CHAPTER 17: The Transformation of the Trans-Mississippi West

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CHAPTER 17The Transformation of
theTrans-Mississippi West
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• Chapter 17 Transformation of the
• Trans-Mississippi West, 1860-1900
• Chapter Essential Questions
• What roles did the federal government, the army,
  and the railroads play in the settlement of the
  West?
• 2. How was Indian life on the Great Plains
  transformed in the 2nd half of the 19th Century?
• 3. How did ranchers and settlers displace
  Spanish-speaking Americans in the Southwest?

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Native Americans and theTrans-Mississippi West

• Westward migration destroyed the traditional
  Indian way of life.
• Native Americans were placed on reservations,
  ending traditional, nomadic cultures
• Throughout the mid to late 1800s, the Indians
  desperately, but unsuccessfully fought to
  preserve their traditional ways of life.

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The Assault on Nomadic Indian Life

• The 1850s discovery of gold and silver in the
  Rockies brought 1000s of miners, and pressure on
  the US government to make Indian lands available
  to white settlement
• The governments response was to establish the
  reservation system.
• Most Indians opposed this the 1860s-1890s was a
  period of constant fighting between Indian tribes
  and the U.S. army.

• The US Army intentionally slaughtered the bison
  in order to undermine Indian resistance to white
  expansion.
• By the 1880s, the Plains Indians way of life,
  dependent on the buffalo, was destroyed.

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Custers Last Stand

• Custer was sent into the Black Hills (SD) to
  force all Indians back onto reservations.
• Custer attacked a force of Sioux and Cheyenne
  Indians encamped on the Little Bighorn River
  (Montana).
• The Indians, led by Chief Sitting Bull, vastly
  outnumbered Custers men and killed them
• Most Americans, viewed the Indians as uncivilized
  barbarians standing in the way of progress
• Outraged by the slaughter at Little Bighorn,
  pressure grew for the US government to solve
  the Indian problem to destroy Native American
  resistance.
• After a five year campaign to destroy the Sioux
  through attacks on villages and food supplies,
  the Sioux were defeated and Sitting Bull was
  forced to surrender.

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The Ghost Dance and the End of Indian Resistance
on the Great Plains, 1890

• Desperate Sioux turned to Wovoka, an Indian
  mystic who promised that their lands would be
  returned to them if they returned to traditional
  ways, exemplified by the Ghost Dance
• The Ghost Dance movement spread throughout the
  Sioux, unifying Indian resistance US military
  officials believed it needed to be stopped
• At Wounded Knee (SD), in 1890, a gun fired while
  US cavalry was rounding up 340 starving men,
  women, and children of the Sioux tribe.
• The soldiers retaliated with cannon fire,
  slaughtering 300 Indians. This slaughter
  effectively ended Plains Indian resistance.

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Saving the Indians

• A vocal minority of Americans were outraged by
  the federal governments flagrant violation of
  its Indian treaties.
• Humanitarians concluded that the only way to save
  the Indian was to force him to abandon Indian
  culture, settle as farmers, and become
  assimilated into American society
• Reformers established boarding schools to teach
  Indians trades and American cultural ways

• The Dawes Act (1887) called for turning Native
  Americans into farmers and landowners.
• The Dawes called for the distribution of 160
  acres of reservation land for farming or 320
  acres of grazing land to the head of each Indian
  family
• Rather than focusing on tribal rights, it imposed
  a private property model on Native Americans

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The First Transcontinental Railroad

• Pacific Railroad Act (1862) authorized the
  construction of a transcontinental railroad, with
  separate crews starting east and west moving
  toward each other.
• Chinese, Irish, Mexican immigrants, and freed
  blacks were the main labor force in the building
  of the railroads
• May 10, 1869 The Golden Spike is hammered in as
  the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific lines
  meet the transcontinental railroad is complete
  and the trip that once took months could now be
  completed in a week.

The two railroads meet at Promontory Point, 1869
Chinese laborers - Central Pacific RR
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Railroad Expansion, Settlement and Govt.
Incentives

• The railroad dramatically accelerated the
  settlement of the West
• Quicker transport of troops made the defeat of
  the Indians easier
• Quicker transport of wheat and other crops opened
  new markets
• Easy credit and cheap railroad-owned land drew
  floods of immigrants and migrating Americans to
  the West

• By 1872, Congress had awarded around 170 million
  acres of land to the railroads as incentives for
  laying track.
• By 1893, many western states had deeded 20-25 of
  their land to railroads.

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Settlers and the Railroad

• The vast land holdings of the railroads shaped
  the settlement of the west.
• Building towns along rail lines was a way to
  profit through land sales, and through increased
  freight and passenger traffic that the new towns
  generated.
• Railroads advertised heavily to attract settlers
  to their land. The west was promoted as a new
  Garden of Eden. Land bureaus offered easy
  credit, long-term loans and free transportation.
• Between 1870 and 1900, the railroads helped bring
  nearly 2.2 million foreign settlers to the west.

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• Homesteading on the Great Plains
• The Homestead Act (1862) offered 160 acres of
  land to any individual who would pay a 10
  registration fee, live on the land for five
  years, cultivate and improve it.
• Nearly 400,000 families claimed land under the
  Homestead Act, but the law did not function as
  Congress intended.

• Land fraud was common - speculators, lumber
  companies, and cattle ranchers gained control of
  8 of every 9 acres intended for homesteading
  families.
• Another problem was the 160 acre limit of the
  Homestead Act. In drier climates more land was
  needed for successful farming.

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• New Farming Technology, New Markets
• Steel plows and new plowing techniques enabled
  farmers who could afford the new machinery to
  produce ten times more than was possible only
  decades earlier.
• Rapid growth in urban population (400 between
  1870 and 1910) caused skyrocketing demand for
  wheat
• High start-up costs for a farm led to dependence
  upon cash crops to repay mortgage loans and
  expenses
• Farmers were at the mercy of fluctuating grain
  prices worldwide overproduction or local crop
  failures could quickly bring ruin
• Farmers were also at the mercy of railroads, who
  controlled the price of shipping their crops

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Racism in the Southwestern Frontier

• As white settlers poured into California, Texas,
  and the Southwest, the legal and property rights
  of Hispanics were often ignored
• Increasingly, Mexican-Americans were segregated
  into barrios and restricted to low level manual
  labor and migrant labor jobs
• Similar laws were passed restricting the rights
  of Chinese immigrants to mine or farm

The Massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs,
Wyoming by Thure de Thulstrup, 1885
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Mining in the West

• Heavy publicized stories of gold strikes drew
  hundreds of thousands of easterners and
  immigrants west in search of riches
• In reality, mining is a boom-and-bust economy
• Few become rich, most remained dirt poor
• Large corporations, with mechanized mining
  equipment, quickly pushed out solitary miners
  panning or digging by hand
• Millions of ounces of gold and silver stimulated
  immigration, funded eastern industrial growth,
  and helped move the US into the world economy
• Progress came at a price the environmental cost
  of extracting ore was staggering (air, water
  pollution, and the destruction of forests)

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Cowboys and the Cattle Frontier

• Encouraged by railroads eager to sell land,
  open-range cattle ranching was promoted as a way
  to get rich quick, and boomed in the 1860s and
  1870s
• Profits to herd owners could be huge, but
  unstable market conditions could as easily lead
  to ruin
• Little of the profit filtered down to the cowboys
  on the cattle drives, whose lives were harsh and
  pay low
• Barred from many other lines of work, nearly 20
  of the cowboys were black or Mexican
• By the 1880s, the days of the open range and
  cattle drives had ended a victim of easier rail
  transport and competing demands upon the land

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Wheat and Early Agribusiness

• The Panic of 1873 caused Northern Pacific
  Railroad bonds to plummet. The railroad offered
  land in the Red River Valley of North Dakota in
  exchange for its depreciated bonds
• Speculators bought up 10,000 acre plots, invested
  heavily in massive farm machinery and gave birth
  to agribusiness
• Early success inspired migration to North Dakota
  and led to a wheat boom in 1880
• By 1890, a combination of drought and collapsing
  prices due to world-wide overproduction had
  destroyed profits, leaving large numbers of both
  large-scale and small farms in the Great Plains
  states bankrupt.
• In contrast, agribusiness was booming in
  California, where fruit and vegetable giants were
  growing, aided by newly developed refrigerated
  train cars, which could ship to midwestern and
  eastern markets without spoilage.

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The Oklahoma Land Rush, 1889

• By the 1880s, land hungry settlers were eyeing
  Indian Territory (Oklahoma), demanding that the
  government open it to farmers
• In 1889 the government confiscated 2 million
  acres from Native Americans, and opened it to
  settlers.
• At noon, April 22,1889 thousands of settlers
  stampeded onto the land to stake claims. A number
  of earlier settlers (Sooners) had sneaked onto
  the land illegally and begun claiming and plowing
  the land.

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The West of Life and Legend

• The American frontier was seized upon by critics
  of industrialization, who romanticized the west
  as a place where true American virtues of truth,
  honor, and rugged individualism still existed.
• The western myth ignored the role played by
  government, railroads, and big business in the
  settlement of the west.
• The romanticizing of the west did, however, lead
  to the development of the national parks system,
  and the first efforts at environmental
  conservation.

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Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, by Thomas Moran
Dazzled by its monumental beauty, painters strove
to portray the western landscape as one of Gods
wonders. In the process, they stimulated a new
popular interest in preserving the spectacular
features of the land.