Studied by 0 peopleThe settlement of the American west happens unevenly. Leapfrog effect:
this tide that has been going west just skips over the middle west of America and goes to the far west.
What does the leapfrog effect over the middle west reflect about its environment:
The basic natural environment of the west with inland was inhospitable deserts to plants, animals, and humans.
The Appalachians are lower mountains but are significant barriers because they
choppy ridges that make crossing it with wagons and people difficult
Natural increase: average American has 7 kids who 4-5 survive, and this doubling of generation
creates a large demand for land!!
Louisiana Purchase:
Thomas Jefferson buys American inland of the west for 15 million from the French. (incredible bargain!)
The trek to the west is
dry, flat, and always under pressure to move fast because winter is coming!
Advantages of Western travel that helps these pioneers on their journey:
The land is flat, prior roads have been created, fur trappers guide them, and are accustomed to frontier settlement.
Organ settlers are glamorized as both civilians as tamers of nature:
"natural men" who are close to nature. (most of these men are NOT city wage workers)
The settlers are destroying native American habitats and bison are competing with horses for grass, and
people are moving across the plains with their livestock.
In California, there are over a 100,000 Natives who live on Hunting and Gathering:
California's gold rush floods immigrants onto the Native's land! (Europeans/Mexicans/Americans)
Only a few get rich and the gold rush is a complete disaster for the native Americans:
Most native Americans die due to the loss of food sources and new exposures to diseases.
People who make a lot are investors who hire agents to go to California, find the prospectors, and
buy the claim of the gold from the mountains.
Hard rock mining:
going underground, and usually, the prospector can't go underground with their limited funds.
Hydraulic mining:
high-pressure hoses that blast away hillsides. It kills fish, and river life, and it's the most environmentally destructive.
Hydraulic mining leads to
The first environmental regulations within the country.
The regulations stemming from Hydraulic mining are:
Is focused to protect the rights of farmers against the miners, and isn't formulated to protect nature. (protecting human against human)
Mormons are allured to the inner west because
The dryness and isolation appeal to them (natural protections against persecutors)
Utah has little vegetation and water, however, the Mormons advantage is
The mountains capture moisture which create rain and snow and allows for the Mormons settlements to work.
Mormons are forming permanent settlements and irrigate the land with water, on the other hand,
Miners: Seek gold and other minerals across geologically young rocky mountains. They want to get rich quick!
Bison survive the megafuana extinction yet are impossible to domesticate for Native Americans
and Natives hunt Bison on foot and horseback to use them as fuel, food, clothing, tools, and more
When horses arrive to the Native Americans, their
reliance on Bison only increases
When the hide of Buffalo becomes a lucrative commodity and Indians become reliant on the market for trading,
The Natives and Americans systematically hunt these Bison down
What destroyed the Bison Populations?
The Robe trade, cattle diseases, and the drought destroyed Bison populations.
Tanneries: places that make leather.
They discover how to make belting material from the Bison with chemicals to create a rubber material.
A few states prohibit hunting for bison, but those laws pass in states where there are no bison populations left, or they are not strictly enforced.
Only a 1,000 left after a population of 10,000,000
A Market for longhorn emerges and open ranges are used to transport these cattle, however,
Barbed wire helps create cattle business and end open range
Self-defeating methods by investors with cattle:
put too much cattle on a parcel of land for it to support, and when the cattle eat all the grass, weedy plants grow after this.
Homestead: Act: Attempt to spread small independent farming to the west! Downfalls:
It's expensive to get tools, livestock, traveling, limited timber supplies, limited water, and conditions make 160-acre farms too small.
The South's economy- Natural resource extraction
The North's economy- Natural resource transformation (industry)
1st industrial revolution: small-scale, organic power such as water and air. As opposed to
1860s: 2nd revolution: Large scale, fossil fuel (coal)
Soft coal:
dirty coal but abundant and cheap. you can't burn in your house but it is efficient for the industry.
As coal becomes a more valuable commodity:
Coal replaces wood fuel as the industry grows, and coal fuels locomotives and plants.
There is demand for hard and flexible metal like steel:
An incentive to develop new ways to make it for construction, tools, and railroads, and Iron mines begin to spread!
The successor energy source of coal is Petroleum, and it
has been used for thousands of years prior to its industrial influences.
Seneca tribe in Pennsylvania used it for medicine, insect repellant, and other natural uses:
At the beginning, oil near the surface is a nuisance to farmers and others.
Once Oil is discovered to be the equivalent of a liquid oil, it's pinpointed and exhausted:
Used for Kerosene put it in a lamp that produces a light, but this is cheap and saves whales.
First Oil boom from Kerosene:
Built upon lighting and the fact that it's expensive to light your house.
Many Americans feel like they have lost something when they don't have local production anymore:
Local production is replaced by mass production.
People who could farm would farm because they believe
they had a more natural and rural life.
Jobs at the steel plant:
Wages are very low, you work very long hours, and there are dangerous conditions.
Deskilling labor:
You only do one repetitive movement over and over again. You work on machine time, and workers are incredibly replaceable.
Farmland is expanding, but farmer populations are declining.
Farmers feel left behind by the industrial urban economy.
Farm Mechanization is paramount for success in the farming society because of market dependence:
Farmers are living in more and more debt for the commercialized fertilizers and mechanizations to compete with larger farmers.
Farmers live in this perpetual state of anxiety where they can't get by if they even have 1 season of bad crops:
These Farmers feel as though their work is fundamental for human survival and a movement will form!
Populist movement:
Farmers see conspiracies among urban elites and demand that the government take over the railroad and telegraph industry as they perceive themselves as the necessary producers.
Frederick Jackon Turner Historian:
The American frontier is closing! There is no discernible line between dense populations to settlers, and this expansion into nature had been the basis for American life.
Charles Darwin:
Natural selection and convinces middle-class Americans that biological competition is grounded in nature and science.
Darwin, on a ship voyage, reads about geology and nature from the captain's library:
It supports his theory of natural selection creating new traits and new species because of how old the earth is!
Social Darwinism:
Darwins' ideals being applied to human beings. Social differences due to biological evolution.
Darwins intention was not to apply his ideas to human society and human evolution:
Creating Social Darwinists!
Social Darwinists:
If you belong to a rich/powerful or poor/weak, it can be explained to your species.
Social Darwinists come from the upper echelon of society and perceive themselves as the protectors of Nature.
They believe the un-fit are surviving and producing, but isn't this contradictory because they are thriving??
Eugenics:
Prompt birth amongst richer, educated, and powerful. They want to breed people like livestock.
Scientific Racism:
They tried to divide humanity into races and rank those races and encourage reproduction in the fittest.
Paradox:
Roosevelt says if you need to preserve civilization, you must abandon civilization and not lose sight of your primal nature, such as reproduction.
Government Policy encourages the spread of small landholdings:
Log Cabin Law allows squatters to keep legal land they have improved/Homestead emphasized westward expansion
There is a deep disdain and mistrust for conservation movements because people who tell you not to manipulate the land you own:
they most likely will exploit you and take advantage to be your owners.
With denser populations, it's evident that America's resources are finite.
Indicators such as Eroded Soils, overgraze soils, and pollutions.
Conservationists are trying to protect nature to provide for humans for future generations:
They are trying to protect the interests of humans' future over Nature's use as efficient resource use. (All about economic efficiency)
George Perkin Marsh:
His idea is that ancient civilizations deforested and over-plowed the land and erosion!
Progressives aspire to reform America against
corruption, lack of sewers, child labor, and big businesses.
Theorode Roosevelt:
was Harvard educated, and his time out west helped him in politics and he's a conservationist.
He builds the fish commission, which studies every lake, river, and ocean. They study for Maximum Sustainable Yield:
How many fish can we take out of this body of water and not deplete it? (All about economics and resources being preserved.)
Passenger Pigeons:
For centuries, these pigeons have been a signature feature of America as the sky equivalent of Bison. (Not a coincidence their extinction coincided with European arrival)
Most flocks die off to mysterious reasons, however, it's most likely
Diseases, livestock competing for their food source, and market-dependent hunting methods!
Conservation:
about efficient use and economic exploitation that takes away from the land that is sustainable over time.
Preservation:
Setting aside parcels of land to protect wild nature.
National parks:
proposal come from George Catlin who is an artist who paints bison and Indians. It will hold a pristine environment and pristine humans. (Pure wild humans who are Indians.)
Yosemite Valley was Discovered in 1851. By the 1860s there is a call to preserve the valley to avoid commercialization
because many Americans believe their natural landscapes are what make America special.
John Muir is a Scottish immigrant who is hired to operate a sawmill and he becomes world-famous for
nature preservationists and he's important at defining what Natural Parks are
John Muir is blinded temporarily in a freak factory accident and decides to veer off his current career trajectory and
write about nature and he desires tourists economies to be on the outskirts of nature.
John Muir is so compelling with his writing that he
convinces American people and the government to protect the environment.
The first "national park" is by Railways pushing for tourist parks and in 1872: creates the first official "national park":
Yellowstone national park
General Philip Sheridan is a civil war hero:
He wants to prevent overgrazing, poaching, logging, and vandalism. He makes it a personal crusade with his division of calvary to stop all of these.
The President signs in the law: The act to protect the animals and birds in yellow stone park.
This act came into fruition from a story of a guy skinning buffalo and this poacher bragged about it!!
Wild nature must be created by removing human land users. To make land more alluring for tourists you must move off
Native Americans and Poor whites are also driven off of the land.
Fight over Hetch Hetchy Valley: The city of San Francisco had decided they wanted to build a reservoir here and
John Muir is aghast at that. He creates a movement to stop the building.
Then, a large fire that occurred in San Francisco helped politicians to
convince people and the government that a reservoir could have helped with the fire.
Short-term win: San Francisco gets what it wants
Long-term: It infuriates millions of people who galvanize the preservationist movement.
A wealthy mogul named Stephen T. Mather will be the successor of John Muir. He takes a job as chief of national parks and
buys land for parks, and convinces wealthy friends to follow.
Stephen T. Mather
used his own money to pay employees and builds roads and attractions at these parks.
Park population and popularity explodes in 1910-1920 with
the spread of cars.
Frontier economics and new settlements were often dominated by men:
Men make a majority of the decisions and women have no voice
Women are essential in small family farm enterprises.
Women will gather, garden, cook, and care for animals and children.
Men take pride in doing heavy and strenuous labor.
Men's and women's roles may alternate on seasons for what is needed most on the farm.
In an economic sense, men have dominance but in a practical sense,
women and men's work are both necessary for the success of the farm.
With the growing market economy, there is a formation of
Wealthier women staying indoors and avoiding outdoor work, and men are more likely to work away from home.
Women have become guardians of civilized life.
They want to keep men civilized, educate their children. (perceive themselves as public servants)
In this new market economy mens work is:
more calculating, more cutthroat, and more competitive.
Women are generally less enthusiastic than men about moving to the West. Women endure social isolation and shoddy houses:
Men have anticipation for building settlements and empires, while women miss home.
Women are supposed to be close to the good aspects of nature. Birth rates are falling because:
men are selfish and don't want the responsibility of having kids.
Women nature writers who are conservationists emphasize camping as a break from polite society:
woman are supposed to take nature out of a place by trying to establish churches, schools, better sanitation, and a strong disdain for prostitutes.
Pigs are referred to as walking sewers because they will eat garbage, manure, and practically anything.
In cities pigs will clean waste and are adequate food supplies for poor people.
Wealthy and middle class people have a disdain for pigs in the city that are aggressive, create copious amounts of waste, and are unappealing to look at:
A Cholera outbreak occurs and people blame the pig and there is the great pig round-up!
Horses: There are millions of Horses in Urban areas. Problems:
Sheer tonnage of manure being produced. Each horse produced 15-30 pounds of poop!
Cities are filthy with dirty/putrid air and water.
Pipe water dilutes human waste but you have to wash it out somewhere!
Not everyone is capable of having indoor plumbing and indoor water:
These are special privileges the rich enjoy!
Human waste is flowing into the streets and there are companies that create sewers for people who can afford them:
Eventually, city governments expanded this and this creates modern indoor plumbing.
People were upset with pipes and modern plumbing because they perceived the old system of carrying waste to farms as more virtuous:
they would buy the food from farmers and give back the poop and waste which creates a cycle of replenishing the fields. (also destroyed a thriving enterprise)
Women are not prominent in American political life but get involved by making cities more
attractive, greener, and cleaner, and these involvements are not breaking the usual gender norms.
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