Chapter 26 - The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

I. The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

1. After the Civil War, the Great West was still relatively untamed,
   wild, full of Indians, bison, and wildlife, and sparsely populated by a
   few Mormons and Mexicans.
2. As the White settlers began to populate the Great West, the
   Indians, caught in the middle, increasingly turned against each other,
   were infected with White man’s diseases, and stuck battling to
   hunt the few remaining bison that were still ranging around.
   • The Sioux, displaced by Chippewas from the their ancestral lands at
     the headwaters of the Mississippi in the late 1700s, expanded at the
     expense of the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees, and justified their actions
     by reasoning that White men had done the same thing to them.
     • The Indians had become great riders, hunters, and fighters ever since the Spanish had introduced the horse to them.
3. The federal government tried to pacify the Indians by signing
   treaties at Fort Laramie in 1851 and Fort Atkinson in 1853 with the
   chiefs of the tribes. However, the U.S. failed to understand that such
   “tribes” and “chiefs” didn’t necessarily
   represent groups of people in Indian culture, and that in most cases,
   Native Americans didn’t recognize authorities outside of their
   families.
4. In the 1860s, the U.S. government intensified its efforts by
   herding Indians into still smaller and smaller reservations (like the
   Dakota Territory).
   • Indians were often promised that they wouldn’t be bothered
     further after moving out of their ancestral lands, and often, Indian
     agents were corrupt and pawned off shoddy food and products to their
     own fellow Indians.
   • White men often disregarded treaties, though, and frequently swindled the Indians.
5. In frustration, many Native American tribes fought back. A slew of
   Indian vs. White skirmishes emerged between roughly 1864 to 1890 in the
   so-called “Indian Wars.”
   • After the Civil War, the U.S. Army’s new mission
     became—go clear Indians out of the West for White settlers to
     move in.
   • Many times though, the Indians were better equipped than the
     federal troops sent to quell their revolts because arrows could be
     fired more rapidly than a muzzle-loaded rifle. Invention of the Colt
     .45 revolver (six-shooter) and Winchester repeating rifle changed this.
   • Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer (at Little Bighorn) all battled Indians.

II. Receding Native Population

1. Violence reigned supreme in Indian-White relations.
   • In 1864, at Sand Creek, Colorado, Colonel J.M. Chivington’s
     militia massacred some four hundred Indians in cold blood—Indians
     who had thought they had been promised immunity and Indians who were
     peaceful and harmless.
   • In 1866, a Sioux war party ambushed Captain William J.
     Fetterman’s command of 81 soldiers and civilians who were
     constructing the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields, leaving no
     survivors.
     • This massacre was one of the few Indian victories, as another treaty at Fort Laramie was signed two years later.
2. Colonel Custer found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota
   (sacred Sioux land), and hordes of gold-seekers invaded the Sioux
   reservation in search of gold, causing Sitting Bull and the Sioux to go
   on the warpath, completely decimating Custer’s Seventh Calvary at
   Little Big Horn in the process.
   • The reinforcements that arrived later brutally hunted down the
     Indians who had attacked, including their leader, Sitting Bull (he
     escaped).
3. The Nez Percé Indians also revolted when gold seekers made
   the government shrink their reservation by 90%, and after a tortuous
   battle, Chief Joseph finally surrendered his band after a long trek
   across the Continental Divide toward Canada. He buried his hatchet and
   gave his famous speech saying, “From where the sun now stands I
   will fight no more forever.”
4. The most difficult to subdue were the Apache tribes of Arizona and
   New Mexico, led by Geronimo, but even they finally surrendered after
   being pushed to Mexico, and afterwards, they became successful farmers.
5. The Indians were subdued due to (1) the railroad, which cut through
   the heart of the West, (2) the White man’s diseases, (3) the
   extermination of the buffalo, (4) wars, and (5) the loss of their land
   to White settlement.

III. Bellowing Herds of Bison

1. In the early days, tens of millions of bison dotted the American
   prairie, and by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 million
   buffalo grazing, but it was the eruption of the railroad that really
   started the buffalo massacre.
   • Many people killed buffalo for their meat, their skins, or their
     tongues, but many people either killed the bison for sport or killed
     them, took only one small part of their bodies (like the tongue) and
     just left the rest of the carcass to rot.
2. By 1885, fewer than 1,000 buffalo were left, and the species was in
   danger of extinction. Those left were mostly in Yellowstone National
   Park.

IV. The End of the Trail

1. Sympathy for the Indians finally materialized in the 1880s, helped
   in part by Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor and
   her novel Ramona.
   • Humanitarians wanted to kindly help Indians “walk the White
     man’s road” while the hard-liners stuck to their
     “kill ‘em all” beliefs, and no one cared much for the
     traditional Indian heritage and culture.
2. Often, zealous White missionaries would force Indians to convert,
   and in 1884, they helped urge the government to outlaw the sacred Sun
   Dance, called the Ghost Dance by Whites. It was a festival that Whites
   thought was the war-drum beating.
   • At the Battle of Wounded Knee, the “Ghost Dance” was
     brutally stamped out by U.S. troops, who killed women and children as
     well. This battle marks the end of the Indian Wars as by then the
     Indians were all either on reservations or dead.
3. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 dissolved the legal entities of all
   tribes, but if the Indians behaved the way Whites wanted them to behave
   (become farmers on reservations), they could receive full U.S.
   citizenship in 25 years (full citizenship to all Indians was granted in
   1924). Ironically, an immigrant from a foreign nation could become a
   citizen much, much faster than a native-born Native American.
   • Reservation land not allotted to Indians under the act was sold to railroads.
   • In 1879, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania was founded to
     teach Native American children how to behave like Whites, completely
     erasing their culture.
   • The Dawes Act struck forcefully at the Indians, and by 1900 they
     had lost half the land than they had held 20 years before. This plan
     would outline U.S. policy toward Indians until the 1934 Indian
     Reorganization Act which helped the Indian population rebound and grow.

V. Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker

1. Gold was discovered in California in the late 1840s, and in 1858,
   the same happened at Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
   “Fifty-Niners” flocked out there, but within a month or
   two, the gold had run out.
2. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was discovered in 1859, and a fantastic
   amount of gold and silver worth more than $340 million was mined.
3. Smaller “lucky strikes” also drew money-lovers to
   Montana, Idaho, and other western states. Anarchy in these outposts
   seemed to rule, but in the end, what was left were usually ghost towns.
4. After the surface gold was found, ore-breaking machinery was
   brought in to break the gold-bearing quartz (which was very expensive
   to do).
5. Women found new rights in these Western lands however, gaining
   suffrage in Wyoming (1869) (the first place for women to vote), Utah
   (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896).
6. Mining also added to the folklore and American literature (Bret Harte & Mark Twain).

VI. Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive

1. As cities back east boomed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the demand for food and meat increased sharply.
2. The problem of marketing meat profitably to the public market and
   cities was solved by the new transcontinental railroads. Cattle could
   now be shipped to the stockyards under “beef barons” like
   the Swifts and Armours.
   • The meat-packaging industry thus sprang up.
3. The “Long Drive” emerged to become a spectacular feeder
   of the slaughterhouses, as Texas cowboys herded cattle across desolate
   land to railroad terminals in Kansas.
   • Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, and Cheyenne became favorite stopovers.
     • At Dodge City Wyatt Earp and in Abilene, Marshal James B. Hickok maintained order.
4. The railroads made the cattle herding business prosper, but it also
   destroyed it, for the railroads also brought sheepherders and
   homesteaders who built barbed-wire, invented by Samuel Glidden, fences
   that erased the open-range days of the long cattle drives.
   • Also, blizzards in the winter of 1886-87 left dazed cattle starving and freezing.
5. Breeders learned to fence their ranches and to organize (i.e. the Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association).
   • The legends of the cowboys were made here at this time, but lived on in American lore.

VII. The Farmers’ Frontier

1. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed folks to get as much as 160 acres
   of land in return for living on it for five years, improving it, and
   paying a nominal fee of about $30.00. Or, it allowed folks to get land
   after only six month’s residence for $1.25 an acre.
   • Before, the U.S. government had sold land for revenue, but now, it was giving it away.
   • This act led half a million families to buy land and settle out
     West, but it often turned out to be a cruel hoax because in the dry
     Great Plains, 160 acres was rarely enough for a family to earn a living
     and survive. And often, families were forced to give up their
     homesteads before the five years were up, since droughts, bad land, and
     lack of necessities forced them out.
   • However, fraud was spawned by the Homestead Act, since almost ten
     times as much land ended up in the hands of land-grabbing promoters
     than in the hands of real farmers. Sometimes these cheats would not
     even live on the land, but say that they’d erected a
     “twelve by fourteen” dwelling—which later turned out
     to be twelve by fourteen inches!
2. Taming Western Deserts
   • Railroads such as the Northern Pacific helped develop the
     agricultural West, a place where, after the tough, horse-trodden lands
     had been plowed and watered, proved to be surprisingly fertile.
   • Due to higher wheat prices resulting from crop failures around the
     world, more people rashly pushed further westward, past the 100th
     meridian (which is also the magic 20-inch per year rainfall line),
     where it was difficult to grow crops.
     • Here, as warned by geologist John Wesley Powell, so little rain
       fell that successful farming could only be attained by massive
       irrigation.
     • To counteract the lack of water (and a six year drought in the
       1880s), farmers developed the technique of “dry farming,”
       or using shallow cultivation methods to plant and farm, but over time,
       this method created a finely pulverized surface soil that contributed
       to the notorious “Dust Bowl” several decades later.
   • A Russian species of wheat—tough and resistant to
     drought—was brought in and grew all over the Great Plains, while
     other plants were chosen in favor of corn.
   • Huge federally financed irrigation projects soon caused the
     “Great American Desert” to bloom, and dams that tamed the
     Missouri and Columbia Rivers helped water the land.

VIII. The Far West Comes of Age

1. The Great West experienced a population surge, as many people moved onto the frontier.
2. New states like Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were admitted into the Union.
   • Not until 1896 was Utah allowed into the Union, and by the 20th
     century, only Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona remained as territories.
   • In Oklahoma, the U.S. government made available land that had
     formerly belonged to the Native Americans, and thousands of
     “Sooners” jumped the boundary line and illegally went into
     Oklahoma, often forcing U.S. troops to evict them.
   • On April 22, 1889, Oklahoma was legally opened, and 18 years later, in 1907, Oklahoma became the “Sooner State.”
3. In 1890, for the first time, the U.S. census announced that a frontier was no longer discernible.
4. The “closing” of the frontier inspired the Turner Thesis, which stated that America needed a frontier.
5. At first, the public didn’t seem to notice that there was no
   longer a frontier, but later, they began to realize that the land was
   not infinite, and concern led to the first national park being opened,
   Yellowstone, founded in 1872, followed by Yosemite and Sequoia (1890).

IX. The Fading Frontier

1. The frontier was a state of mind and a symbol of opportunity.
2. The “safety valve theory” stated that the frontier was
   like a safety valve for folks who, when it became too crowded in their
   area, could simply pack up and leave, moving West.
   • Actually, few city-dwellers left the cities for the West, since
     they didn’t know how to farm; the West increasingly became less
     and less a land of opportunity for farms, but still was good for hard
     laborers and ranchers.
   • Still, free acreage did lure a host of immigrant farmers to the
     West—farmers that probably wouldn’t have come to the West
     had the land not been cheap—and the lure of the West may have led
     to city employers raising wages to keep workers in the cities.
3. It seems that the cities, not the West, were the safety valves, as
   busted farmers and fortune seekers made Chicago and San Francisco into
   large cities.
4. Of hundreds of years, Americans had expanded west, and it was in
   the trans-Mississippi west that the Indians made their last stand,
   where Anglo culture collided with Hispanic culture, and where America
   faced Asia.
5. The life that we live today is one that those pioneers dreamed of,
   and the life that they lived is one of which we can only dream.

X. The Farm Becomes a Factory

1. Farmers were now increasingly producing single “cash”
   crops, since they could then concentrate their efforts, make profits,
   and buy manufactured goods from mail order companies, such as the Aaron
   Montgomery Ward catalogue (first sent in 1872) or from Sears.
2. Large-scale farmers tried banking, railroading, and manufacturing,
   but new inventions in farming, such as a steam engine that could pull a
   plow, seeder, or harrow, the new twine binder, and the combined
   reaper-thresher sped up harvesting and lowered the number of people
   needed to farm.
   • Farmers, though, were inclined to blame banks and railroads for their losses rather than their own shortcomings.
3. The mechanization of agriculture led to enormous farms, such as
   those in the Minnesota-North Dakota area and the Central Valley of
   California.
   • Henry George described the state as a country of plantations and estates.
   • California vegetables and fruits, raised by ill-paid Mexican workers, made handsome profits when sold to the East.

XI. Deflation Dooms the Debtor

1. In the 1880s, when world markets rebounded, produced more crops,
   and forced prices down, the farmers in America were the ones that found
   ruin.
2. Paying back debts was especially difficult in this deflation-filled
   time during which there was simply not enough money to go around for
   everyone. Less money in circulation was called
   “contraction.”
3. Farmers operated year after year on losses and lived off their fat
   as best they could, but thousands of homesteads fell to mortgages and
   foreclosures, and farm tenancy rather than farm ownership was
   increasing.
4. The fall of the farmers in the late 1800s was similar to the fall
   of the South and its “King Cotton” during the Civil War:
   depending solely on one crop was good in good times but disastrous
   during less prosperous times.

XII. Unhappy Farmers

1. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, droughts, grasshopper plagues,
   and searing heat waves made the toiling farmers miserable and poor.
2. City, state, and federal governments added to this by gouging the
   farmers, ripping them off by making them pay painful taxes when they
   could least afford to do so.
3. The railroads (by fixing freight prices), the middlemen (by taking
   huge cuts in profits), and the various harvester, barbed wire, and
   fertilizer trusts all harassed farmers.
4. In 1890, one half of the U.S. population still consisted of farmers, but they were hopelessly disorganized.

XIII. The Farmers Take Their Stand

1. In the Greenback movement after the Civil War, agrarian unrest had flared forth as well.
2. In 1867, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, better
   known as The Grange, was founded by Oliver H. Kelley to improve the
   lives of isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternal
   activities.
   • Eventually, it spread to claim over 800,000 members in 1875, and
     the Grange changed its goals to include the improvement of the
     collective plight of the farmer.
   • The Grangers found most success in the upper Mississippi Valley,
     and eventually, they managed to get Congress to pass a set of
     regulations known as the Granger Laws, but afterwards, their influence
     faded.
3. The Greenback Labor Party also attracted farmers, and in 1878, the
   Greenback Laborites polled over a million votes and elected 14 members
   of Congress.
   • In 1880, the Greenbackers ran General James B. Weaver, a Civil War general, but he only polled 3% of the popular vote.

XIV. Prelude to Populism

1. The Farmers’ Alliance, founded in the late 1870s, was another
   coalition of farmers seeking to overthrow the chains from the banks and
   railroads that bound them.
   • However, its programs only aimed at those who owned their own land,
     thereby ignoring the tenant farmers, and it purposely excluded Blacks.
   • The Alliance members agreed on the (1) nationalization of
     railroads, (2) the abolition of national banks, (3) a graduated income
     tax, and (4) a new federal sub-treasury for farmers.
2. Populists were led by Ignatius Donnelly from Minnesota and Mary
   Elizabeth Lease, both of whom spoke eloquently and attacked those that
   hurt farmers (banks, railroads, etc.).
3. The Alliance was still not to be brushed aside, and in the coming
   decade, they would combine into a new People’s Party (AKA, the
   Populist Party) to launch a new attack on the northeastern citadels of
   power.

XV. Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike

1. The Panic of 1893 fueled the passion of the Populists. Many disgruntled unemployed fled to D.C. calling for change.
   • Most famous of these people was “General” Jacob Coxey.
     “Coxey’s Army” marched on Washington with scores of
     followers and many newspaper reporters. They called for:
     • relieving unemployment by an inflationary government public works program.
     • an issuance of $500 million in legal tender notes.
   • The march fizzled out when they were arrested for walking on the grass.
2. The Pullman Strike in Chicago, led by Eugene Debs, was more dramatic.
   • Debs helped organize the workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company.
   • The company was hit hard by the depression and cut wages by about 1/3.
   • Workers struck, sometimes violently.
   • U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney called in federal troops to
     break up the strike. His rationale: the strike was interfering with the
     transit of U.S. mail.
   • Debs went to prison for 6 months and turned into the leading Socialist in America.

XVI. Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan

1. McKinley
   • The leading Republican candidate in 1896 was William McKinley, a
     respectable and friendly former Civil War major who had served many
     years in Congress representing his native Ohio.
   • McKinley was the making of another Ohioan, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, who
     financially and politically supported the candidate through his
     political years.
   • McKinley was a conservative in business, preferring to leaves
     things alone, and his platform was for the gold standard, even though
     he personally was not.
     • His platform also called for a gold-silver
       bimetallism—provided that all the other nations in the world did
       the same, which was not bound to happen.
2. Bryan
   • The Democrats were in disarray and unable to come up with a
     candidate, until William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator of the
     Platte,” came to their rescue.
   • At the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Bryan delivered a
     movingly passionate speech in favor of free silver. In this
     “Cross of Gold Speech” he created a sensation and won the
     nomination for the Democratic ticket the next day.
     • The Democratic ticket called for unlimited coinage of silver with
       the ratio of 16 silver ounces worth as much as one ounce of gold.
     • Democrats who would not stand for this left the party.
   • Some Democrats charged that they’d stolen the Populist ideas,
     and during the Election of 1896, it was essentially the
     “Demo-Pop” party.

XVII. Class Conflict: Plowholders Versus Bondholders

1. McKinley won decisively, getting 271 electoral votes, mostly from
   the populous East and upper Midwest, as opposed to Bryan’s 176,
   mostly from the South and the West.
2. This election was perhaps the most important since the elections
   involving Abraham Lincoln, for it was the first to seemingly pit the
   privileged against the underprivileged, and it resulted in a victory
   for big business and big cities.
3. Thus, the Election of 1896 could be called the “gold vs.
   silver” election. And, put to the vote, it was clear then that
   Americans were going with gold.
4. Also in the election, the Middle Class preserved their comfortable
   way of life while the Republicans seized control of the White House of
   16 more years.

XVIII. Republican Standpattism Enthroned

1. When McKinley took office in 1897, he was calm and conservative, working well with his party and avoiding major confrontations.
2. The Dingley Tariff Bill was passed to replace the Wilson-Gorman law
   and raise more revenue, raising the tariff level to whopping 46.5
   percent.