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Chapter 18 - The New South and the New West (1865-1900)

  • The South had to be rebuilt, while the sparsely settled territories and states west of the Mississippi River were ripe for the development of farms, businesses, railroads, and towns. By 1900, a New West and a New South had emerged, and eleven new states had been created out of the western territories

The Myth of the New South

  • After the war between the states, the South fought an inner civil war over the future of the region. Many white southerners embraced the “Lost Cause,” a romanticized interpretation of the war that painted the Confederates as noble defenders of their distinctive way of life against a tyrannical federal government headed by Abraham Lincoln. Home and history are two of the most revered words in southern life. Other prominent southerners, however, looked more to the future. They called for a New South, where the region’s predominantly agricultural economy would be diversified by an expanded industrial sector. The tireless champion of the New South ideal was Henry Woodfin Grady (1850–1889), the powerful managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Many southerners shared Grady’s vision. The Confederacy, they concluded, had lost the war because it had relied too much upon King Cotton and slavery.

  • Textile Mills: The chief accomplishment of the New South’s effort to industrialize was a dramatic expansion of the region’s textile industry, which produced thread and cotton bedding and clothing. Thousands of dirt-poor farm folk rushed to take jobs in the mill villages that arose after the war. By 1900, the South had surpassed New England as the largest producer of cotton fabric in the nation.

The Tobacco Industry

  • Tobacco growing and cigarette production also soared in the New South. Essential to the rise of the tobacco industry was the Duke family of Durham, North Carolina. At the end of the Civil War, Washington Duke took his barn load of tobacco and, with the help of his two sons, hitched two mules to his wagon and traveled across the state, selling tobacco in small pouches as he went.

  • By 1872, the Dukes had a cigarette factory. Washington’s son, James Buchanan Duke, wanted even greater success, however. He spent millions on advertising schemes and perfected the mechanized mass production of cigarettes. Duke also undersold competitors and cornered the supply of ingredients needed to make cigarettes. Eventually, his primary competitors agreed to join forces with him, and in 1890 Duke brought most of them into the American Tobacco Company.

Other New South Industries

  • Coal production grew. At the southern end of the mountains, Birmingham, Alabama, sprang up during the 1870s in large part because of the massive deposits of iron ore in the surrounding ridges, leading boosters to label the steelmaking city the “Pittsburgh of the South.” 1870 lumbering became the fastest growing industry in the South.

  • Northern investors bought up vast forests of yellow pine and set about clear-cutting them and hauling the logs to new sawmills, where they were milled into lumber for the construction of homes and businesses. By 1900, lumber had surpassed textiles in annual economic value. Still, for all of its advances, the South continued to lag behind the rest of the nation in industrial development.

The Redeemers

  • Henry Grady’s vision of a New South celebrated the Redeemers, the conservative, pro-business, white politicians in the Democratic party who had embraced the idea of industrial progress grounded in white supremacy. Their supporters referred to them as Redeemers because they supposedly saved (“redeemed”) the South from Yankee domination and “black rule” during Reconstruction. They also sought cuts in state taxes and expenditures, including those for the public school systems that started after the war. “Schools are not a necessity,” claimed a Virginia governor.

The Failings on the New South

  • The South was still dependent on the North for investment capital and manufactured goods. Cotton remained king after the Civil War, although it never regained the huge profitability it had generated in the 1850s. Cotton production remained the same, but profits decreased.

Southern Poverty

  • Henry Grady also hoped that growing numbers of southern farmers would own their own land by the end of the nineteenth century. But the opposite occurred. Many actually lost ownership of the land that they worked on each year.

The Crop-Lien System

  • Because most southern communities had no banks after the Civil War, people had to find ways to operate with little or no cash. Many rural areas adopted a barter economy (merchants provided food, clothing, seed, fertilizer on credit for share/lien of crops). Southern farmers, white and black, who participated in the crop-lien system fell into three distinct categories: small farm owners, sharecroppers, and tenants.

  • The farms owned by most southerners were small and did not generate much cash income. As a result, even those who owned their own farms had to pledge a portion of their future crop to the local merchant in return for supplies purchased “on credit.” Sharecroppers, mostly blacks who had nothing to offer but their labor, worked an owner’s land in return for shelter, seed, fertilizer, mules, supplies, food—and a share of the crop, generally about half.

  • Share tenants, mostly white farmers who were barely better off, might have their own mule or horse, a plow and tools, and a line of credit with the country store, but they still needed to rent land to farm. The crop-lien system was self-destructive. The overwhelming focus on planting cotton or tobacco year after year stripped the soil of its fertility and stability.

  • The crop-lien system was a post–Civil War version of economic slavery for poor whites as well as for blacks. The landowner or merchant (often the same The Failings of the New South 665 person) decided what crop would be planted and how it would be cultivated, harvested, and sold. Over time, the high interest charged on the credit offered by the local store or landowner, coupled with sagging prices for cotton and other crops, created a hopeless cycle of debt among small farmers, sharecroppers, and share tenants.

Falling Cotton Prices

  • As cotton production soared during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, largely because of dramatic growth in Texas cultivation, the price paid for raw cotton fell steadily.

Race Relations During the 1890s - Disenfranchising African Americans

  • By the 1890s, a new generation of African Americans born and educated since the end of the Civil War was determined to gain true equality.

  • A growing number of young white adults, however, were equally determined to keep “Negroes in their place.” Mississippi took the lead in stripping blacks of their voting rights. The so-called Mississippi Plan, a series of state constitutional amendments in 1890, set the pattern of disfranchisement that nine more states would follow. The plan first instituted a residence requirement for voting—two years in the state, one year in a local election district. This was aimed at African American tenant farmers who were in the habit of moving yearly in search of better economic opportunities.

  • Second, Mississippi disqualified blacks from voting if they had committed certain crimes.

  • Third, in order to vote, people had to have paid all of their taxes on time, including a so-called poll tax specifically for voting—a restriction that hurt both poor blacks and poor whites. Finally, all voters had to be able to read or at least “understand” the U.S. Constitution. White registrars decided who satisfied this requirement, and they often discriminated against blacks.

  • Other states added variations on the Mississippi Plan. In 1898, Louisiana inserted into its state constitution the “grandfather clause,” which allowed illiterate whites to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, when African Americans were still disenfranchised. By 1910, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Oklahoma had incorporated the grandfather clause. When such “legal” means were not enough to ensure their political dominance, white candidates used fraud and violence.

  • Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist who was South Carolina’s governor from 1890 to 1894, maintained that his state’s problems were caused by white farmers renting their land to “ignorant lazy negroes.” His use of such racist explanations gained him the support of poor whites in his crusade to oust the ruling Redeemers. To ensure his election, Tillman and his followers effectively eliminated the black vote.

  • By the end of the nineteenth century, widespread racial discrimination— segregation of public facilities, political disfranchisement, and vigilante justice—had elevated government-sanctioned bigotry to an official way of life in the South. The efforts to suppress the black vote succeeded throughout the South.

The Spread of Segregation

  • At the same time that southern blacks were being shoved out of the political arena, they were also being segregated socially. The symbolic first target was the railroad passenger car. From 1875 to 1883, in fact, any local or state law requiring racial segregation violated the federal Civil Rights Act (1875). By 1883, however, many northern whites endorsed the resegregation of southern life. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

  • The judges explained that private individuals and organizations could engage in acts of racial discrimination because the Fourteenth Amendment specified only that “no State” could deny citizens equal protection of the law. The Court’s interpretation in what came to be called the Civil Rights Cases (1883) left as an open question the validity of state laws requiring racially segregated public facilities under the principle of “separate but equal.”

  • When Louisiana followed suit in 1890 with a similar law, blacks challenged it in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case originated in New Orleans when Homer Plessy, an octoroon (a person having one-eighth African ancestry), refused to leave a whites-only railroad car and was convicted of violating the law. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that states had a right to create laws segregating public places such as schools, hotels, and restaurants.

  • Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian who had once owned slaves, was the only member of the Court to dissent. He stressed that the Constitution is “color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” The Court’s ruling in the Plessy case legitimized the widespread practice of racially “separate but equal” facilities in virtually every area of southern life. The new regulations came to be called “Jim Crow” laws. The name derived from “Jump Jim Crow,” an old song-and-dance caricature of African Americans.

  • During the 1890s, the term Jim Crow became a derisive expression meaning “Negro.” Signs reading “white only” or “colored only” above restrooms and water fountains emerged as hallmarks of the Jim Crow system, and racist customs dating back before the Civil War were revived. Widespread racist violence accompanied the Jim Crow laws.

Mob Rule in North Carolina

  • White supremacy was violently imposed in the thriving coastal port of Wilmington, North Carolina, then the largest city in the state. In 1894 and 1896, black voters, by then a majority in the city, elected African Americans to various municipal offices, infuriating the city’s white elite. On the morning of November 10, 1898, some 2,000 well-armed white men and teens rampaged through the streets of Wilmington. Almost 100 blacks were killed. The mob then stormed the city hall and forced the African American business leaders and elected officials to board northbound trains. The new, self-appointed all-white city government issued a “Declaration of White Independence” that stripped blacks of their jobs and voting rights. Desperate black residents appealed for help to the governor as well as President William McKinley but received none. The Wilmington insurrection marked the first time in history that a lawfully elected municipal government had been overthrown in the United States.

The Black Response

  • By the end of the nineteenth century, white supremacy had triumphed across the South. Some African Americans chose to leave in search of equality and opportunity. Those who stayed and resisted white supremacy—even in self-defense—were ruthlessly suppressed. Yet accommodation did not mean surrender, as African Americans constructed their own lively culture.

Ida B. Wells

  • One of the most outspoken African American activists of the time was Ida B. Wells. Born into slavery in 1862 in Mississippi, she attended a school staffed by white missionaries. She moved in 1880 to Memphis, where she taught in segregated schools and gained entrance to the social life of the city’s African American middle class. In 1883, after being denied a seat on a railroad car because she was black, Wells became the first African American to file suit against such discrimination. The circuit court decided in her favor and fined the railroad, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the ruling.

  • Soon after, she discovered her love of journalism and through it, , a weapon with which to wage her crusade for justice. She became editor of Memphis Free Speech, a newspaper that focused on African American issues. Wells launched a crusade against lynching. Angry whites responded by destroying her office and threatening to lynch her. She moved to New York, where she continued to criticize Jim Crow laws and demand that blacks have their voting rights restored. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and worked for women’s suffrage.

Booker T Washington

  • Born a slave in Virginia, in 1856, the son of a black mother and a white father, Booker T. Washington at sixteen had enrolled at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, one of several colleges for ex-slaves created during Reconstruction. There he met the school’s founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who preached moderation- Washington listened and learned well.

  • Nine years later, Armstrong received a request from a group in northern Alabama to start a black college called Tuskegee Institute. The college needed a president, and Armstrong urged them to hire Washington. Although only twenty-five years old, Washington was, according to Armstrong, “a very capable mulatto, clear-headed, modest, sensible, polite, and a thorough teacher and superior man.” He became a skilled fundraiser, gathering substantial gifts from wealthy whites, most of them northerners. The complicated racial dynamics of the late nineteenth century required him to walk a tightrope between being candid and being an effective college president.

  • As the years passed, Tuskegee Institute became celebrated for its dedication to discipline and vocational training, and Booker T. Washington became a source of inspiration and hope to millions. ” In part to please his white donors, he argued that African Americans should not focus on fighting racial segregation. They should instead work hard and remain silent; their priority should be self-improvement rather than social change.

W. E. B Du Bois

  • He and Ida Wells disagreed with Washington's Accommodationist. Strategy.

  • W. E. B. Du Bois emerged at the turn of the century as Washington’s foremost rival. A native of Massachusetts, Du Bois first experienced racial prejudice as a student at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Later he became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard (in history and sociology). In addition to promoting civil rights, he left a distinguished record as a scholar, authoring more than twenty books.

  • Du Bois had a flamboyant personality and a combative spirit. Not long after he began teaching at Atlanta University in 1897, he launched a public assault on Washington’s strategy for improving the quality of life for African Americans. Du Bois called Washington’s celebrated 1895 speech “the Atlanta Compromise” and said that he would not “surrender the leadership of this race to cowards.” Du Bois stressed that African American leaders should adopt a strategy of “ceaseless agitation” directed at ensuring the right to vote and winning civil equality.

  • The education of blacks, Du Bois maintained, should not be merely vocational but comparable to that enjoyed by the white elite. Black education should help develop bold leaders willing to challenge Jim Crow segregation and discrimination.

  • What Du Bois and others did not know was that Washington secretly worked to finance lawsuits challenging segregation and disfranchisement, to stop the brutal culture of race lynching, and to increase funding for public schools. He acted privately because he feared that public activism would trigger violence against Tuskegee and himself.

The Settling of the New West - The Western Landscape

  • For most western Americans, the Civil War, and Reconstruction were remote events that hardly touched the lives of the Indians, Mexicans, Asians, farmers, ranchers, trappers, miners, and Mormons scattered through the plains, valleys, and mountains. In the west, the concept of manifest destiny was heavily important- the idea that it was God's will to have America grow and expand. This expansion into the west represented both economic prosperity and economic destruction.

  • The post–Civil War West came to symbolize economic opportunity and personal freedom. On another level, however, the economic exploitation of the West was a story of irresponsible behavior and reckless abuse of nature that scarred the land, decimated its wildlife, and nearly exterminated much of Native American culture. After the mid-century, farmers and their families began spreading west to the Great Plains—western Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, northern Texas, the Dakotas, eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The Great Plains had little rainfall and few rivers.

  • The scarcity of water and timber rendered useless the familiar trappings of the pioneer—the ax, the log cabin, the rail fence—as well as traditional methods of tilling the soil. For a long time, the region had been called the Great American Desert, unfit for human habitation and therefore, in the minds of most Americans, the perfect refuge for Indians who refused to embrace the white way of life.

  • The discovery of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal; the completion of the transcontinental railroads; the collapse of Indian resistance; and the rise of the buffalo hide and range-cattle industries convinced many Americans, as well as the federal government, that economic development of the West held the key to national prosperity.

The Migratory Stream

  • During the second half of the nineteenth century, an unrelenting stream of migrants flowed into what had been the largely Indian and Hispanic West. The largest number of foreign immigrants to the West came from northern Europe and Canada. Compared with European immigrants, those from China and Mexico were much less numerous but nonetheless significant. The Chinese were frequently discriminated against and denied citizenship rights, and they became scapegoats whenever there was an economic downturn. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively banning further immigration from China.

The African American Migration

  • In the aftermath of the collapse of Radical Republican rule in the South, some blacks decided to found their own towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Others had larger communities in mind. Thousands of African Americans began migrating westward. These migrants came to be known as Exodusters because they were making their exodus from the South in search of a haven from racism and poverty. The foremost promoter of black migration to the West was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton.

  • Born a slave in Tennessee in 1809, he escaped and made his way to Michigan. He led 200 colonists to Kansas when he found out that land was $1.25/acres that had formerly been an Indian reservation, and established the Dunlop Community. Southern leaders worried about the loss of black laborers and In 1879, white southerners closed access to the Mississippi River and threatened to sink all boats carrying blacks to the West.

  • By the early 1880s, however, the exodus of black southerners to the West had petered out. Many African American settlers were unprepared for the harsh living conditions on the plains, most of the black farmers were forced to supplement their income by hiring themselves out to white ranchers. many African American pioneers in Kansas soon abandoned their land and moved to the few cities in the state. The frontier was not the “promised land” that they had been led to expect, but it was better than what they had experienced in the South.

Western Mining

  • After the Civil War, the dream of striking it rich by finding gold or silver continued to be the most powerful lure to the West.

  • Like much of western agriculture, mining had become a mass-production industry as individual prospectors gave way to large mining companies. The first wave of miners who rushed to California in 1849 had sifted gold dust and nuggets out of riverbeds by means of “placer” mining, or “panning.” But once the placer deposits were exhausted, efficient mining required large-scale operations, massive machinery, and substantial capital investment. Industrial miners used huge hydraulic cannons to strip canyon walls of rock and topsoil in a search for veins of gold or silver. The tons of dirt and debris unearthed by the water cannons covered rich farmland downstream and created sandbars that clogged rivers and killed fish.

Mining Boomtowns

  • Throughout the region, mining camps and towns sprouted like mushrooms. Tombstone, Arizona, only thirty miles from the Mexican border, was a major silver mining site in the 1870s. By only its fourth year of existence, it was the fastest-growing boomtown in the Southwest. Some of the other largest and most famous mining boomtowns included Virginia City in Nevada, Cripple Creek and Leadville in Colorado, and Deadwood in the Dakota Territory.

  • These towns were male-dominated and had a major population of immigrants. Ethnic prejudice was as common as violence in mining towns. The Chinese, for example, were usually prohibited from laboring in the mines but were allowed to operate laundries and work in boarding houses. Mexicans were often treated the worst.

  • Most of the boomtowns lasted only a few years. Once the mines played out, the people moved on, leaving ghost towns behind.

  • The Comstock Lode was found near Gold Hill, Nevada, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas near the California border. Henry Comstock, a Canadian-born fur trapper, gave the new discovery (actually made by other prospectors in 1859) his name. The Comstock Lode, a seam of gold and silver more than fifty feet wide and thousands of feet deep, was the most profitable mine in history to that point.

  • Democrats refused to create states out of territories that were dominated by Republicans. After the sweeping Republican victory in the 1888 legislative races, however, Congress admitted North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington as states in 1889, and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890. Utah entered the Union in 1896 (after the Mormons agreed to abandon the practice of polygamy), and Oklahoma in 1907; and in 1912 Arizona and New Mexico became the forty-seventh and forty-eighth contiguous states. (The final two states, Alaska and Hawaii, were added fifty years later.)

Life in the New West

  • To encourage new settlers in the West, the federal government generously helped finance construction of four transcontinental railroads, dispatched troops to conquer and relocate Indians to designated reservations, and sold government-owned land at low prices—or gave it to railroad companies as a means of rapidly populating areas served by trains. Drudgery and tragedy were as commonplace as adventure and success. While the West was being taken from the Indians, cattle were herded into the grasslands where the buffalo had roamed. The wild cattle had competed with the buffalo in the borderland of Tx and Az. Breeding them produced the hybrid-Texas Longhorns, who were known for speed and endurance. They had marginal value, moreover, because the largest urban markets for beef were so far away—until the railroads arrived.

The Cattle Boom

  • Joseph G. Mccoy built a stockyard in Abilene, Kansas, barn, office building, livestock scales, hotel, and a bank. He sent an agent to Tx to convince the owners of herds bound north to go through Abilene. Once the Texas herds reached Abilene, cattle by the thousands were loaded onto rail cars and shipped to the Chicago stockyards where they were sent (as beef) to cities around the nation. Abilene flourished as the first successful Kansas cow town.The thriving cattle industry spurred rapid population growth. The ability to ship huge numbers of cattle by rail transformed ranching into a major national industry. Before long, however, the flush times of the cow towns passed, and the cattle drives ended because they were unprofitable. Cattle ranchers developed their own code of laws and ways of enforcing them; cowboys would “ride the line” to keep the animals off the adjoining ranches. In the spring they would “round up” the herds, which invariably got mixed up, and sort out ownership by identifying the distinctive ranch symbols “branded,” or burned, into the cattle. All that changed in 1873, when Joseph Glidden, an Illinois farmer, developed the first effective form of barbed-wire fencing, which ranchers used to fence off their lands at relatively low cost. Soon the open range—owned by all, where a small rancher could graze his cattle anywhere—was no more.

Farming on the Plains

  • Farming on the Great Plains was made harder by the region’s unforgiving environment, bitterly cold winters, and scorching summers. People made the dangerous trek lured by cheap federal land and misleading advertisements.

Homesteaders

  • The first homesteaders in the Great Plains were mostly landless folk eager to try their hand at farming. Many of them had never used a hoe or planted a seed. Yet the farmers faced a grim struggle. Although the land was essentially free as a result of the Homestead Act (1862), horses, livestock, wagons, wells, lumber, fencing, seed, machinery, and fertilizer were not. Freight rates and interest rates were criminally high. The virgin land itself, although fertile, resisted planting; the heavy sod woven with tough grassroots broke many a plow. Families used buffalo chips for fuel instead of the rare wood and coal. Farm families also fought a constant battle with the elements: tornadoes, hailstorms, droughts, prairie fires, blizzards, and pests. Swarms of locusts often clouded the horizon. In the end, two-thirds of the people who gained land under the Homestead Act failed to become self-sustaining farmers.

Commercial Farming

  • Eventually, as the railroads brought piles of lumber from the East, farmers could upgrade their houses built of sod (“Kansas brick”) into more comfortable wood-framed dwellings. New machinery and equipment, for those who could afford them, improved productivity. In 1868, James Oliver, a Scottish immigrant living in Indiana, made a sturdy chilled-iron “sodbuster” plow that greatly eased the task of preparing land for planting. In Minnesota, the Dakotas, and central California, wealthy capitalists created gigantic “bonanza farms” that became the marvels of the age. American grew what was exported around the world. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an America primarily made up of small farmers continued to give way to industrial agriculture and bonanza farms. small farmers did not keep up. Their numbers grew in size but decreased in proportion to the population at large.

Women in the West

  • West was largely a male society. In both mining and farming communities, women were prized as spouses. But the women pioneers continued to face the same legal barriers and social prejudices prevalent in the East. A wife could not sell the property without her husband’s approval. The constant fight for survival west of the Mississippi, however, made men and women more equal partners than in the East. Many women who lost their mates to the deadly toil of “sod busting” assumed complete responsibility for their farms. It was not coincidental, then, that the new western territories and states were among the first to allow women to vote and hold office. Wyoming was admitted to the Union as the first state that allowed women to vote in all elections.

The Fate of Western Indians

  • The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, in which the chiefs of the Plains Indians agreed to accept definite tribal borders and allow white emigrants to travel across their lands, worked for a while. Fighting resumed, however, as Indians continued their ancient practice of following the buffalo herds and as Americans began to settle on Indian lands.

Indian Relations in the West

  • From the early 1860s until the late 1870s, the trans-Mississippi West, often called “Indian Country,” raged with the so-called Indian Wars. Although the U.S. government had signed numerous treaties with Indian nations, those commitments were repeatedly violated by buffalo hunters, miners, ranchers, farmers, railroad surveyors, and horse soldiers. In the 1860s, the federal government ousted numerous tribes from lands they had been promised “forever.” In the summer of 1862, Sioux warriors killed 644 white traders, settlers, government officials, and soldiers in the Minnesota Valley. It was the first of many clashes between American settlers and miners and the Indians living on reservations in the Great Plains.

The Sand Creek Massacre

  • After Indians murdered a white family near Denver, John Evans, the territorial governor, called on whites to “kill and destroy” the “hostile Indians on the plains.” At the same time, Evans persuaded “friendly Indians” (mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho) to gather at “places of safety” such as Fort Lyon.

  • On November 29, 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington’s 700 militiamen attacked a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahoes along Sand Creek. Black Kettle, the chief, frantically waved first an American flag and then a white flag, but the attacking soldiers paid no heed. Then the truth about Sand Creek began to come out.

  • Captain Silas Soule witnessed the massacre but, along with his company of soldiers, had disobeyed orders to join the attack. Congress and the army launched lengthy investigations, and the congressional report concluded that Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre,” murdering “in cold blood”. The Sand Creek Massacre did as Soule had predicted: it ignited warfare that raged across the central plains for the next three years. Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux war parties attacked scores of ranches and stagecoach stations.

  • In 1866, Congress established two “colored” cavalry units and dispatched them to the western frontier. The Cheyenne nicknamed them “buffalo soldiers” because they “fought like a cornered buffalo. The buffalo soldiers were mostly Civil War veterans from Louisiana and Kentucky. They built and maintained forts, mapped vast areas of the Southwest, strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, protected railroad construction crews, subdued hostile Indians, and captured outlaws and rustlers.

Indian Relocation

  • The 1867 “Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes” led to the creation of an Indian Peace Commission charged with removing the causes of the Indian wars. They were to give up their ancestral lands in return for peace so that the whites could move in. The U.S. government had decided it had no choice but to gain control of the region—by purchase if possible, by force if necessary. In 1867, a conference at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, ended with the Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes, and Cheyennes reluctantly agreeing to move to land in western Oklahoma- they settle in Black hills reservation in SW Dakota territory bc partly they viewed black hills as holy grounds.

Grant’s Indian Policy

  • In his inaugural address in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant urged Congress to adopt more progressive policies toward Native Americans. Grant’s noble intentions, however, ran afoul of longstanding prejudices against Native Americans and the unrelenting efforts of miners, farmers, and ranchers to trespass on Indian lands and reservations. Neither William T Sherman (commanding gen of the US army) nor General Philip Sheridan (In charge of milt. Efforts in the west) agreed with Grant’s “peace policy.” In their view, the president’s naive outlook was shaped by the distance between the Great Plains and Washington, D.C. Armed clashes occurred with increasing frequency until the Red River War of 1874–1875 when Sheridan’s soldiers won a series of battles in the Texas Panhandle.

Custer and the Sioux

  • White prospectors searching for gold were trespassing on Sioux hunting grounds in the Dakotas despite promises that the army would keep them out. Ohio senator John Sherman warned that nothing would stop the mass migration of Americans across the Mississippi River.

  • The massive gold rush in the Black Hills convinced some Indians to make a last stand. In 1875, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a veteran Indian fighter driven by reckless ambition and courage, led 1,000 soldiers in the Seventh Cavalry regiment into the Black Hills, where he announced the discovery of gold on French Creek near present-day Custer, South Dakota. The news set off a massive gold rush, and within two years, the mining town of Deadwood overflowed with miners. The undermanned army units in the area could not keep the miners from violating the rights guaranteed to the Sioux by federal treaties.

  • President Grant and federal authorities tried to convince the Sioux to sell the Black Hills to the government. With that news, Custer was sent back to the Black Hills, this time to find roving bands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and force them back onto reservations. If they resisted, he was to kill them. He was in charge of an expedition to attack the wandering bands of Sioux hunting parties, even though he recognized that intruding American miners had caused the renewal of warfare.

  • The Great Sioux War was the largest military campaign since the end of the Civil War. The war lasted fifteen months and entailed fifteen battles in present-day Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. After a half-hour of desperate fighting, Custer and his 210 men were all dead. Afterward, Cheyenne women pierced Custer’s eardrums with sewing needles because he had failed to listen to their warnings to stay out of their ancestral lands.

  • The Sioux had won their greatest battle, but in doing so they helped ensure that they would lose the war. Upon learning of the Battle of Little Bighorn (“Custer’s Last Stand”), President Grant and Congress abandoned the “peace policy” and dispatched more troops (“Custer’s Avengers”) to the plains. Forced back onto reservations, the remaining Native Americans soon found themselves struggling to survive. Many of them died of starvation or disease. By the end of 1876, the chiefs living on the Dakota reservation agreed to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government. In the spring of 1877, Crazy Horse and his people surrendered. The Great Sioux War was over.

The Demise of the Buffalo

  • Over the long run, the collapse of Indian resistance resulted as much from the decimation of the buffalo herds as from the actions of federal troops. The conventional story focuses on the intensive harvesting of buffalo by white commercial hunters after the Civil War. The construction of railroads allowed them to ship huge numbers of hides each year to cities in the East, where consumers developed a voracious demand for buffalo robes and buffalo leather. The average commercial hunter-killed 100 animals a day. The story is more complicated, however. The buffalo disappeared for a variety of health and environmental reasons, notably a prolonged drought during the late 1880s into the 1890s that severely reduced the grasslands upon which the animals depended.

The Last Resistance

  • The Blackfeet and Crows had to leave their homes in Montana. In a war along the California-Oregon boundary, the Modocs held out for six months in 1871–1872 before they were overwhelmed. In 1879, the Utes were forced to give up their vast territories in western Colorado. In Idaho, the peaceful Nez Perce bands refused to surrender land along the Salmon River, and prolonged fighting erupted there and in eastern Oregon. In 1877, Joseph, a Nez Perce chief, led some 650 of his people on a 1,300-mile journey through Montana in hopes of reaching safety in Canada. Just before reaching the border, they were caught by U.S. soldiers. As he surrendered, Joseph delivered an eloquent speech that served as an epitaph to the Indians’ efforts to withstand the march of the American empire. The Nez Perce requested that they be allowed to return to their ancestral lands in western Idaho, but they were forced to settle in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where many died of malaria. A generation of Indian wars virtually ended in 1886 with the capture of Geronimo, a powerful chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, who had outridden, outwitted, and outfought American forces in the Southwest for fifteen years.

The Ghost Dance

  • Wovoka (or Jack Wilson), a Paiute in western Nevada, fell ill. In delirium, he imagined being in the spirit world, where he learned of a deliverer coming to rescue the Indians and restore their lands. To hasten their deliverance, he said, the Indians must perform a ceremonial dance that would make them bulletproof against white soldiers. The Ghost Dance craze fed upon old legends of the dead reuniting with the living and bringing prosperity and peace. The Ghost Dance movement spread rapidly. White authorities banned the dance on Lakota reservations, but the native Americans defied the order and a crisis erupted.

  • On December 29, 1890, a bloodbath occurred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, after nervous soldiers fired into a group of Indians who had surrendered. Many politicians and religious leaders condemned the persistent mistreatment of Indians. In his annual message of 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes joined the protest. .

  • Such reform efforts produced the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 (also called the General Allotment Act), the most sweeping policy directed at Native Americans in U.S. history. Sponsored by Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, the act divided tribal lands and “allotted” them to individuals, granting 160 acres to each head of a family and lesser amounts to others. White Bear, a Kiowa chief, expressed a common complaint--But his preferences were not heeded.

The End of the Frontier

  • Frederick Jackson Turner- Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian at the University of Wisconsin, announced his “frontier thesis” in 1893, in which he argued that more than slavery or any other single factor, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner’s view of the frontier—as the westward-moving source of the nation’s democratic politics, open society, unfettered economy, and rugged individualism— gripped the popular imagination. But his frontier thesis left out much of the story of American development. The frontier experience that Turner described was in many respects a self-serving myth involving only Christian white men. He virtually ignored the role of women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Moreover, Turner’s frontier was always the site of heroism, triumph, and progress. He downplayed the evidence of greed, exploitation, and failure in the settling of the West.

Discontented Farmers

  • In both cases, dramatically changed economic conditions spurred the emergence of a New South and a New West. In the West, the widespread use of mechanized commercial agriculture changed the dynamics of farming. As discontent rose among farmers and farmworkers in the South and the West, many of them joined the People’s party, whose followers were known as Populists, a grassroots social and political movement that was sweeping the poorest rural regions of the nation. The Populist movement would tie the South and West together in an effort to wrest control of the political system from Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest.

  • The South had to be rebuilt, while the sparsely settled territories and states west of the Mississippi River were ripe for the development of farms, businesses, railroads, and towns. By 1900, a New West and a New South had emerged, and eleven new states had been created out of the western territories

The Myth of the New South

  • After the war between the states, the South fought an inner civil war over the future of the region. Many white southerners embraced the “Lost Cause,” a romanticized interpretation of the war that painted the Confederates as noble defenders of their distinctive way of life against a tyrannical federal government headed by Abraham Lincoln. Home and history are two of the most revered words in southern life. Other prominent southerners, however, looked more to the future. They called for a New South, where the region’s predominantly agricultural economy would be diversified by an expanded industrial sector. The tireless champion of the New South ideal was Henry Woodfin Grady (1850–1889), the powerful managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Many southerners shared Grady’s vision. The Confederacy, they concluded, had lost the war because it had relied too much upon King Cotton and slavery.

  • Textile Mills: The chief accomplishment of the New South’s effort to industrialize was a dramatic expansion of the region’s textile industry, which produced thread and cotton bedding and clothing. Thousands of dirt-poor farm folk rushed to take jobs in the mill villages that arose after the war. By 1900, the South had surpassed New England as the largest producer of cotton fabric in the nation.

The Tobacco Industry

  • Tobacco growing and cigarette production also soared in the New South. Essential to the rise of the tobacco industry was the Duke family of Durham, North Carolina. At the end of the Civil War, Washington Duke took his barn load of tobacco and, with the help of his two sons, hitched two mules to his wagon and traveled across the state, selling tobacco in small pouches as he went.

  • By 1872, the Dukes had a cigarette factory. Washington’s son, James Buchanan Duke, wanted even greater success, however. He spent millions on advertising schemes and perfected the mechanized mass production of cigarettes. Duke also undersold competitors and cornered the supply of ingredients needed to make cigarettes. Eventually, his primary competitors agreed to join forces with him, and in 1890 Duke brought most of them into the American Tobacco Company.

Other New South Industries

  • Coal production grew. At the southern end of the mountains, Birmingham, Alabama, sprang up during the 1870s in large part because of the massive deposits of iron ore in the surrounding ridges, leading boosters to label the steelmaking city the “Pittsburgh of the South.” 1870 lumbering became the fastest growing industry in the South.

  • Northern investors bought up vast forests of yellow pine and set about clear-cutting them and hauling the logs to new sawmills, where they were milled into lumber for the construction of homes and businesses. By 1900, lumber had surpassed textiles in annual economic value. Still, for all of its advances, the South continued to lag behind the rest of the nation in industrial development.

The Redeemers

  • Henry Grady’s vision of a New South celebrated the Redeemers, the conservative, pro-business, white politicians in the Democratic party who had embraced the idea of industrial progress grounded in white supremacy. Their supporters referred to them as Redeemers because they supposedly saved (“redeemed”) the South from Yankee domination and “black rule” during Reconstruction. They also sought cuts in state taxes and expenditures, including those for the public school systems that started after the war. “Schools are not a necessity,” claimed a Virginia governor.

The Failings on the New South

  • The South was still dependent on the North for investment capital and manufactured goods. Cotton remained king after the Civil War, although it never regained the huge profitability it had generated in the 1850s. Cotton production remained the same, but profits decreased.

Southern Poverty

  • Henry Grady also hoped that growing numbers of southern farmers would own their own land by the end of the nineteenth century. But the opposite occurred. Many actually lost ownership of the land that they worked on each year.

The Crop-Lien System

  • Because most southern communities had no banks after the Civil War, people had to find ways to operate with little or no cash. Many rural areas adopted a barter economy (merchants provided food, clothing, seed, fertilizer on credit for share/lien of crops). Southern farmers, white and black, who participated in the crop-lien system fell into three distinct categories: small farm owners, sharecroppers, and tenants.

  • The farms owned by most southerners were small and did not generate much cash income. As a result, even those who owned their own farms had to pledge a portion of their future crop to the local merchant in return for supplies purchased “on credit.” Sharecroppers, mostly blacks who had nothing to offer but their labor, worked an owner’s land in return for shelter, seed, fertilizer, mules, supplies, food—and a share of the crop, generally about half.

  • Share tenants, mostly white farmers who were barely better off, might have their own mule or horse, a plow and tools, and a line of credit with the country store, but they still needed to rent land to farm. The crop-lien system was self-destructive. The overwhelming focus on planting cotton or tobacco year after year stripped the soil of its fertility and stability.

  • The crop-lien system was a post–Civil War version of economic slavery for poor whites as well as for blacks. The landowner or merchant (often the same The Failings of the New South 665 person) decided what crop would be planted and how it would be cultivated, harvested, and sold. Over time, the high interest charged on the credit offered by the local store or landowner, coupled with sagging prices for cotton and other crops, created a hopeless cycle of debt among small farmers, sharecroppers, and share tenants.

Falling Cotton Prices

  • As cotton production soared during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, largely because of dramatic growth in Texas cultivation, the price paid for raw cotton fell steadily.

Race Relations During the 1890s - Disenfranchising African Americans

  • By the 1890s, a new generation of African Americans born and educated since the end of the Civil War was determined to gain true equality.

  • A growing number of young white adults, however, were equally determined to keep “Negroes in their place.” Mississippi took the lead in stripping blacks of their voting rights. The so-called Mississippi Plan, a series of state constitutional amendments in 1890, set the pattern of disfranchisement that nine more states would follow. The plan first instituted a residence requirement for voting—two years in the state, one year in a local election district. This was aimed at African American tenant farmers who were in the habit of moving yearly in search of better economic opportunities.

  • Second, Mississippi disqualified blacks from voting if they had committed certain crimes.

  • Third, in order to vote, people had to have paid all of their taxes on time, including a so-called poll tax specifically for voting—a restriction that hurt both poor blacks and poor whites. Finally, all voters had to be able to read or at least “understand” the U.S. Constitution. White registrars decided who satisfied this requirement, and they often discriminated against blacks.

  • Other states added variations on the Mississippi Plan. In 1898, Louisiana inserted into its state constitution the “grandfather clause,” which allowed illiterate whites to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, when African Americans were still disenfranchised. By 1910, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Oklahoma had incorporated the grandfather clause. When such “legal” means were not enough to ensure their political dominance, white candidates used fraud and violence.

  • Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist who was South Carolina’s governor from 1890 to 1894, maintained that his state’s problems were caused by white farmers renting their land to “ignorant lazy negroes.” His use of such racist explanations gained him the support of poor whites in his crusade to oust the ruling Redeemers. To ensure his election, Tillman and his followers effectively eliminated the black vote.

  • By the end of the nineteenth century, widespread racial discrimination— segregation of public facilities, political disfranchisement, and vigilante justice—had elevated government-sanctioned bigotry to an official way of life in the South. The efforts to suppress the black vote succeeded throughout the South.

The Spread of Segregation

  • At the same time that southern blacks were being shoved out of the political arena, they were also being segregated socially. The symbolic first target was the railroad passenger car. From 1875 to 1883, in fact, any local or state law requiring racial segregation violated the federal Civil Rights Act (1875). By 1883, however, many northern whites endorsed the resegregation of southern life. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

  • The judges explained that private individuals and organizations could engage in acts of racial discrimination because the Fourteenth Amendment specified only that “no State” could deny citizens equal protection of the law. The Court’s interpretation in what came to be called the Civil Rights Cases (1883) left as an open question the validity of state laws requiring racially segregated public facilities under the principle of “separate but equal.”

  • When Louisiana followed suit in 1890 with a similar law, blacks challenged it in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case originated in New Orleans when Homer Plessy, an octoroon (a person having one-eighth African ancestry), refused to leave a whites-only railroad car and was convicted of violating the law. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that states had a right to create laws segregating public places such as schools, hotels, and restaurants.

  • Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian who had once owned slaves, was the only member of the Court to dissent. He stressed that the Constitution is “color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” The Court’s ruling in the Plessy case legitimized the widespread practice of racially “separate but equal” facilities in virtually every area of southern life. The new regulations came to be called “Jim Crow” laws. The name derived from “Jump Jim Crow,” an old song-and-dance caricature of African Americans.

  • During the 1890s, the term Jim Crow became a derisive expression meaning “Negro.” Signs reading “white only” or “colored only” above restrooms and water fountains emerged as hallmarks of the Jim Crow system, and racist customs dating back before the Civil War were revived. Widespread racist violence accompanied the Jim Crow laws.

Mob Rule in North Carolina

  • White supremacy was violently imposed in the thriving coastal port of Wilmington, North Carolina, then the largest city in the state. In 1894 and 1896, black voters, by then a majority in the city, elected African Americans to various municipal offices, infuriating the city’s white elite. On the morning of November 10, 1898, some 2,000 well-armed white men and teens rampaged through the streets of Wilmington. Almost 100 blacks were killed. The mob then stormed the city hall and forced the African American business leaders and elected officials to board northbound trains. The new, self-appointed all-white city government issued a “Declaration of White Independence” that stripped blacks of their jobs and voting rights. Desperate black residents appealed for help to the governor as well as President William McKinley but received none. The Wilmington insurrection marked the first time in history that a lawfully elected municipal government had been overthrown in the United States.

The Black Response

  • By the end of the nineteenth century, white supremacy had triumphed across the South. Some African Americans chose to leave in search of equality and opportunity. Those who stayed and resisted white supremacy—even in self-defense—were ruthlessly suppressed. Yet accommodation did not mean surrender, as African Americans constructed their own lively culture.

Ida B. Wells

  • One of the most outspoken African American activists of the time was Ida B. Wells. Born into slavery in 1862 in Mississippi, she attended a school staffed by white missionaries. She moved in 1880 to Memphis, where she taught in segregated schools and gained entrance to the social life of the city’s African American middle class. In 1883, after being denied a seat on a railroad car because she was black, Wells became the first African American to file suit against such discrimination. The circuit court decided in her favor and fined the railroad, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the ruling.

  • Soon after, she discovered her love of journalism and through it, , a weapon with which to wage her crusade for justice. She became editor of Memphis Free Speech, a newspaper that focused on African American issues. Wells launched a crusade against lynching. Angry whites responded by destroying her office and threatening to lynch her. She moved to New York, where she continued to criticize Jim Crow laws and demand that blacks have their voting rights restored. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and worked for women’s suffrage.

Booker T Washington

  • Born a slave in Virginia, in 1856, the son of a black mother and a white father, Booker T. Washington at sixteen had enrolled at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, one of several colleges for ex-slaves created during Reconstruction. There he met the school’s founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who preached moderation- Washington listened and learned well.

  • Nine years later, Armstrong received a request from a group in northern Alabama to start a black college called Tuskegee Institute. The college needed a president, and Armstrong urged them to hire Washington. Although only twenty-five years old, Washington was, according to Armstrong, “a very capable mulatto, clear-headed, modest, sensible, polite, and a thorough teacher and superior man.” He became a skilled fundraiser, gathering substantial gifts from wealthy whites, most of them northerners. The complicated racial dynamics of the late nineteenth century required him to walk a tightrope between being candid and being an effective college president.

  • As the years passed, Tuskegee Institute became celebrated for its dedication to discipline and vocational training, and Booker T. Washington became a source of inspiration and hope to millions. ” In part to please his white donors, he argued that African Americans should not focus on fighting racial segregation. They should instead work hard and remain silent; their priority should be self-improvement rather than social change.

W. E. B Du Bois

  • He and Ida Wells disagreed with Washington's Accommodationist. Strategy.

  • W. E. B. Du Bois emerged at the turn of the century as Washington’s foremost rival. A native of Massachusetts, Du Bois first experienced racial prejudice as a student at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Later he became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard (in history and sociology). In addition to promoting civil rights, he left a distinguished record as a scholar, authoring more than twenty books.

  • Du Bois had a flamboyant personality and a combative spirit. Not long after he began teaching at Atlanta University in 1897, he launched a public assault on Washington’s strategy for improving the quality of life for African Americans. Du Bois called Washington’s celebrated 1895 speech “the Atlanta Compromise” and said that he would not “surrender the leadership of this race to cowards.” Du Bois stressed that African American leaders should adopt a strategy of “ceaseless agitation” directed at ensuring the right to vote and winning civil equality.

  • The education of blacks, Du Bois maintained, should not be merely vocational but comparable to that enjoyed by the white elite. Black education should help develop bold leaders willing to challenge Jim Crow segregation and discrimination.

  • What Du Bois and others did not know was that Washington secretly worked to finance lawsuits challenging segregation and disfranchisement, to stop the brutal culture of race lynching, and to increase funding for public schools. He acted privately because he feared that public activism would trigger violence against Tuskegee and himself.

The Settling of the New West - The Western Landscape

  • For most western Americans, the Civil War, and Reconstruction were remote events that hardly touched the lives of the Indians, Mexicans, Asians, farmers, ranchers, trappers, miners, and Mormons scattered through the plains, valleys, and mountains. In the west, the concept of manifest destiny was heavily important- the idea that it was God's will to have America grow and expand. This expansion into the west represented both economic prosperity and economic destruction.

  • The post–Civil War West came to symbolize economic opportunity and personal freedom. On another level, however, the economic exploitation of the West was a story of irresponsible behavior and reckless abuse of nature that scarred the land, decimated its wildlife, and nearly exterminated much of Native American culture. After the mid-century, farmers and their families began spreading west to the Great Plains—western Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, northern Texas, the Dakotas, eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The Great Plains had little rainfall and few rivers.

  • The scarcity of water and timber rendered useless the familiar trappings of the pioneer—the ax, the log cabin, the rail fence—as well as traditional methods of tilling the soil. For a long time, the region had been called the Great American Desert, unfit for human habitation and therefore, in the minds of most Americans, the perfect refuge for Indians who refused to embrace the white way of life.

  • The discovery of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal; the completion of the transcontinental railroads; the collapse of Indian resistance; and the rise of the buffalo hide and range-cattle industries convinced many Americans, as well as the federal government, that economic development of the West held the key to national prosperity.

The Migratory Stream

  • During the second half of the nineteenth century, an unrelenting stream of migrants flowed into what had been the largely Indian and Hispanic West. The largest number of foreign immigrants to the West came from northern Europe and Canada. Compared with European immigrants, those from China and Mexico were much less numerous but nonetheless significant. The Chinese were frequently discriminated against and denied citizenship rights, and they became scapegoats whenever there was an economic downturn. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively banning further immigration from China.

The African American Migration

  • In the aftermath of the collapse of Radical Republican rule in the South, some blacks decided to found their own towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Others had larger communities in mind. Thousands of African Americans began migrating westward. These migrants came to be known as Exodusters because they were making their exodus from the South in search of a haven from racism and poverty. The foremost promoter of black migration to the West was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton.

  • Born a slave in Tennessee in 1809, he escaped and made his way to Michigan. He led 200 colonists to Kansas when he found out that land was $1.25/acres that had formerly been an Indian reservation, and established the Dunlop Community. Southern leaders worried about the loss of black laborers and In 1879, white southerners closed access to the Mississippi River and threatened to sink all boats carrying blacks to the West.

  • By the early 1880s, however, the exodus of black southerners to the West had petered out. Many African American settlers were unprepared for the harsh living conditions on the plains, most of the black farmers were forced to supplement their income by hiring themselves out to white ranchers. many African American pioneers in Kansas soon abandoned their land and moved to the few cities in the state. The frontier was not the “promised land” that they had been led to expect, but it was better than what they had experienced in the South.

Western Mining

  • After the Civil War, the dream of striking it rich by finding gold or silver continued to be the most powerful lure to the West.

  • Like much of western agriculture, mining had become a mass-production industry as individual prospectors gave way to large mining companies. The first wave of miners who rushed to California in 1849 had sifted gold dust and nuggets out of riverbeds by means of “placer” mining, or “panning.” But once the placer deposits were exhausted, efficient mining required large-scale operations, massive machinery, and substantial capital investment. Industrial miners used huge hydraulic cannons to strip canyon walls of rock and topsoil in a search for veins of gold or silver. The tons of dirt and debris unearthed by the water cannons covered rich farmland downstream and created sandbars that clogged rivers and killed fish.

Mining Boomtowns

  • Throughout the region, mining camps and towns sprouted like mushrooms. Tombstone, Arizona, only thirty miles from the Mexican border, was a major silver mining site in the 1870s. By only its fourth year of existence, it was the fastest-growing boomtown in the Southwest. Some of the other largest and most famous mining boomtowns included Virginia City in Nevada, Cripple Creek and Leadville in Colorado, and Deadwood in the Dakota Territory.

  • These towns were male-dominated and had a major population of immigrants. Ethnic prejudice was as common as violence in mining towns. The Chinese, for example, were usually prohibited from laboring in the mines but were allowed to operate laundries and work in boarding houses. Mexicans were often treated the worst.

  • Most of the boomtowns lasted only a few years. Once the mines played out, the people moved on, leaving ghost towns behind.

  • The Comstock Lode was found near Gold Hill, Nevada, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas near the California border. Henry Comstock, a Canadian-born fur trapper, gave the new discovery (actually made by other prospectors in 1859) his name. The Comstock Lode, a seam of gold and silver more than fifty feet wide and thousands of feet deep, was the most profitable mine in history to that point.

  • Democrats refused to create states out of territories that were dominated by Republicans. After the sweeping Republican victory in the 1888 legislative races, however, Congress admitted North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington as states in 1889, and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890. Utah entered the Union in 1896 (after the Mormons agreed to abandon the practice of polygamy), and Oklahoma in 1907; and in 1912 Arizona and New Mexico became the forty-seventh and forty-eighth contiguous states. (The final two states, Alaska and Hawaii, were added fifty years later.)

Life in the New West

  • To encourage new settlers in the West, the federal government generously helped finance construction of four transcontinental railroads, dispatched troops to conquer and relocate Indians to designated reservations, and sold government-owned land at low prices—or gave it to railroad companies as a means of rapidly populating areas served by trains. Drudgery and tragedy were as commonplace as adventure and success. While the West was being taken from the Indians, cattle were herded into the grasslands where the buffalo had roamed. The wild cattle had competed with the buffalo in the borderland of Tx and Az. Breeding them produced the hybrid-Texas Longhorns, who were known for speed and endurance. They had marginal value, moreover, because the largest urban markets for beef were so far away—until the railroads arrived.

The Cattle Boom

  • Joseph G. Mccoy built a stockyard in Abilene, Kansas, barn, office building, livestock scales, hotel, and a bank. He sent an agent to Tx to convince the owners of herds bound north to go through Abilene. Once the Texas herds reached Abilene, cattle by the thousands were loaded onto rail cars and shipped to the Chicago stockyards where they were sent (as beef) to cities around the nation. Abilene flourished as the first successful Kansas cow town.The thriving cattle industry spurred rapid population growth. The ability to ship huge numbers of cattle by rail transformed ranching into a major national industry. Before long, however, the flush times of the cow towns passed, and the cattle drives ended because they were unprofitable. Cattle ranchers developed their own code of laws and ways of enforcing them; cowboys would “ride the line” to keep the animals off the adjoining ranches. In the spring they would “round up” the herds, which invariably got mixed up, and sort out ownership by identifying the distinctive ranch symbols “branded,” or burned, into the cattle. All that changed in 1873, when Joseph Glidden, an Illinois farmer, developed the first effective form of barbed-wire fencing, which ranchers used to fence off their lands at relatively low cost. Soon the open range—owned by all, where a small rancher could graze his cattle anywhere—was no more.

Farming on the Plains

  • Farming on the Great Plains was made harder by the region’s unforgiving environment, bitterly cold winters, and scorching summers. People made the dangerous trek lured by cheap federal land and misleading advertisements.

Homesteaders

  • The first homesteaders in the Great Plains were mostly landless folk eager to try their hand at farming. Many of them had never used a hoe or planted a seed. Yet the farmers faced a grim struggle. Although the land was essentially free as a result of the Homestead Act (1862), horses, livestock, wagons, wells, lumber, fencing, seed, machinery, and fertilizer were not. Freight rates and interest rates were criminally high. The virgin land itself, although fertile, resisted planting; the heavy sod woven with tough grassroots broke many a plow. Families used buffalo chips for fuel instead of the rare wood and coal. Farm families also fought a constant battle with the elements: tornadoes, hailstorms, droughts, prairie fires, blizzards, and pests. Swarms of locusts often clouded the horizon. In the end, two-thirds of the people who gained land under the Homestead Act failed to become self-sustaining farmers.

Commercial Farming

  • Eventually, as the railroads brought piles of lumber from the East, farmers could upgrade their houses built of sod (“Kansas brick”) into more comfortable wood-framed dwellings. New machinery and equipment, for those who could afford them, improved productivity. In 1868, James Oliver, a Scottish immigrant living in Indiana, made a sturdy chilled-iron “sodbuster” plow that greatly eased the task of preparing land for planting. In Minnesota, the Dakotas, and central California, wealthy capitalists created gigantic “bonanza farms” that became the marvels of the age. American grew what was exported around the world. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an America primarily made up of small farmers continued to give way to industrial agriculture and bonanza farms. small farmers did not keep up. Their numbers grew in size but decreased in proportion to the population at large.

Women in the West

  • West was largely a male society. In both mining and farming communities, women were prized as spouses. But the women pioneers continued to face the same legal barriers and social prejudices prevalent in the East. A wife could not sell the property without her husband’s approval. The constant fight for survival west of the Mississippi, however, made men and women more equal partners than in the East. Many women who lost their mates to the deadly toil of “sod busting” assumed complete responsibility for their farms. It was not coincidental, then, that the new western territories and states were among the first to allow women to vote and hold office. Wyoming was admitted to the Union as the first state that allowed women to vote in all elections.

The Fate of Western Indians

  • The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, in which the chiefs of the Plains Indians agreed to accept definite tribal borders and allow white emigrants to travel across their lands, worked for a while. Fighting resumed, however, as Indians continued their ancient practice of following the buffalo herds and as Americans began to settle on Indian lands.

Indian Relations in the West

  • From the early 1860s until the late 1870s, the trans-Mississippi West, often called “Indian Country,” raged with the so-called Indian Wars. Although the U.S. government had signed numerous treaties with Indian nations, those commitments were repeatedly violated by buffalo hunters, miners, ranchers, farmers, railroad surveyors, and horse soldiers. In the 1860s, the federal government ousted numerous tribes from lands they had been promised “forever.” In the summer of 1862, Sioux warriors killed 644 white traders, settlers, government officials, and soldiers in the Minnesota Valley. It was the first of many clashes between American settlers and miners and the Indians living on reservations in the Great Plains.

The Sand Creek Massacre

  • After Indians murdered a white family near Denver, John Evans, the territorial governor, called on whites to “kill and destroy” the “hostile Indians on the plains.” At the same time, Evans persuaded “friendly Indians” (mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho) to gather at “places of safety” such as Fort Lyon.

  • On November 29, 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington’s 700 militiamen attacked a camp of Cheyennes and Arapahoes along Sand Creek. Black Kettle, the chief, frantically waved first an American flag and then a white flag, but the attacking soldiers paid no heed. Then the truth about Sand Creek began to come out.

  • Captain Silas Soule witnessed the massacre but, along with his company of soldiers, had disobeyed orders to join the attack. Congress and the army launched lengthy investigations, and the congressional report concluded that Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre,” murdering “in cold blood”. The Sand Creek Massacre did as Soule had predicted: it ignited warfare that raged across the central plains for the next three years. Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux war parties attacked scores of ranches and stagecoach stations.

  • In 1866, Congress established two “colored” cavalry units and dispatched them to the western frontier. The Cheyenne nicknamed them “buffalo soldiers” because they “fought like a cornered buffalo. The buffalo soldiers were mostly Civil War veterans from Louisiana and Kentucky. They built and maintained forts, mapped vast areas of the Southwest, strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, protected railroad construction crews, subdued hostile Indians, and captured outlaws and rustlers.

Indian Relocation

  • The 1867 “Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes” led to the creation of an Indian Peace Commission charged with removing the causes of the Indian wars. They were to give up their ancestral lands in return for peace so that the whites could move in. The U.S. government had decided it had no choice but to gain control of the region—by purchase if possible, by force if necessary. In 1867, a conference at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, ended with the Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes, and Cheyennes reluctantly agreeing to move to land in western Oklahoma- they settle in Black hills reservation in SW Dakota territory bc partly they viewed black hills as holy grounds.

Grant’s Indian Policy

  • In his inaugural address in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant urged Congress to adopt more progressive policies toward Native Americans. Grant’s noble intentions, however, ran afoul of longstanding prejudices against Native Americans and the unrelenting efforts of miners, farmers, and ranchers to trespass on Indian lands and reservations. Neither William T Sherman (commanding gen of the US army) nor General Philip Sheridan (In charge of milt. Efforts in the west) agreed with Grant’s “peace policy.” In their view, the president’s naive outlook was shaped by the distance between the Great Plains and Washington, D.C. Armed clashes occurred with increasing frequency until the Red River War of 1874–1875 when Sheridan’s soldiers won a series of battles in the Texas Panhandle.

Custer and the Sioux

  • White prospectors searching for gold were trespassing on Sioux hunting grounds in the Dakotas despite promises that the army would keep them out. Ohio senator John Sherman warned that nothing would stop the mass migration of Americans across the Mississippi River.

  • The massive gold rush in the Black Hills convinced some Indians to make a last stand. In 1875, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a veteran Indian fighter driven by reckless ambition and courage, led 1,000 soldiers in the Seventh Cavalry regiment into the Black Hills, where he announced the discovery of gold on French Creek near present-day Custer, South Dakota. The news set off a massive gold rush, and within two years, the mining town of Deadwood overflowed with miners. The undermanned army units in the area could not keep the miners from violating the rights guaranteed to the Sioux by federal treaties.

  • President Grant and federal authorities tried to convince the Sioux to sell the Black Hills to the government. With that news, Custer was sent back to the Black Hills, this time to find roving bands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and force them back onto reservations. If they resisted, he was to kill them. He was in charge of an expedition to attack the wandering bands of Sioux hunting parties, even though he recognized that intruding American miners had caused the renewal of warfare.

  • The Great Sioux War was the largest military campaign since the end of the Civil War. The war lasted fifteen months and entailed fifteen battles in present-day Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. After a half-hour of desperate fighting, Custer and his 210 men were all dead. Afterward, Cheyenne women pierced Custer’s eardrums with sewing needles because he had failed to listen to their warnings to stay out of their ancestral lands.

  • The Sioux had won their greatest battle, but in doing so they helped ensure that they would lose the war. Upon learning of the Battle of Little Bighorn (“Custer’s Last Stand”), President Grant and Congress abandoned the “peace policy” and dispatched more troops (“Custer’s Avengers”) to the plains. Forced back onto reservations, the remaining Native Americans soon found themselves struggling to survive. Many of them died of starvation or disease. By the end of 1876, the chiefs living on the Dakota reservation agreed to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government. In the spring of 1877, Crazy Horse and his people surrendered. The Great Sioux War was over.

The Demise of the Buffalo

  • Over the long run, the collapse of Indian resistance resulted as much from the decimation of the buffalo herds as from the actions of federal troops. The conventional story focuses on the intensive harvesting of buffalo by white commercial hunters after the Civil War. The construction of railroads allowed them to ship huge numbers of hides each year to cities in the East, where consumers developed a voracious demand for buffalo robes and buffalo leather. The average commercial hunter-killed 100 animals a day. The story is more complicated, however. The buffalo disappeared for a variety of health and environmental reasons, notably a prolonged drought during the late 1880s into the 1890s that severely reduced the grasslands upon which the animals depended.

The Last Resistance

  • The Blackfeet and Crows had to leave their homes in Montana. In a war along the California-Oregon boundary, the Modocs held out for six months in 1871–1872 before they were overwhelmed. In 1879, the Utes were forced to give up their vast territories in western Colorado. In Idaho, the peaceful Nez Perce bands refused to surrender land along the Salmon River, and prolonged fighting erupted there and in eastern Oregon. In 1877, Joseph, a Nez Perce chief, led some 650 of his people on a 1,300-mile journey through Montana in hopes of reaching safety in Canada. Just before reaching the border, they were caught by U.S. soldiers. As he surrendered, Joseph delivered an eloquent speech that served as an epitaph to the Indians’ efforts to withstand the march of the American empire. The Nez Perce requested that they be allowed to return to their ancestral lands in western Idaho, but they were forced to settle in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where many died of malaria. A generation of Indian wars virtually ended in 1886 with the capture of Geronimo, a powerful chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, who had outridden, outwitted, and outfought American forces in the Southwest for fifteen years.

The Ghost Dance

  • Wovoka (or Jack Wilson), a Paiute in western Nevada, fell ill. In delirium, he imagined being in the spirit world, where he learned of a deliverer coming to rescue the Indians and restore their lands. To hasten their deliverance, he said, the Indians must perform a ceremonial dance that would make them bulletproof against white soldiers. The Ghost Dance craze fed upon old legends of the dead reuniting with the living and bringing prosperity and peace. The Ghost Dance movement spread rapidly. White authorities banned the dance on Lakota reservations, but the native Americans defied the order and a crisis erupted.

  • On December 29, 1890, a bloodbath occurred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, after nervous soldiers fired into a group of Indians who had surrendered. Many politicians and religious leaders condemned the persistent mistreatment of Indians. In his annual message of 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes joined the protest. .

  • Such reform efforts produced the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 (also called the General Allotment Act), the most sweeping policy directed at Native Americans in U.S. history. Sponsored by Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, the act divided tribal lands and “allotted” them to individuals, granting 160 acres to each head of a family and lesser amounts to others. White Bear, a Kiowa chief, expressed a common complaint--But his preferences were not heeded.

The End of the Frontier

  • Frederick Jackson Turner- Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian at the University of Wisconsin, announced his “frontier thesis” in 1893, in which he argued that more than slavery or any other single factor, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner’s view of the frontier—as the westward-moving source of the nation’s democratic politics, open society, unfettered economy, and rugged individualism— gripped the popular imagination. But his frontier thesis left out much of the story of American development. The frontier experience that Turner described was in many respects a self-serving myth involving only Christian white men. He virtually ignored the role of women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Moreover, Turner’s frontier was always the site of heroism, triumph, and progress. He downplayed the evidence of greed, exploitation, and failure in the settling of the West.

Discontented Farmers

  • In both cases, dramatically changed economic conditions spurred the emergence of a New South and a New West. In the West, the widespread use of mechanized commercial agriculture changed the dynamics of farming. As discontent rose among farmers and farmworkers in the South and the West, many of them joined the People’s party, whose followers were known as Populists, a grassroots social and political movement that was sweeping the poorest rural regions of the nation. The Populist movement would tie the South and West together in an effort to wrest control of the political system from Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest.