Post-Civil War Westward Migration

• In the decades after the Civil War, American settlers poured across the Mississippi River in record numbers

  • Many of the first American migrants had come to the West in search of quick profits during the midcentury gold and silver rushes

  • Others came to the Plains to extract the hides of the great bison herds

  • The nearly seventy thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly called Mormons) who migrated west between 1846 and 1868 were similar to other Americans traveling west on the overland trail

• It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West

  • Family farms were the backbone of the agricultural economy that expanded in the West after the Civil War

  • In 1862, northerners in Congress passed the Homestead Act, which allowed male citizens (or those who declared their intent to become citizens) to claim federally owned lands in the West

    • Settlers could head west, choose a 160-acre surveyed section of land, file a claim, and begin “improving” the land

The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies

• The “Indian Wars,” so mythologized in western folklore, were a series of seemingly sporadic, localized, and often brief engagements between U.S. military forces and various Native American groups

  • New patterns of American settlement, railroad construction, and material extraction clashed with the vast and cyclical movement across the Great Plains to hunt buffalo, raid enemies, and trade goods

  • Thomas Jefferson’s old dream that Indigenous nations might live isolated in the West was, in the face of American expansion, no longer a viable reality

Beyond the Plains

• Plains peoples were not the only ones who suffered as a result of American expansion, with groups like the Utes and Paiutes were pushed out of the Rocky Mountains by U.S. expansion into Colorado and away from the northern Great Basin by the expanding Mormon population in Utah Territory

  • Faced with a shrinking territorial base, members of these two groups often joined the U.S. military in its campaigns in the southwest against other powerful Native groups

• Conflicts between the U.S. military, American settlers, and Native nations increased throughout the 1850s

  • By 1862, General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and end their threat to U.S. expansion in the Southwest, eventually settling on Bosque Redondo (dry and almost treeless)

    • In April 1863, Carleton gave orders to Colonel Kit Carson to round up the entire Navajo population and escort them to Bosque Redondo, beginning a period of Navajo history called the Long Walk

      • A series of forced marches

    • On June 1, 1868, the Navajo signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, an unprecedented treaty in the history of U.S.-Indian relations in which the Navajo were able to return from the reservation to their homeland due to the terrible conditions there

Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle

• Aside from agriculture and the extraction of natural resources, two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads

  • Both developed in tandem with each other

• No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination—or federal support—as the transcontinental railroad (which crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States)

  • Railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, but they also created enormous labor demands

    • It was largely immigrants working on the railroads, which was dangerous work

• This national network created by the new railroads, in turn, created the fabled cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s → railroads created the market for ranching

  • Ranching was just one of many western industries that depended on the railroads

The Allotment Era and Resistance in the Native West

• As the rails moved into the West, and more and more Americans followed, the situation for Native groups deteriorated even further

  • Passed by Congress on February 8, 1887, the Dawes General Allotment Act splintered Native American reservations into individual family homesteads

    • Each head of a Native family was to be allotted 160 acres, the typical size of a claim that any settler could establish on federal lands under the provisions of the Homestead Act

    • Americans touted the Dawes Act as an uplifting humanitarian reform, but it upended Native lifestyles and left Native nations without sovereignty over their lands

• The stresses of conquest unsettled generations of Native Americans, with many taking comforts from the words of prophets and holy men

  • In Nevada, on January 1, 1889, Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka experienced a great revelation, telling his people that they must participate in a religious ceremony that came to be known as the Ghost Dance

    • If the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, their ancestors would rise from the dead, droughts would dissipate, the whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains

    • Perhaps the most avid Ghost Dancers—and certainly the most famous—were the Lakota Sioux

  • The Wounded Knee Massacre was a massacre of nearly 300 Lakota people by army soldiers as a response to their Ghost Dance, marking the end of sustained, armed Native American resistance on the Plains

Rodeos, Wild West Shoes, and the Mythic American West

• “The American West” conjures visions of tipis, cabins, cowboys, Indians, farm wives in sunbonnets, and outlaws with six-shooters → the American West became mythologized

  • In the 1860s, Americans devoured dime novels that embellished the lives of real-life individuals such as Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid

  • Rodeos began as small roping and riding contests among cowboys in towns near ranches or at camps at the end of the cattle trails, but casual contests evolved into planned celebrations

  • Americans also experienced the “Wild West”—the mythical West imagined in so many dime novels—by attending traveling Wild West shows

• The western “cowboys and Indians” mystique, perpetuated in novels, rodeos, and Wild West shows, was rooted in romantic nostalgia and, perhaps, in the anxieties that many felt in the late nineteenth century’s new seemingly “soft” industrial world of factory and office work

The West as History: the Turner Thesis

• At the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis,” one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

  • Turner looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a tsunami of war and plunder and industry, waves of “civilization” that washed across the continent

  • A frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon

  • Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization out of the frontier, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe

• Turner worried for the United States’ future: what would become of the nation without the safety valve of the frontier?