United States History

XIV

The Trans-Mississippi West

After the Civil War, hope of economic opportunity lured migrants and immigrants west to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region (see American Westward Movement). Settlers battled Native Americans for desirable lands, carved out farms, and built mines and ranches. By the end of the century, the Western territories had turned into states, and their residents had become part of a rapidly industrializing economy.

A

Native Americans Living on the Plains

The Native Americans of the Great Plains included diverse tribes—among them the Blackfoot, Sioux, Dakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, Navajo, and Apache. After the Civil War, the Native Americans confronted a growing stream of settlers—prospectors, ranchers, and farm families. The newcomers brought with them new diseases that ravaged the tribes. The settlers also killed off the buffalo and thus damaged the Native American economy.

The Plains peoples defended their land and their way of life from the oncoming settlers. Fierce battles took place in the 1860s and 1870s between the Plains peoples and federal troops. Ultimately, disease and conflict reduced the population and power of the tribes. Displacement by settlers and concentration on Indian reservations, mainly in Oklahoma, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, challenged the traditional Native American way of life.

In the late 19th century, Congress developed a new policy toward Native Americans. Instead of isolating them on reservations, as had been done in the mid-1800s, the new policy sought to assimilate Native Americans into the cultural mainstream. Congressional policymakers responded to pressure from two different groups. First, some people sought to suppress Native American culture by converting Native Americans to Christianity and turning them into farmers. Second, land-hungry settlers and speculators wanted the Native Americans removed from desirable land in the reservations.

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The Dawes Severalty Act, passed by Congress in 1887, addressed both concerns. The law broke up reservations and encouraged private farms. Native Americans families received individual plots of land, carved from reservations, as well as farm equipment. These families were to give up their communal way of life on the reservations and become independent farmers. But few Native Americans profited from the Dawes Act; the greatest beneficiaries were land speculators, who under the law were able to buy the best pieces of reservation land.

In 1890 at the Battle of Wounded Knee federal troops fired on a group of Sioux and massacred from 150 to 370 men, women, and children. The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of Native American resistance to settlement. For more information, see Native American Policy.

B

Railroads

The building of the railroads spurred western settlement. In 1862 Congress authorized construction of two railroads to link the Midwest and the West Coast. The Union Pacific Railroad extended westward from Nebraska; the Central Pacific Railroad went eastward from the Pacific Ocean. The meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 signified a new era in Western history.

Federal and state governments had long encouraged the growth of railroads. When Congress authorized building the transcontinental railroad in 1862, it agreed to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the two corporations to construct it. Congress also gave the railroad companies millions of acres of Western land, which the railroads sold to repay their loans. In effect, major railroad companies, with federal support, became colonizers of the West.

To attract settlers who would establish farms and become paying customers, the railroads advertised in the East and in Europe. They provided free trips west and offered long-term loans to settlers. Once the settlers had set up farms, they depended on the railroads to ship their produce. Farmers often became deeply in debt to the railroads, and to repay these debts they frequently relied on a single cash crop—typically wheat. Reliance on a single crop made their incomes dependent on fluctuating world markets and thus precarious.

The railroads became very powerful. They established monopolies in specific locales, cut off service, fixed prices, and discriminated among customers. A railroad might offer rebates to favored customers or charge more for a short haul than a long one. Aggrieved by such practices, farmers soon tried to curb the power of railroad corporations.

C

Farmers

Federal land policy attracted settlers and land speculators. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided land, originally 160 acres, at no cost if the settler agreed to cultivate the land for at least five years. As settlers moved into arid areas farther west, however, the 160-acre plots proved insufficient, so the size of land grants increased.

As farmers settled more western land from 1870 to 1900, the nation’s agricultural production doubled. Several factors increased productivity. New farm machinery included the steel plow, which could slice through the heavy soil of the plains, and the twine-binder, which gathered bundles of wheat and tied them with string. New varieties of grain, such as drought-resistant sorghum, enlarged harvests. Barbed wire, patented in 1874, enabled farmers to protect their property from roaming livestock. Finally, the railroads made it possible for Western farm produce to be sold in Eastern cities.

However, pioneers who established farms in the plains—in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas—faced difficult and isolated lives. They also lost much of their independence. By the late 19th century, farmers had grown increasingly dependent on large businesses. Railroads transported their crops, banks loaned them money, manufacturers sold them farm machinery, and unstable international markets for wheat and corn determined their income. Overproduction, meanwhile, drove prices down. Farmers were frustrated by sagging prices, rising debt, high interest rates, and railroad practices such as fixed prices or discrimination among customers. Farmers no longer felt in charge of their own fates.

To try to address some of their problems, farmers joined together in 1867 and founded the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, which established cooperative stores and urged laws to curb railroad abuses. In a number of states, including Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California, the Grangers supported the passage of laws that regulated railroad rates and practices (see Granger Movement).

In 1887 Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which sought to deal with some of these problems. The law required railroad companies that transported passengers or goods to establish reasonable rates, to publish those rates, and to adhere to them. It also banned unfair practices, such as rebates to favored customers. Finally, it created a new agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), to supervise railroad operations. The new law, however, did little to curb railroad power. Railroads gained control of the ICC, evaded the law, and won repeal of the Granger laws that regulated rates; farmers’ protests grew.

D

Miners and Ranchers

Starting with the California Gold Rush of 1849, a series of mining booms spurred settlement in the West. When gold prospects in California dimmed, thousands of prospectors moved eastward into the Rocky Mountains, seeking gold, silver, copper, and other minerals. Spectacular gold rushes of the late 19th century drew prospectors to mining camps in Boise, Idaho; Helena, Montana; and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Some mining towns became cities, such as Denver. Others, such as Virginia City in the Sierra Nevada mountains, boomed while prospectors worked the mines, only to become ghost towns when the prospectors left. The era of individual prospectors was limited; by the end of the century, they had been replaced by large mining companies in the Western states.

In the 1860s and 1870s the railroads transformed the cattle industry, just as they had transformed farming—by transporting cattle to urban markets in the East. When a rail line reached Abilene, Kansas, in 1867, Texas ranchers began to drive their cattle north to Abilene. The cattle then traveled east, destined for packing houses. The cattle industry began to grow rapidly as railroads made the business more profitable.

Large-scale ranchers profited, although the cowboys who drove the herds contended with dull lives and difficult jobs. By the 1880s, the open-range cattle industry extended from Texas to the Dakotas. Then the cattle boom peaked. The disastrous winter of 1886-1887, which followed an unusually dry summer, wiped out herds and forced ranchers into bankruptcy. Those ranchers who remained in business raised smaller herds of high-grade cattle, grew crops to feed them, and, to conserve this food supply, fenced in their livestock with barbed wire. The open range, in which cattle grazed freely, ended. Some ranchers moved farther west, to Wyoming and Montana.