion and withdrawal. On March 3, 1885, Congress authorized the Indian Office to terminate Indian claims to the empty Oklahoma district and Cherokee outlet in the territory. But the Indian agents realized that any white settlement in the Indian Territory would soon lead to the collapse of the entire reservation. They decided to do nothing. But Congress could not withstand increasing demands for homesteads, and in January 1889 it obliged the Creeks and Seminoles to waive their rights to the land in return for $4.19 million. On March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison declared that Oklahoma district would be opened to settlers on April 22 that year.
Prospective settlers gathered at the boundary and sped into Oklahoma by horse and wagon, by train and on foot as soon as rifle fire announced that it was noon. Ray Allen Billington describes the scene:
At last the revolvers barked, and along the line pandemonium broke loose. Men whipped up their horses, wagons careened wildly forward, horses freed from overturned vehicles galloped slowly about—all was hurrah and excitement. The Sante Fe trains, steaming slowly forward at a regulated pace which would not give their passengers an undue advantage, disgorged riders along the route as men leaped from roofs or platforms and rushed about in search of a claim. Noise and confusion reigned as the shouts of successful “Boomers,” the crash of hammers on stakes, the clatter of wagons, the crash of overturned vehicles, and the curses of disappointed homesteaders mingled to create a bedlam unique in the annals of the nation.
That day 1.92 million acres of Oklahoma district were settled.
On May 2, 1890, Congress granted the new settlement the status of a territory. In the following years it extended its lands by opening up successive reservations under the terms of the Dawes Act: in September 1891, 900,000 acres of the Sauk, Fox, and Potawatomi; in April 1892, 3 million acres of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe; in September 1893, 6 million acres of the Cherokee.
The Dawes Act of 1887 did not apply to the Five Civilized Tribes living in Indian Territory for whom separate provision was made by a special senatorial commission of 1893. By this time it was perfectly clear that the severalty policy had been, at best, a terrible mistake. At worst, it was another white betrayal. Where land was of no interest to whites, such as the desert of the Southwest, Native Americans were not forced to accept severalty. Elsewhere, whites exploited their innocence by systems of leaseholding and guardianship that reduced the rightful owners to paupers.
Historians, Artists, and the West
Frederick Jackson Turner’s successor as the most prominent historian of the West was Ray Allen Billington who delved more deeply than Turner but covered much the same ground in the various editions of his mammoth Western Expansion (1949). In a complementary account, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (1981), he reflected on our mental picture of the West as a land of dramatic contrasts, including breathtaking vistas and limitless possibilities for personal and territorial development, but also a land with intense, inherent dangers. One of Billington’s conclusions is that the illusion of being able to escape was so important for many settlers and in time became even more important than the physical realities of the frontier.
Yet Billington’s attempt at a definitive history of the frontier, and the very concept of a frontier, moving continuously to the West, was not the last word on the subject. In the 1960s and 1970s American historians were turning to less optimistic interpretations of the American past. They included a generation of revisionist historians who focused on previously uncharted fields for research and challenged traditional assumptions about western expansion. The political and social upheaval of the 1960s, much of it centered on the civil rights movement for African-Americans, on the turmoil engendered by the United States’s involvement in the Second Indochina War of 1961–1975, and agitation by an increasingly powerful environmental movement, had a seismic impact on work undertaken by scholars at American universities. They began to focus increasingly on points of view radically different from traditional assumptions. This meant a new emphasis—not on the triumph of individual white settlers and the spread of their technological prowess and political systems, but rather on the virtues of what they superseded: Native Americans’ values and heroism, the rights of Hispanic and Indian minorities, and the importance of ecological awareness.
“I Am Coming,” a 1900 lithograph by the Courier Lithograph Company. It was partly in tribute to folk hero Colonel William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), known as Buffalo Bill for his unparalleled feat of slaughtering 4,280 head of buffalo in eight months in 1867-68 to feed construction workers on the Union Pacific Railroad, and partly an advertisement for Cody’s Wild West Show, which he ran from 1883 until two months before his death. (Library of Congress.)
In fact, the very first piece of revisionist scholarship predated the 1960s. This was Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), examining the myths and symbols that have shaped American images of the West. Drawing on popular fiction and political tracts, Henry Nash Smith showed how, first Europeans and then American settlers regarded the frontier as an inhospitable wilderness but then how time softened this harsh view until, by the close of the nineteenth century, the West was considered a land golden with opportunity. This was a book about a land and its myths.
Later revisionists include Patricia Nelson Limerick, William Cronon, Richard White, Clyde A. Milner 2d, Charles E. Rankin, Gary Holihaus, Charles F. Wilkinson, Terry Tempest Williams, William Kittredge, Wallace Stegner, and Eve Styler Munson. Their work and attitudes are illustrated by two anthologies: Trails: Toward a New Western History (1991) and Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (1992), which draw together articles by different historians. Despite some disagreements, these revisionists are united in two respects: their repudiation of the Turner thesis and their conviction that Americans’ perception of the history of the West has changed irreversibly. They criticize Frederick Jackson Turner for his interpretation of the opening of the West to white settlers as a triumph of white democratic progress; for his emphasis on the achievements of individuals; and for his taking the Census Bureau’s declaration of an end to the frontier a stage further as signifying an end to the history of the West. In fact, the revisionist school rejects the concept of the frontier outright. Instead, they discuss the already well developed civilizations extant in the West—notably those of Native Americans (or Indians), Hispanic, and metis (or mixed blood).
Two major art exhibitions left legacies in books conceived for visitors to them that suggest the ways in which art has fashioned our ideas about the West and also the ways in which the customs of the art have been shaped by our own mental pictures of the region. Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (1992) drawn from collections at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and at Yale was exhibited in Cody, New Haven, and Tulsa in 1992 and 1993 and accompanied by a book of the same title edited by Jules Prown. And the controversial 1991 National Museum of American Art exhibition in Washington, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 was accompanied by a book also of the same title (1991) edited by William H. Truettner.
The Discovered Lands exhibition concentrated on three themes: discovery, erasure, and invention. First, as to discovery, western pioneers regarded their exploration and settlement of the West as an adventure into the unknown. George Catlin’s Buffalo Hunt on Snowshoes (undated) aroused the curiosity of the Americans who first enjoyed it, partly because the subject was unfamiliar and, therefore, exciting. Second,, artists’ apparently naturalistic representation of vistas blurred actual details of the landscapes and sometimes even traces of their original inhabitants. Thus Albert Bierstadt’s Sierra Nevada Morning (1870) is a mountain fantasy with shafts of celestial light illuminating a paradisiacal lake. Its perfectly balanced composition comes near to obliterating any distinctive features of the terrain. By the time Bierstadt had painted his picture, the Sierras were already in the process of profound transformation wrought by the coming of the railroad. In fact, the painting would provide an apt backdrop for a rustic scene in a Wagnerian opera. It is mythic but it does not conjure up any part of the American West in any realistic sense. In The Last of His Race (1908) Frederic Remington, peerless painter of roisterous pioneers, chooses to reduce an image of the indigenous inhabitants to a solitary brave. Western artists might depict encounters of New Americans with Native Americans (perhaps exchanging gifts) as if these were precious moments of discovery rather than routine events, while sometimes showing Indian possession of western objects that could only have been obtained by trade with the whites.
The third theme of invention came from the way explorers who were also artists, such as John Mix Stanley and Gustavus Sohon, in their various illustrations for government reports encouraged public interest in expansion. Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s mural for the United States Capitol, Westward the Course of Empire Takes the Way (circa 1861), celebrates Manifest Destiny with a band of pioneers seeing California for the first time as they resolutely cross and mount the Rockies.
Other artists who romanticized the opening of the West to whites and who achieved peak form during the Gilded Age included Joseph Hubert Becker, Rosa Bonheur, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge.
Instead of the progress Frederick Jackson Turner discerned in settlement, political institutions, and civilization generally, the West of modern revisionist historians is a much harsher environment with moldering ghost towns, squalid Indian reservations, and devastated landscapes. Not for them Turner’s belief in the sort of rugged individualism that continuously transformed and enhanced a primitive society. They believe that western individualism is a self-serving myth. The region was always inextricably bound to the national economy and to the national economy’s links with the international market. What sustained Anglo-Saxon settlement was the demand elsewhere for the West’s natural resources. Thus western pioneers were not truly self-sufficient. They were dependent on railroads subsidized by the federal government for carrying produce to and products from markets, on federal troops for protection from Native Americans, and—albeit later in the twentieth century—canals and dams cut and built to irrigate fields and sustain cities and towns.
According to the revisionist interpretation, the English-speaking newcomers did not settle the West. They conquered it—perhaps as the Normans subdued Anglo-Saxon England after 1066. However, conquest of the West was never total. Anglo-Americans and their descendants not only came to share the region with their predecessors, the Native Americans, but also with Asian-Americans and African-Americans, who arrived either alongside them or slightly later. In fact, modern scholars think the very cultural diversity of the West is one of its most distinctive features. John Mack Faragher, author of Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979), remarks that “frontier history is the story of the contact of cultures, their competition and their continuing relation. It cannot be the story of any one side.” In short, a multicultural approach has become the preferred approach by many historians. For example, Elliot West, author of Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (1989), finds
Indians and Hispanics may have been militarily subdued, but when we start to reconstruct the details we find that . . . those cultures have been remarkably resilient. If much has been lost, much has survived, and there has been a vigorous exchange between the conquered and the conquerors, a cross fertilization of customs, ideas, material culture, language, and world views.
Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (1992), edited by William Cronon, contains various studies. Some are about the complex interaction of ethnic minorities with the dominant Anglo-American culture. One theme is the ways in which life in the West altered relations between men and women; another is the ways in which hitherto unused historical materials, including newspapers published by Native Americans, not only fill out but also alter our knowledge of conflict and adaptation in the West.
The school of revisionist historians has had its critics. In 1990 novelist Larry McMurtry wrote in the New Republic how, by insisting on the undoubted tragedies and failures of the West in the nineteenth century to the virtual exclusion of the courageous dreams of the settlers, the revisionists had in fact created a school of “Failure Studies,” in which they also were participants “because they so rarely do justice to the quality of imagination that constitutes part of the truth.” In 1991 the National Museum of American Art in Washington mounted The West as America, the comprehensive but controversial exhibition of nineteenth-century art of the West. The controversy was acrimonious, partly because visitors were offended by the didactic nature of the accompanying wall texts that critic Michael Kimmelmann of the New York Times complained about as burdened with “forced analyses and inflammatory observations.” It was also controversial because the exhibition called attention to the propaganda inherent in the art, and thereby implied something was sorely wrong with several of America’s cherished myths. Instead of the rugged individualism of the West with its romantic associations, it seemed that the organizers had turned the Anglo-American settlers into demons and sanctified their adversaries: in short, the exhibitors failed to indicate that the Anglo-Americans had contributed anything of positive, lasting value in the West.
Where revisionist historians have considered the place of myth and imagination, they have done so by stripping them of spurious factual accretions and discussing them as illusions. This shattering of long-cherished myths is disturbing to people right across the world whose mental picture of the West has been determined by thousands of motion pictures and radio and television programs—a first generation of movies for the cinema and serials for radio and a later generation of serials for television—and everything their screenplays, stars, and potent images have conveyed: cowboy heroes battling evil; shootouts in the center of town; Indian braves both helping and hindering the advance of white civilization; horses responding to the every command of their owners–all at the service of homespun American values. Such was the classic western Stagecoach (1939) by director John Ford, the film that established John Wayne as a star, and which was essentially an interior drama of conversations and motives. In the face of this legacy we might say that the revisionist historians have been engaged in an undeclared war with the whole panoply of American popular culture. This culture has extended from songs and children’s games of cowboys and Indians right across the world, as have its fashions. Thus westerns might be made in Italy–as was a series in the 1960s, the so-called spaghetti westerns, developed around Clint Eastwood.
The revisionists’ most potent cultural allies have come from the school of alternative westerns, extolling the virtues of Native Americans and condemning the materialism, rapaciousness, and gross brutality of whites, notably A Man Named Horse (1969) with Richard Harris, Soldier Blue (1970) with Candice Bergen, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) with Dustin Hoffman, and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990).
The Wild West
The traditional view of the West purveyed by show business was sub-stantively determined by the way certain impresarios first sold themselves, and, hence, the West, to the American public. To many the Golden West really was the Wild West. In the absence of established law and order crime was rife, especially rustling horses and cattle and armed robbery of trains and stagecoaches. There were three types of law officer: town marshals appointed by town councils; county sheriffs elected in state counties and appointed by governors in territories; and United States marshals appointed by the federal government to police territories and prevent crime. They were supplemented by the private operatives of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and the Wells Fargo Express Company and, in Texas, by the state Rangers. Picturesque characters among the lawmen included Sheriff Frank Canton of Wyoming; Marshal Henry Brown of Caldwell, Kansas; Marshal Long Jim Courtwright of Fort Worth; and Tom Threepersons, a Cherokee who was an expert shot. Posterity has not been kind to some of the semiofficial groups of vigilantes formed to protect local interests against raids by outlaws. In 1884 cattlemen in Montana, determined to eradicate cattle rustling, went on the rampage and killed thirty-five people, several of whom were undoubtedly innocent. Some said the vigilantes’ real motive was to move legitimate smallholders off their own ranches to make way for the big cattlemen.
“You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.” Annie Oakley (left), originally Phoebe Anne Oakley Moses (1860-1926), the most famous markswoman ever. After winning a shooting match in Cincinnati, she toured vaudeville circuits and became a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show from 1885 to 1902. Her best-known biography is the musical written by Irving Berlin for Ethel Merman, Annie, Get Your Gun (1946), with immortal songs extolling early vaudeville and the lost frontier. Frontierswoman Martha Jane Cannary Burke (circa 1852–1903) became a legend as Calamity Jane (right). Orphaned when her parents died on a wagon train moving west, Calamity Jane earned a living as a dance hall girl until she settled in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876 and worked as a bullwhacker, hauling goods and machinery to outlying camps. She enjoyed a brief sojourn with lawman James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickok (1837-1876) and later became a subject for short-story writers. Capitalizing on her newfound reputation as a frontier heroine, she toured with Wild West shows; but the seamy side of her life was muted in a gutsy but essentially saccharine film biography of 1953 starring Doris Day. (Library of Congress.)
The outlaws themselves have passed into picaresque legend. The mass media have turned desperadoes into heroic individuals combating the encroaching power of the state. The most famous were William H. Bonney, “Billy the Kid,” originally from New York, who was shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881; Joaquin Murieta of New Mexico; Robert Leroy Parker (“Butch Cassidy”), leader of the Wild Bunch, which included Harry Longabaugh (“The Sundance Kid”) and Harvey Logan (“Kid Curry”); and Belle Starr, a woman outlaw who was no beauty, though it was said that she had more lovers than a dog has fleas.
Two characters of the Golden West, who became legends in their own lifetime, turned the fact into commercial advantage. William F. (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody began to work as an actor in 1872 when he appeared in a lurid melodrama, Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, staged for him in New York. Buffalo Bill had served the Union Army in the Civil War, and later served as a civilian scout out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas, where he was noted for deadly marksmanship, accurate knowledge of Indian life, and total recall of terrain. He had played a pivotal role in the federal government’s remorseless policy of Indian removal, or elimination, being a fearless fighter in sixteen Indian campaigns, including one that ended in the notorious scalping of the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair in Sioux County, Nebraska (July 17, 1876). Ironically, he helped perpetuate the myths of the West through his Wild West exhibition, first seen in 1883, a traveling show featuring demonstration marksmanship, a buffalo hunt, and exhilarating chases between cowboys and Indians. In fact, Sitting Bull, during a brief period of favor with the authorities in the mid-1880s, was one of Buffalo Bill’s artists.
Perhaps the most popular star was crack shot Annie Oakley of Ohio. She could hit the thin edge of a playing card in midair and shoot a cigarette from the lips of her husband and manager, Frank Butler. In 1887 the show went to London and she won a contest with Grand Duke Michael of Russia, a famous marksman, to discover who could smash the most glass balls thrown in the air. She hit forty-seven out of fifty to the duke’s thirty-five. On this occasion her target in the cigarette trick was the German emperor. Because she could perforate a playing card five times in midair her name was used to describe any punched theater ticket.
Ecology
The official closing of the frontier emphasized the physical fact that the supply of virgin land had come to an end, that the population had increased, and that the supply of natural resources had decreased. No longer could one escape the pressures of the East by going west. The romantic legend, that while there was free land every man had the opportunity to make his fortune, died with the frontier. The realization of frontiersmen that they were not truly free of the East was a factor leading to the Populist revolt that shook American politics in the 1890s.
The federal government had freely disposed of unoccupied land in a period when few people were ready to admit that the supply was not endless. However, the admission of the new western states to the Union spurred on a conservation lobby. It believed Americans had already wasted precious natural resources by their reckless extraction of minerals, their careless cutting of forests, and their exploitation of arable, and even semi-arid, land. In 1891 it urged on Congress the Forest Reserve Act. This gave the president authority over “public lands wholly or in part covered with timber.” Thus he could protect them from sale or homesteading by setting them aside as forest reserves. Accordingly, Grover Cleveland turned 25 million acres of the San Joaquin forest in California into a national forest. Benjamin Harrison withdrew 13 million acres and William McKinley 7 million acres from the public domain. Where western land was barren the problems were different. If the plains were to be successfully settled it was essential that water was brought to the land. Private cooperative projects were clearly insufficient to irrigate a whole desert and in 1894 Congress passed the Carey Act. It authorized the president to allow western states to sell up to a million acres of public lands to raise funds for irrigation projects. However, it was left to Theodore Roosevelt, who made conservation a subject of his first annual message to Congress when he became president in 1901, to improve and expand these policies.
Revisionist history has been a source of continuous scholarship on the environment, a subject crucial to the desert lands of the West and one that has now assumed enormous significance across the world. One example of this scholarship is Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (1992), a collection of essays by Donald Worster, author of Rivers of Empire (1992). Worster argues in various books that the West was, and remains, a hydraulic society, that its “social order [is] founded on the intensive management of water.” Making the desert fecund has been one of the outstanding achievements of recent Western history, allowing agriculture to prosper in California and large cities to flourish in Arizona. This bloom was conferred on the deserts of the West by engineering and technology sponsored by the federal government. Indeed, the role of the federal government through its engineering and technology was greater in the West than in any other region. Yet this achievement, the irrigation of the desert, also led to epic disasters, notably the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Yet Donald Worster’s epitaph on this achievement is bleak:
Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but, all the same, it’s an illusion.
In his essays in The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West (1992), Charles F. Wilkinson, a historian of the land and water laws, asks residents of the West of the 1980s and 1990s to develop an “ethic of place,” that will balance the needs of human beings and the West’s natural world in the interest of protecting the West’s distinctive natural environment. The sort of West that endures is partly determined by the impact of its inhabitants on the environment.