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Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

Immediately after the Civil War, the Great West was a wild expanse mostly uninhabited by whites By 1890, it had been divided into Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and pioneers were streaming in The Clash of Cultures on the Plains Change preceded American settlement: Tribes sometimes abandoned their lands and displaced other tribes Some tribes, ex. the Cheyenne and the Sioux, went from being settled farmers to being nomadic traders and hunters atop Spanish-brought horses Effects of Antebellum Era white settlers: Spread cholera, typhoid, and smallpox Reduced the bison population through grazing their own livestock and hunting, so increased tensions between tribes competing for hunting grounds The US government's reaction: 1851 and 1853 signed treaties at Fort Laramie and Fort Atkinson that established boundaries for each tribes' territory and tried to make a corridor for white settlement; were the beginnings of the reservation system But the treaties were not effective because the Plains Indians usually had no tribes or chiefs and lived in isolated, wandering groups 1860s the government put the Plains Indians into even smaller confines, ex. present-day Oklahoma and the Great Sioux Reservation, and promised to provide them with supplies but otherwise leave them alone; but many federal Indian agents corruptly provided faulty supplies For over a decade after the Civil War, US troops, 1/5 black, fought with the Plains Indians The Indian wars on the Plains were often extremely savage: 1864 massacre of Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado under Colonel J. M. Chivington 1866 Sioux ambush of Captain William J. Fetterman's troops that successfully stopped the construction of the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields with another Treaty of Fort Laramie 1874 Colonel Custer attracted pioneers to Sioux territory when announced the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, so the Sioux (influenced by Sitting Bull) went on the offensive, so Custer's Seventh Cavalry was sent in, but was decimated at the Little Bighorn River 1877 the Nez Perce Indians in northeastern Oregon joined the fight when they, under Chief Joseph, resisted the government's attempts to put them on a reservation; were eventually tricked into being sent to a reservation in Kansas were 40% of them died The fierce Apache of Arizona and New Mexico, under Geronimo, finally surrendered after their women were exiled to Florida, and would become successful farmers in Oklahoma The Native Americans ended up getting herded into reservations, where they had to live as oft-ignored wards of the government; it was cheaper to feed them than to fight them Causes of the US government's victory: Railroads bring great numbers of troops, farmers, ranchers, and settlers into the heart of the

Receding Native Population

West The Indians succumbed to the white man's diseases and alcohol The extermination of the buffalo made nomadic life impossible Bellowing Herds of Bison Plains Indians were extremely dependent on buffalo for food, fuel, clothing, and more Before white settlement, tens of millions of buffalo lived on the Plain; by the end of the Civil War, 15 million remained With railroad construction came the slaughter of the buffalo herds for hides, food, or fun By 1885, less than a thousand buffalo remained Children's author Helen Hunt Jackson wrote 1881 A Century of Dishonor that chronicled the government's ruthless dealings with the Indians and 1884 Ramona that depicted the injustice done to the California Indians; inspired sympathy towards the Indians Humanitarians wanted to be kind to the Indians in order to persuade them to become more civilized, while hard-liners wanted the current policy of punishment and forced containment Christian reformers often administered education to Indians, and 1884-1890 outlawed the sacred Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance cult with the Battle of Wounded Knee 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act: Tribes were no longer legal entities, no more tribal ownership of land, and each Indian family head received 160 acres of land After 25 years of good behavior, the Indians would get citizenship and full title of their land (1924 citizenship was granted to all Indians) Reservation land not given to the Indians was sold to railroads and settlers to put money towards educating Indians with white values and customs, ex. Carlisle Indian School in PA and field matrons who taught Indian women sewing and the virtues of chastity and hygiene Ignored Indian culture's reliance on tribally held land; by 1900, Indians had lost half of what land they had in 1880 Would remain the government's Indian policy until the 1934 Indian Reoganization Act From 1887 to 2000, the Indian population increased from 243,000 to 1.5 million The mining frontier was strengthened by the defeat of the Indians and the building of the railroads 1858 gold was discovered in Colorado, causing a wave of fifty-niners to go there; many failed and returned to civilization, some stayed to mine silver, and others stayed as farmers 1859 gold and silver were discovered in the Comstock Lode in Nebraska, and 1864 Nebraska was admitted as a free state Boomtowns arose rapidly, in which order was kept though lynching and vigilantism and every third cabin was a saloon, and petered out once the gold ran out, leaving behind ghost towns After the loose surface gold was mined up, expensive ore-breaking machinery had to be brought in and run by corporations, so independent gold-miners were replaced by trained engineers and day laborers Effects of the mining frontier: Attracted settlers to the Wild West Gave women opportunities (ex. Running boardinghouses or being prostitutes), and starting 1869 with Wyoming several Plains states granted them the franchise

The End of the Trail (or, Indian Reform Movements)

Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker

The amassing of precious metals helped finance the Civil War and the railroads and intensified conflict with the Indians 1879 the Treasury resumed specie payments Silver Senators represented the sparsely populated Western states and promoted the silver miners interests Added to American folklore and literature, ex. The writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twain Beef Bonanzas and Immediately after the Civil War, the long-horn cattle of Texas were killed mostly for their hides, because it was unprofitable to transport their meat to market the Long Drive The railroads allowed cattle to be transported to the stockyards; meatpacking became a major industry, ex. Beef barons Swift and Armour, with the perfection of the refrigerator car In the Long Drive, Cowboys drove herds of cattle over the unfenced and unpopulated plains until they reached a railroad terminal, ex. Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, and Cheyenne, with the cattle grazing on the way In Abilene, Marshal James Wild Bill Hickok maintained order with his famed gunmanship The Long Drive was threatened by: Indians, stampedes, and cattle fever Homesteaders and sheepherders who built fences Harsh winter of 1886-1887 Overexpansion and overgrazing So cattle-raising was turned into a big business; breeders fenced ranches, laid winter feed, imported bulls, produced fewer but larger animals, and organized into ex. The Wyoming Stock-Growers Association Was the heyday of the cowboy Around 5,000 cowboys were black The Farmers' Frontier Effects of the 1862 Homestead Act: Allowed families to acquire up to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on it for five years, and improving it Before, public land had been sold mostly for revenue Half a million families who could not afford land took advantage of it, but five times as many families bought their land 160 acres was enough to live on in the Mississippi basin, but not on the more dry Great Plains, so 2/3rds of Plains homesteaders had to give up and return home Land promoters gained ten times more land than actual farmers by employing dummy homesteaders to seize the properties with the most natural resources The railroads helped open the West by marketing crops and encouraging Americans and European immigrants to settle there Before, most believed that the prairie sod was poor, but realized it was quite rich once broken by heavy iron plows pulled by four yokes of oxen, so sodbusters streamed in to farm The settlement of the semiarid area west of the 100th meridian: 1870s settlers went farther west because of high wheat prices from wheat failures elsewhere But 1880s, many went broke because of a six-year drought So developed the technique of dry farming with frequent shallow cultivation, but it only served to worsened the situation by creating a layer of fine, dusty surface soil Also imported cold- and drought-resistant strains of wheat, abandoned drought-sensitive corn, and built barbed-wire fences instead of wooden ones

Massive-scale federal irrigation projects, ex. dams, would have the most impact on agriculture and the environment out west The Far West Comes of Age 1870s to 1890s many western states admitted to the Union: 1876 Colorado (the Centennial State) 1889 to 1890 the Republican Congress admitted North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming because wanted their votes 1890 the Mormon Church banned polygamy, but Utah was not admitted until 1896 Before April 1889, sooners had illegally entered the Indian land of Oklahoma Territory; in April 1889, half of Oklahoma was opened to settlers, and the boomers poured in The 1890 census revealed that there was no longer a frontier line 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner wrote The Significance of the Frontier in American History The government set aside land for national parks, ex. 1872 Yellowstone and 1890 Sequoia, because realized that western land was not inexhaustible The frontier greatly affected America's economy and psychology: Farmers, unlike European peasants, were extremely mobile Acted like a safety valve to lure immigrant farmers away from the cities and induced urban employers to maintain high enough wages to keep workers from moving out West Western cities grew from the influx of failed pioneers The trans-Mississippi west was one of the many American wests, from the West Indies to the Chesapeake to the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers to the Tenessee and Ohio Rivers The frontier was the subject of authors, ex. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Francis Parkman, and painters, ex. George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Albert Bierstadt

The Fading Frontier

The Farm Before, farmers were jacks of all trades; now, because of high prices, concentrated on Becomes a Factory growing single cash crops and had to buy other provisions and manufactured goods Wheat harvesting was sped up by the 1870s invention of the twine binder and the 1880s invention of the combine (combined reaper-thresher) So farms grew into huge outdoor grain factories Effects of the mechanization of agriculture: Large-scale farmers became business-people as well as farmers and were closely tied to banking, railroading, and manufacturing because they now had to buy expensive machines, though often suffered losses because were unskilled at managing such costly equipment Marginal farmers were driven off the plain and into the industrial work force America became the world's leading producer of wheat and meat From their start, farms in Central Valley, California were massive affairs; with the 1880s perfection of the refrigerator car, became a major producer of fruits and vegetables Deflation Dooms the Debtor The new one-crop economy was dangerous for farmers because they depended on the price of their product, and the price of their product was determined by world markets and output Low prices and deflation were detrimental to farmers because meant that they had to pay back more on their loans 1880s and 1890s, there was deflation, because of the static money supply, and a drop in grain prices:

So farmers were caught in a vicious cycle of overproduction, so drove down prices, so deeper in debt Hundreds of thousands of farms had mortgages on them, often with huge interest rates So by 1880, 1/4 of all American farms were worked by tenants, rather than owners Unhappy Farmers Natural problems included swarms of grasshoppers, the cotton-boll weevil, floods that exacerbated the erosion problem and made necessary the use of expensive fertilizers, and a series of droughts Farmers also faced trouble from the government in the forms of overassessed land, local taxes, and high protective tariffs that forced them to buy expensive manufactured goods while selling their crops at low prices in the competitive world market Corporations and processors controlled the cost and availability of harvesters, barbed-wire, and fertilizer, middlemen took cuts, and operators kept high grain storage rates The railroads had high freight rates and refused to serve farmers who protested them 1890, the population were farmers, but they did not organize because of their independent nature

1868 the Greenback Movement wanted inflation through the printing of paper money because The Farmers Take of a drop in prices Their Stand The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry: Organized 1867 by Freemason Oliver H. Kelley Goals: At first, to enhance the lives of isolated farmers with social, educational, and fraternal activities To be independent of the trusts through ex. Cooperatively owned stores, grain elevators, and warehouses and a failed attempt at manufacturing their own machinery To regulate rates for railways and storage through the Granger Laws, but the laws were fought by well-paid lawyers of the railways and operators, ex. the 1886 Wabash Supreme Court case By 1875, had 800,000 members, mostly in the upper Mississippi Valley, because appealed to many lonely farming families Decreased in influence after the Wabash case The Greenback Labor Party wanted inflation and improvement of laborers lives; 1878 elected 14 members to Congress, and 1880 presidential candidate James B. Weaver polled 3% of the popular vote Prelude to Populism Late 1870s in Texas Farmers Alliance was founded in order to socialize and escape the control of railroads and manufacturers through cooperative trading, but excluded landless tenant farmers and blacks; by 1890 had more than a million members 1880s the Colored Famers' National Alliance was formed that had 250,000 members by 1890 Emerging from the Farmers' Alliance, the Peoples party, or the Populists, wanted to nationalize the railroads, telephones, and telegraph, institute a graduated income tax, and create a federal subtreasury to give loans to farmers for crops stored ing government warehouses, and the unlimited coinage of silver 1894 pamphlet Coins Financial School by William Hope Harvey argued for free silver Ignatious Donnelly was a popular Populist Congressman Mary Elizabeth Lease encouraged farmers to protest In the 1892 elections, the Populists alarmed the main parties with successes at the polls (presidential candidate was James B. Weaver)

Coxey's Army and Because of the Panic of 1893 and the Populist idea that farmers and laborers were victims of the economic and political system, armies of unemployed began protesting, ex. 1894 an army the Pullman Strike under wealthy quarry owner General Jacob S. Coxey unsuccessfully tried to march on Washington, D.C. 1894 the Pullman Strike in Chicago: Eugene V. Debs organized the American Railway Union with 150,000 members Striked because the Pull Palace Car Company had cut wages while keeping rent the same American Federation of Labor did not support Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld did not feel that intervention was needed, but President Cleveland and U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney decided to sent in federal troops on the legal basis that the strikers were blocking the transport of the mail So federal troops crushed the strike, and Debs was sentenced to six months in prison Was the first time that the government used a legal method to break a strike, and strikers could be imprisoned without a jury trial, so organized labor was incensed Golden McKinley The Republican party: and Silver Bryan Iron baron Marcus Alonzo Hanna backed McKinley for presidential candidate with $3 (or, the Election of million; believed that the main purpose of government was to aid business, and that wealth 1896) trickled down to the laborers William McKinley of Ohio won the candidential election; was an experienced Congressman and Civil War officer Platform called for the gold standard (though McKinley leaned towards silver), supported the protective tariff, and opposed hard times The Democratic party: Was no longer led by Cleveland because of he was disliked for his ultraconservative, nearRepublican stance on economics Was extremely divided until William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska appeared and delivered his Cross of Gold speech; Bryan was nominated for presidential candidate the next day Platform wanted inflation through the unlimited coinage of silver at 16 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold (the ratio at the time was 32 to 1) Gold Bug Democrats, including Cleveland, who disliked the party's support silver formed their own party but mostly hoped that McKinley would win Most of the Populist party joined with the Democratic party, since the Dems had taken their main plank of the 16 to 1 silver to gold ratio Class Conflict: Plowholders Versus Bondholders (or, the presidential campaigns and election of 1896) Bryan's campaign: Turned silver into an almost religious issue, traveled widely giving speeches all over Sparked fear in eastern conservatives because threatened to devalue their holdings Hanna and McKinley's campaign: Had the largest campaign chest in American history ($16 million) Made contracts with manufacturers contingent on McKinley's election Some factory owners threatened and bribed their workers to get them to vote Republican McKinley won the election with the support of the West coast and the East, while Bryan had the support of the South and the trans-Mississippi West Significance of the election: Showed how Bryan's platform lacked appeal to Eastern urban laborers with fixed wages

and unmortgaged farmers Showed that not enough of the underprivileged banded together to win the election Bryan's campaign was the last major one to seek farmers' support Republicans would hold the Presidency for 28 of the next 36 years, so a new political era of falling voter turnout, weakening of party organizations, and the replacement of such issues as the money question and civil service reform with the issues of industrial regulation and labor welfare (the fourth party system) Republican Stand- McKinley listened closely to public opinion, so stayed away from reform issues pattism Enthroned Businesses and trusts were given more freedom (or, Effects of The Wilson Gorman law was not raising enough revenue to cover the Treasury deficit, and McKinley's the Republican trusts felt entitled to a protective tariff because of their contributions to the Presidency) Republicans' campaign chest, so 1897 the Dingley Tariff Bill was pushed through the House and amended 850 times in the Senate so that the average tariff rate was raised to 46.5% By 1897, prosperity returned after the panic of 1893, and the Republicans claimed credit The money issue and support for silver faded with the 1900 Gold Standard Act that allowed paper currency to be freely redeemed in gold, plus the discoveries of new gold deposits in ex. the Klondike in Canada and the perfection of the inexpensive cyanide process for extracting gold from low-grade ore

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