Introduction to Chapter 17

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17

The Contested West

1865–1900

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LAKOTA VEST This late-nineteenth-century Lakota vest displays the American flag, which was a common design in Indian bead art and testifies to the great changes that took place in the American West.
Private Collection, photograph American Hurrah Archive, NYC.

CONTENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

  • Explain federal policies toward Native Americans during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Describe how Native Americans resisted these policies and how the government quashed these acts of resistance.

  • Recount how the late-nineteenth-century frenzy for gold and silver in the West transformed the region and explain how the development of the western mining industry mirrored the processes of industrialization in other parts of the country.

  • Identify who worked and settled in the West and why they were drawn there.

  • Describe the ways in which farming became increasingly commercialized and ranching became increasingly industrialized.

TO CELEBRATE THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF COLUMBUS’S VOYAGE to the New World, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, creating a magical White City on the shores of Lake Michigan. Among the organizations vying to hold meetings at the fair was the American Historical Association, whose members gathered on a warm July evening to hear Frederick Jackson Turner deliver his landmark essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner began by noting that the 1890 census no longer discerned a clear frontier line. His tone was elegiac: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of settlement westward,” he observed, “explained American development.”

Of course, west has always been a comparative term in American history. Until the gold rush focused attention on California, the West for settlers lay beyond the Appalachians. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, the West stretched from Canada to Mexico, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.

Turner, who originally studied the old frontier east of the Mississippi, viewed the West as a process as much as a place. The availability of land provided a “safety valve,” releasing social tensions and providing opportunities for social mobility that worked to Americanize Americans. Turner’s West demanded strength and nerve, fostered invention and adaptation, and produced self-confident, individualistic Americans. His frontier thesis underscored the exceptionalism of America’s history, highlighting its difference from the rest of the world. His “frontier thesis” would earn him a professorship at Harvard and a permanent place in American history.

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Yet the historians who applauded Turner in Chicago had short memories. That afternoon, many had crossed the midway to attend Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West extravaganza—a cowboys-and-Indians shoot-’em-up. The historians cheering in the stands that hot afternoon no doubt dismissed Buffalo Bill’s history as amateur, but he made a point that Turner’s thesis ignored: The West was neither free nor open. It was the story of a fierce and violent contest for land and resources.

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VISUAL ACTIVITYBuffalo Bill Poster William (Buffalo Bill) Cody used colorful posters to publicize his Wild West show during the 1880s and 1890s. This poster from 1899 shows Indians attacking a wagon train and a village of tepees in the background. By the 1870s, the era of the wagon train had ended with the coming of the transcontinental railroads. The mythic West that Cody (featured on the right) re-created, was already part of the past.READING THE IMAGE: How does Buffalo Bill contribute to the “myth of the old West” in this poster?CONNECTIONS: What would Frederick Jackson Turner and the historians who gathered in Chicago have thought of the history of expansion depicted in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show?
Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-13514.

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States pursued empire in the American West in Indian wars that lasted until 1890. Pushed off their land and onto reservations, Native Americans resisted as they faced waves of miners and settlers as well as the degradation of the environment by railroads, mines, barbed wire, and mechanized agriculture. The pastoral agrarianism Turner celebrated in his frontier thesis clashed with the urban, industrial West emerging on the Comstock Lode in Nevada and in the commercial farms of California.

Buffalo Bill’s mythic West, with its heroic cowboys and noble savages, also obscured the complex reality of the West as a fiercely contested terrain. Competing groups of Anglos, Hispanics, former slaves, Chinese, and a host of others arrived seeking the promise of land and riches, while the Indians struggled to preserve their cultural identities. Turner’s rugged white “frontiersman” masked racial diversity and failed to acknowledge the role of women in community building.

Yet in the waning decade of the nineteenth century, as history blurred with nostalgia, Turner’s evocation of the frontier as a crucible for American identity hit a nerve in a population facing rapid changes. A major depression started even before the Columbian Exposition opened its doors. Americans worried about the economy, immigration, and urban industrialism found in Turner’s message a new cause for concern. Would America continue to be America now that the frontier was closed? Were the problems confronting the United States at the turn of the twentieth century—the exploitation of land and labor, the consolidation of capital, and vicious ethnic and racial rivalries—destined to play out under western skies?

CHRONOLOGY

1851
  • First Treaty of Fort Laramie negotiated.

1862
  • Homestead Act passes.

  • Great Sioux Uprising (Santee Uprising) kills 1,000 settlers.

1864
  • Sand Creek massacre kills several hundred Indians.

1867
  • Treaty of Medicine Lodge negotiated.

1868
  • Washita massacre led by Custer.

  • Second Treaty of Fort Laramie negotiated.

1869
  • First transcontinental railroad completed.

1870s
  • Hunters begin to decimate bison herds.

1873
  • “Big Bonanza” discovered on Comstock Lode.

1874
  • Gold discovered in Black Hills.

1876
  • Battle of the Little Big Horn destroys Custer’s army.

1877
  • Chief Joseph surrenders.

1879
  • Carlisle Indian School opens.

  • Exodusters move to Kansas.

1881
  • Sitting Bull surrenders.

1882
  • Chinese Exclusion Act passes.

1886
  • Geronimo surrenders.

1886–1887
  • Severe blizzards decimate cattle.

1887
  • Dawes Allotment Act passes.

1889
  • Ghost Dance spreads.

  • Two million acres in Oklahoma opened for settlement.

1890
  • Sitting Bull killed.

  • Massacre at Wounded Knee kills several hundred Indians.

1893
  • Last land rush occurs in Oklahoma Territory.

  • Frederick Jackson Turner presents “frontier thesis.”