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Okay, let's unpack this.
We're diving into a period of, well, extreme contrast and just brutal speed.
It's the final conquest of the West, happening really fast from about 1865, right after the Civil War up to around 1896.
Yeah, it's this massive wholesale colonization of what they called the Great West.
Think about a thousand mile square chunk of land.
And its location is key, right?
It's west of that established frontier line, which often kind of hovered near the Hundredth Meridian.
Exactly.
And that imaginary line is so critical because it basically separates the wetter east from the very arid west.
Big implications for settlement.
And the conflict here is just immediate.
You've got on one side, historians like Frederick Jackson Turner saying this expansion is American development.
Right, defining the American character.
But then you have the perspective of someone like the Shoshone leader, Washaki.
He talked about the cramp we feel in this little spot, reminding everyone that every foot of what you proudly call America, not very long ago, belonged to the Red Man.
A stark contrast.
That really sets our mission here.
How did this huge area transform so quickly?
From indigenous control to territories in states like Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma?
We need to trace the clashes, the policies,
the economic forces that really push everything forward.
So where do we start?
What's the situation around, say, 1860?
Well, in 1860, the Native American population in that region is estimated at about 360 ,000.
And they were definitely a force to be reckoned with.
What's really interesting is that the Plains tribes weren't static at all.
They had this incredibly dynamic mobile culture.
Centered on the horse.
Absolutely.
The horse whose ancestors, funny enough, got loose way back during the Pueblo revolt in the 17th century, completely transformed them.
They became these highly efficient buffalo hunters, true masters of the Plains.
But that whole way of life was basically on a collision course with the arriving white settlers and industrialization.
Definitely.
And the threats came from several directions.
First, disease.
Things like cholera, typhoid, smallpox, which Native populations had little immunity to.
Unintentional, but devastating.
Second,
just competition for land, for grazing.
Right.
But the biggest, most targeted blow was the extermination of the American bison.
The scale, it's just hard to wrap your head around.
It really is.
You go from maybe 15 million bison in 1865 to fewer than a thousand by 1885, 20 years.
And how were they killed?
Not just for food, I gather.
No, I mean, hides were valuable.
Some choice cuts maybe, but a lot of it was just spader.
Passengers shooting from trains for fun or deliberate destruction by the army and others.
It was essentially destroying their livelihood, their culture, their food source, everything.
Exactly.
It was a deliberate strategy in many ways to undermine Plains Indian independence.
So as this pressure builds, the government tries to manage it with the reservation system.
Treaties like Fort Laramie, Fort Atkinson.
Yeah, starting in the 1950s.
But the whole system was kind of flawed from the get go.
How so?
Well, the white treaty makers fundamentally misunderstood Native societies.
They insisted on dealing with tribes and chiefs in a way that often didn't reflect the actual more fluid social structures.
They basically imposed a model.
And then they didn't even stick to the deals they made.
Pretty much.
As pressure for land increased, the government just kept shrinking the reservations, moving people onto smaller and smaller parcels like the Great Sioux Reservation or Indian Territory.
There's that quote.
Right.
The one where an Indian leader tells the Sioux Commission, tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed, we have been moved five times.
It captures that sense of betrayal.
And this inevitably leads to violent conflict.
Brutal stuff between 1860 and 1890.
Absolutely horrific at times.
Take the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.
Colonel Chivington's Colorado militia attacks a Cheyenne camp.
Even though they thought they had immunity?
Yes.
And they killed over 200 people, mostly women and children.
Chivington reportedly said he had come to kill Indians and believed it to be honorable under any circumstances.
Just awful.
And the violence went both ways, of course.
Oh, yes.
In 1866, you have the Fetterman Massacre, where Lakota warriors led by Red Cloud wiped out Captain Fetterman's entire command of 81 men, a major shock to the army.
Then the big one, Little Byhorn.
1876.
Custer.
Right.
Custer's expedition had confirmed gold in the Black Hills, which itself violated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
That led to a gold rush settlers pouring in.
Ignoring the treaty, setting up the conflict.
Exactly.
And when the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho gathered under leaders like Sitting Bull, Custer attacked.
His seventh cavalry was completely wiped out by maybe 2500 warriors.
A huge victory for the tribes,
but temporary.
Very temporary.
It only intensified the military response.
You see the relentless pursuit of Geronimo and the Apaches in the southwest.
They even used the heliograph, a kind of signaling device the Apache called Big Medicine, to coordinate.
And the tragic flight of Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce.
Yeah, that 1700 mile retreat in 1877, trying to reach Canada, only to be stopped just short and forced into exile after being promised they could return home.
Another broken promise.
And it's important to remember who was doing the fighting on the US side.
Yes.
The source points out that about one -fifth of the US army personnel on the frontier were African American regiments, the Buffalo Soldiers.
They played a central role in these campaigns.
A complex layer to this whole story.
So after the main wars die down, the policy shifts.
Right.
From direct military conflict towards, well, assimilation.
Trying to make Native Americans conform to white ways.
President Grant tried a peace policy first, right?
Using church groups.
Yeah.
1869.
Mostly Quakers as Indian agents.
The idea was maybe a more humane approach would work, but it largely failed.
Indians often left the reservations because conditions were terrible or they just wanted to maintain their own way of life.
So the approach got tougher and public opinion was shifting a bit too.
It was.
You had writers like Helen Hunt Jackson.
Her book, A Century of Desana in 1881, was this scathing indictment of government policy, listing all the broken treaties.
And she wrote Ramona too, the novel.
Right.
Which became hugely popular and stirred up a lot of sympathy.
But this sympathy, ironically, led to a policy that was disastrous in its own way.
The Dawes Severality Act of 1887.
Okay.
The Dawes Act.
What was the core idea?
The goal was assimilation, pure and simple.
It aimed to break up tribes as legal entities.
It outlawed communal land ownership, which was central to many Native cultures.
And replace it with individual plots.
Exactly.
Offer 160 acres to each family head.
The idea was if they farmed it and acted like good white settlers for 25 years, they'd get full ownership and citizenship.
Citizenship for all Indians didn't actually come until 1924 though.
The underlying philosophy.
Was summed up by that motto from the Carlisle Indian School, funded by the government, kill the Indian and save the man.
Chilling.
And it meant literally trying to erase culture.
Yes.
Forcibly sending children to boarding schools, forbidding native languages, religions, clothing.
The aim was to stamp out Indian identity.
And the result of the Dawes Act, did it help?
Not in the way reformers hoped.
It was devastating for land ownership because the allotted lands could eventually be sold.
And because much of the surplus reservation land was sold off, Native Americans lost about 50 % of the land they held just two decades earlier, by 1900.
So assimilation policy was also a disaster, just in a different way.
And there was one more major violent event.
The suppression of the ghost dance.
This was a spiritual movement that spread among plains Indians, promising a return to traditional ways and the disappearance of the whites.
The authorities saw it as a threat.
They did.
And it led tragically to the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890.
Soldiers went into a Lakota camp to disarm them.
A shot was fired and the army opened up.
Can you tell me how many?
An estimated 200 Lakota men, women, and children.
Mostly defenseless.
It's really seen as the final grim punctuation mark on the Indian Wars.
Okay.
So while this tragedy is unfolding, the West is also being radically changed by economic forces.
What were the big drivers?
Three main ones, really, all interlinked.
First, the mineral magnet, gold and silver rushes.
This is what really pulled large numbers of people west initially.
Absolutely.
It was the lifeblood, think Pike's Peak in Colorado in 58.
And even bigger, the Comstock load in Nevada found in 1859.
That one was huge, right?
Massive.
It produced over $340 million in gold and silver.
It basically fast -tracked Nevada into statehood in 1864, partly because Lincoln wanted its electoral votes during the Civil War.
And the nature of mining changed quickly.
Yeah, the image of the lone prospector with the pan, the 59er, that didn't last long.
Once the easy surface deposits were gone, it became big business.
Corporations moving in.
Exactly.
With heavy machinery, ore crushers, hydraulic mining that blasted away hillsides, it required huge capital investment.
These operations left behind ghost towns like Virginia City when the ore ran out.
And this wealth helped fund the Civil War.
It did.
And it also fueled conflict, both with Native Americans and among settlers.
An interesting side effect, though.
Women gained political power earlier in some of these mining territories.
Like suffrage?
Yeah.
Wyoming granted women suffrage in 1869, Utah in 1870, Colorado 93, Idaho 96, way ahead of the rest of the country.
Okay.
So mining is one engine.
What's next?
The beef bonanza,
the cattle drives.
Ah, the cowboys and the long drive.
Exactly.
After the Civil War, you had millions of longhorn cattle roaming wild in Texas, and burgeoning cities back east needed beef.
So they drove them north.
Yeah.
From Texas across free government land, the open range up to the new railroad towns, the cow towns like Abilene, Dodge City,
Wild Bill Hickok territory.
This lasted from about 1866 to 1888.
A pretty short era, actually.
Only about 20 years.
What killed it?
Well, ironically, the same thing that created it, the railroad.
The trains brought settlers who wanted to farm.
And they started fencing the land.
Right.
With barbed wire, which was perfected by Joseph Glidden in 1874, suddenly the open range wasn't open anymore.
Plus over -greasing became a problem.
And wasn't there a terrible winter?
Yes.
The winter of 1886, 1887 was catastrophic.
Temperatures dropped to insane levels, like 68 below zero in places.
Huge numbers of cattle froze or starved.
That really broke the back of the long drive system.
So the cowboy era ends and it becomes more corporate.
Exactly.
Cattle raising becomes big business, dominated by beef barons, figures associated with meatpacking giants like Swift and Armour back in Chicago.
They used the newly invented refrigerator cars to ship dressed meat east.
Much more efficient.
Okay.
Mining, cattle.
What's the third big first?
Farmers.
The agricultural frontier.
This was really powered by the Homestead Act of 1862.
The promise of free land.
160 acres.
Yeah, 160 acres.
You paid a small fee, about $10, lived on it, improved it for five years, and it was yours.
It sounded like a godsend.
But there was a catch.
A big one, especially west of that hundredth meridian we keep mentioning.
160 acres just wasn't enough land to make a living in that arid environment.
It was often a cruel hoax, as the text calls it.
People were starving on their claims.
There were folk songs about it.
And on top of that, there was massive fraud.
Corporations would hire dummy homesteaders to claim land for them, sometimes building tiny inches -wide dwellings to technically meet the rules.
So five times more land was actually bought from railroads or land companies than was successfully homesteaded.
That's what the source says.
The Homestead Act wasn't the main way most farmers got their land, despite its fame.
How did farmers adapt to the dryness out west?
Well, initially, they faced this idea of the Great American Desert.
Major John Wesley Powell, a geologist who knew the west well, warned Congress back in 1878 that farming west of the 100th meridian wouldn't work without massive irrigation.
But people tried anyway.
They did.
They developed techniques like dry farming, basically, methods to conserve scarce rainfall.
Unfortunately, that later contributed to the Dust Bowl.
They also brought in hardier crops, like drought -resistant wheat from Russia.
But Powell was right about irrigation in the long run.
Absolutely.
Ultimately, it wasn't the rugged individual homesteader who conquered the arid west for agriculture.
It was massive, federally -funded irrigation projects.
Damming rivers, creating reservoirs.
Delossal projects taming the Missouri, the Colorado, and others.
These eventually irrigated something like 45 million acres.
The government's role in reshaping the landscape was far bigger than the pioneers.
And all this settlement leads to new states joining the Union.
Right.
Colorado came in 1876.
The Centennial State.
Then a big wave in 1889 -1890.
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming.
Utah took longer, joining in 1896 after the Mormon church officially banned polygamy.
And the final big land grab was Oklahoma.
Yeah, the opening of Oklahoma territory in 1889.
It was former Indian territory.
The government opened it up, and 50 ,000 boomers waited for the signal.
And rushed into state claims.
The Sooners were the ones who snuck in early.
Exactly.
Leading to Oklahoma becoming the Sooner State in 1907.
It was kind of the last dramatic act of this frontier settlement era.
So let's try to pull this all together.
What are the main takeaways from this whole period?
Well, the first big one is that sense of an ending.
In 1890, the Census Bureau declared something pretty significant.
What was that?
They announced that there was no longer a clear discernible frontier line on the map.
The density of settlement had basically filled in the gaps.
And that announcement is what inspired Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay in 1893 about the significance of the frontier in American history.
Precisely.
The closing of the frontier felt like a major watershed moment.
What about that idea of the West as a safety valve, you know, for unhappy workers back East?
The source suggests it's mostly a myth.
Very few factory workers actually moved West to become farmers.
It was too difficult, repaired too much capital.
But maybe the idea of free land had an effect.
Possibly.
The book hints that the possibility of going West might have kept urban wages slightly higher as employers didn't want workers leaving.
But the real safety valve, it argues, was probably the growing Western cities themselves, places like Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, where people migrated for opportunity.
Okay, so a more nuanced take on the safety valve.
Right.
And the final point the chapter really emphasizes is the enduring uniqueness of the Trans -Mississippi West.
How so?
It's the region where that final struggle over colonization happened.
It's where Anglo and Hispanic cultures have had their most direct ongoing interaction.
And crucially, it's where the federal government owns vast amounts of land and the environment itself plays such a huge shaping role in life.
So a final thought to leave folks with.
Consider this.
The frontier was officially declared closed in 1890.
But given everything we've talked about, the ongoing legacies of conquest, the resource conflicts, the cultural mixing, the massive federal presence, does the West in many ways still function as a kind of borderland, as the source suggests?
Still a place where these fundamental American forces continue to play out.