The Western Tribes

• The largest and most important western population group before the great Anglo-American migration was the Indian tribes.

• Some were members of eastern tribes—Cherokee, Creek, and others—who had been forcibly resettled west of the Mississippi to “Indian Territory

• The most widespread Indian presence in the West was the Plains Indians, a diverse group of tribes and language groups.

• Some tribes formed alliances with one another; others were in constant conflict.

• Some lived sedentary lives as farmers; others were highly nomadic hunters.

• Despite their differences, however, the tribes shared some traits.

• Their cultures were based on close and extended family networks and on an intimate relationship with nature

• Women’s roles were largely domestic and artistic: raising children, cooking, gathering roots and berries, preparing hides, and creating many of the impressive artworks of tribal culture

• The buffalo, or bison, provided the economic basis for the Plains Indians’ way of life.

• Its flesh was their principal source of food, and its skin supplied materials for clothing, shoes, tepees, blankets, robes, and utensils

• The Plains Indians were proud and aggressive warriors

• The Plains warriors proved to be the most formidable foes white settlers encountered.

• But the tribes also suffered from several serious weaknesses that in the end made it impossible for them to prevail.

• One weakness was the inability of the various tribes (and often even of the bands within tribes) to unite against white aggression.

• They were seldom able to draw together a coalition large enough to counter white power.

• They were also frequently distracted from their battles with whites by conflicts among the tribes themselves.

Hispanic New Mexico

• Spanish-speaking communities were scattered throughout the Southwest, from Texas to California

• In New Mexico, the centers of Spanish speaking society were the farming and trading communities the Spanish had established in the seventeenth century

• There were also large groups of Indian laborers, some enslaved or indentured

• By the 1870s, the government of New Mexico was dominated by one of the most notorious of the many “territorial rings” that sprang up in the West in the years before statehood.

• Even without its former power and despite the expansion of Anglo-American settlement, Hispanic society in New Mexico survived and grew.

• The U.S. Army finally did what the Hispanic residents had been unable to accomplish for 200 years: it broke the power of the Navajo, Apache, and other tribes that had so often harassed the residents of New Mexico and had prevented them from expanding their society and commerce.

• The defeat of the tribes led to substantial Hispanic migration into other areas of the Southwest and as far north as Colorado.

• Most of the expansion involved peasants and small tradespeople who were looking for land or new opportunities for commerce.

• Hispanic societies survived in the Southwest in part because they were so far from the centers of English-speaking society that Anglo-American migrants (and the railroads that carried them) were slow to get there.

• But Mexican Americans in the region also fought at times to preserve control of their societies.

• In the late 1880s, for example, Mexican peasants in an area of what is now Nevada successfully fended off the encroachment of English-speaking cattle ranchers.

• The English-speaking proprietors of the new enterprises restricted most Mexicans to the lowest-paying and least stable jobs.

Hispanic California and Texas

• In California, Spanish settlement began in the eighteenth century with a string of Christian missions along the Pacific coast.

• The missionaries and the soldiers who accompanied them gathered most of the coastal Indians into their communities, some forcibly and some by persuasion.

• The Indians were targets of the evangelizing efforts of the missionaries, who baptized more than 50,000 of them.

• But they were also a labor force for the flourishing and largely self-sufficient economies the missionaries created; the Spanish forced most of these laborers into a state of servitude little different from slavery.

• The missions had enormous herds of cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, most of them tended by Indian workers; they had brickmakers, blacksmiths, weavers, and farmers, most of the Indians as well.

• Few of the profits of the mission economy flowed to the workers.

• In the 1830s, after the new Mexican government had begun reducing the power of the church, the mission society largely collapsed, despite strenuous resistance from the missionaries themselves

• In the southern areas of California, where there were at first fewer migrants than in other parts of the state, some Mexican landowners managed to hang on for a time.

• The booming Anglo communities in the north of the state created a large market for the cattle that southern rancheros were raising.

• But a combination of reckless expansion, growing indebtedness, and a severe drought in the 1860s devastated the Mexican ranching culture.

The Chinese Migration

• At the same time that ambitious or impoverished Europeans were crossing the Atlantic in search of opportunities in the New World, many Chinese crossed the Pacific in hopes of better lives than they could expect in their own poverty-stricken land

• Many Chinese migrated to Hawaii, Australia, South and Central America, South Africa, and even the Caribbean

• A few Chinese had come to California even before the gold rush, but after 1848 the flow increased dramatically.

• In the early 1850s, large numbers of Chinese immigrants worked in the gold mines, and for a time some of them enjoyed considerable success.

• As mining declined as a source of wealth and jobs for the Chinese, railroad employment grew.

• Beginning in 1865, more than 12,000 Chinese found work building the transcontinental railroad.

• In fact, Chinese workers formed 90 percent of the labor force of the Central Pacific and were mainly responsible for the construction of the western part of the new road

• The company preferred them to white workers because they had no experience in labor organizations.

• They worked hard, made few demands, and accepted low wages.

• Many railroad workers were recruited in China by agents for the Central Pacific.

• Once employed, they were organized into work gangs under Chinese supervisors.

• Work in the Central Pacific was arduous and often dangerous.

• Chinese laborers, however, were not always as docile as their employers imagined them to be.

• In the spring of 1866, 5,000 Chinese railroad workers went on strike, demanding higher wages and a shorter workday.

• The company isolated them, surrounded them with strikebreakers, and starved them.

• The strike failed, and most of the workers returned to their jobs.

• In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed.

• Thousands of Chinese were now out of work

• Chinese immigrants flocked to cities.

• By 1900, nearly half the Chinese population of California lived in urban areas.

• By far the largest single Chinese community was in San Francisco.

• Much of community life there, and in other “Chinatowns” throughout the West, revolved around powerful organizations—usually formed by people from a single clan or community in China

• Life was hard for most urban Chinese, in San Francisco and elsewhere.

• The Chinese usually occupied the lower rungs of the employment ladder, working as common laborers, servants, and unskilled factory hands. Some established their own small businesses, especially laundries.

• They moved into this business not because of experience—there were few commercial laundries in China—but because they were excluded from so many other areas of employment

• The relatively small number of Chinese women fared even worse.

• During the earliest Chinese migrations to California, virtually all the women who made the journey did so because they had been sold into prostitution.

• As late as 1880, nearly half the Chinese women in California were prostitutes.

• Both Anglo and Chinese reformers tried to stamp out the prostitution in Chinatowns in the 1890s, but more effective than their efforts was the growing number of Chinese women in America.

• Once the sex ratio became more balanced, Chinese men were more likely to seek companionship in families.

Anti Chinese Settlements

• As Chinese communities grew larger and more conspicuous in western cities, anti-Chinese sentiment among white residents became increasingly strong.

• Anti-coolie clubs emerged in the 1860s and 1870s.

• They sought a ban on employing Chinese and organized boycotts of products made with Chinese labor.

• Some of these clubs attacked Chinese workers in the streets and were suspected of setting fire to factories in which the Chinese worked. Such activities reflected the resentment of many white workers toward Chinese laborers for accepting low wages and thus undercutting union members.

• In 1882, Congress responded to the political pressure and the growing violence by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese emigration to the United States for ten years and barred Chinese already in the country from becoming naturalized citizens.

• Support for the act came from representatives from all regions of the country.

• It reflected the growing fear of unemployment and labor unrest throughout the nation

• The Chinese in America did not accept the new laws quietly.

• They were shocked by the anti-Chinese rhetoric that lumped them together with African Americans and Indians.

• They were, they insisted, descendants of a great and enlightened civilization

• The Six Companies in San Francisco organized strenuous letter-writing campaigns and filed suit in federal court. Their efforts had little effect.

Migration from the East

• The great wave of new settlers in the West after the Civil War came on the heels of important earlier migrations.

• California and Oregon were both already states of the Union by 1860.

• The Homestead Act of 1862 permitted settlers to buy plots of 160 acres for a small fee if they occupied the land they purchased for five years and improved it.

• The Homestead Act was intended as a progressive measure.

• It would give a free farm to any American who needed one.

• It would be a form of government relief to people who otherwise might have no prospects.

• And it would help create new markets and new outposts of commercial agriculture for the nation’s growing economy.

• But the Homestead Act rested on a number of misperceptions.

• The framers of the law had assumed that mere possession of the land would be enough to sustain a farm family.

• They had not recognized the effects of the increasing mechanization of agriculture and the rising costs of running a farm

• A unit of 160 acres was too small for the grazing and grain farming of much of the Great Plains.

• Although more than 400,000 homesteaders stayed on Homestead Act

16.1: The Changing Western Economy

Labor in the West

• As commercial activity increased, many farmers, ranchers, and miners found it necessary to recruit a paid labor force—not an easy task for those far away from major population centers and unable or unwilling to hire Indian workers.

• The labor shortage of the region led to higher wages for workers than were typical in most areas of the East.

• But working conditions were often arduous, and job security was almost nonexistent

• The western working class was highly multiracial. English-speaking whites worked alongside African Americans and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as they did in the East

• Reinforcing this dual labor system was a set of racial assumptions developed and sustained largely by white employers

• These racial myths served the interests of employers above all, but white workers tended to embrace them too

• An Irish common laborer might hope in the course of a lifetime to move several rungs up the occupational ladder.

• A Chinese or Mexican worker in the same job had no realistic prospects of doing the same.

The Arrival of the Miners

• One of the great economic boons in the Far West after the gold rush was a result of the mineral-rich region of mountains and plateaus, where settlers hoped to make quick fortunes by finding precious metals.

• News of a gold or silver strike in an area usually began with a stampede reminiscent of the California gold rush of 1849.

• The first great mineral strikes since the California gold rush occurred just before the Civil War

• While the Colorado rush of 1859 was still in progress, news of another strike drew miners to Nevada

• The thousands of people who flocked to the mining towns in search of quick wealth and who failed to find it often remained as wage laborers in corporate mines after the boom period.

• Working conditions were almost uniformly terrible.

• The corporate mines were deep and extremely hot, with temperatures often exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Some workers died of heatstroke (or of pneumonia, a result of experiencing sudden changes of temperature when emerging from the mines).

• Poor ventilation meant large accumulations of poisonous carbon dioxide, which caused dizziness, nausea, and headaches

The Cattle Kingdom

• A series of “range wars''—between sheepmen and cattlemen, between ranchers and farmers—erupted out of the tensions between these competing groups, resulting in significant loss of life and extensive property damage

• Although the cattle industry was overwhelmingly male in its early years, there were always a few women involved in ranching and driving.

• As ranching became more sedentary, the presence of women greatly increased.

• Women won the vote earlier in the West than they did in the rest of the nation, although for different reasons in different places.

• In Utah, the Mormons granted women suffrage in an effort to stave off criticism of their practice of polygamy

16.2: The Romance of the West

The Western Landscape

• The allure of the West was obvious.

• The Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the basin and plateau region beyond the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Range—all constituted a landscape of brilliant diversity and spectacular grandeur, different from anything white Americans had encountered before.

• It was little wonder that newcomers looked on the West with reverence and wonder.

• Railroads extended farther into the region and as the Indian wars subsided, resort hotels began to spring up near some of the most spectacular landscapes in the region; and easterners began to come for visits of several weeks or more, combining residence in a comfortable hotel with hikes and excursions into the “wilderness.”

The Cowboy Culture

• Even more appealing than the landscape was the rugged, free-spirited lifestyle that many Americans associated with the West—a lifestyle that supposedly stood in sharp contrast to the increasingly stable and ordered world of the East.

• Many nineteenth-century Americans came to romanticize, especially, the figure of the cowboy and transformed him remarkably quickly from the low-paid worker he actually was into a powerful and enduring figure of myth.

• Admiring Americans seldom thought about the many dismal aspects of the cowboy’s life: the tedium, the loneliness, the physical discomforts, the low pay, the few opportunities for advancement.

• The cowboy had become perhaps the most widely admired popular hero in America and a powerful and enduring symbol of the important American ideal of the “natural man.”

• That symbol has survived into the twenty-first century—in popular literature, in song, in film, and on television.

The Idea of the Frontier

• Yet it was not simply the character of the new West that made it so important to the nation’s imagination.

• It was also that many Americans considered it the last frontier.

Frederick Jackson Turner

• Perhaps the clearest and most influential statements of the romantic vision of the frontier came from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner

• Turner’s assessments were both inaccurate and premature.

• The West had never been a “frontier” in the sense he meant the term: an empty, uncivilized land awaiting settlement.

• White migrants who moved into the region had joined (or displaced) already-established societies and cultures.

• At the same time, considerable unoccupied land remained in the West for many years to come.

• But Turner did express a growing and generally accurate sense that much of the best farming and grazing land was now taken, that in the future it would be more difficult for individuals to acquire valuable land for little or nothing.

The Loss of Utopia

• In accepting the idea of the “passing of the frontier,” many Americans were acknowledging the end of one of their most cherished myths

16.3: The Dispersal of the Tribes

White Tribal Policies

• By the early 1850s, the idea of establishing one great enclave in which many tribes could live gave way, in the face of white demands for access to lands in Indian Territory, to a new reservations policy, known as “concentration.”