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The Great West and the Agricultural

Revolution��

1865–1896

Up to our own day American history has been in

a large degree the history of the colonization

of the Great West. The existence of an area of

free land, its continuous recession, and the

advance of American settlement westward,

explain American development.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, 1893

26

When the Civil War crashed to a close, the frontierline was still wavering westward. A long fringe of

settlement, bulging outward here and there, ran roughlynorth through central Texas and on to the Canadian border. Between this jagged line and the settled areas onthe Pacific slope, there were virtually no white people.The few exceptions were the islands of Mormons inUtah, occasional trading posts and gold camps, and several scattered Spanish Mexican settlements through-out the Southwest.

Sprawling in expanse, the Great West was a roughsquare that measured about a thousand miles on eachside. Embracing mountains, plateaus, deserts, andplains, it was the habitat of the Indian, the buffalo, thewild horse, the prairie dog, and the coyote. Twenty-fiveyears later—that is, by 1890—the entire domain had

been carved into states and the four territories of Utah,Arizona, New Mexico, and “Indian Territory,” orOklahoma. Pioneers flung themselves greedily on thisenormous prize, as if to ravish it. Probably never beforein human experience had so huge an area been transformed so rapidly.

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

Native Americans numbered about 360,000 in 1860,many of them scattered about the vast grasslands of the trans-Missouri West. But to their eternal misfortune,the Indians stood in the path of the advancing whitepioneers. An inevitable clash loomed between an

594

Indians in the West 595

acquisitive, industrializing civilization and the Indians’highly evolved lifeways, adapted over centuries to thedemanding environment of the sparsely watered west-ern plains.

Migration and conflict—and sometimes dramaticcultural change—were no strangers in the arid West,even before the whites began to arrive. The Comancheshad driven the Apaches off the central plains into the upper Rio Grande valley in the eighteenth century.Harried by the Mandans and Chippewas, the Cheyennehad abandoned their villages along the upper reaches ofthe Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the centurybefore the Civil War. The Sioux, displaced from the GreatLakes woodlands in the late eighteenth century,emerged onto the plains to prey upon the Crows,Kiowas, and Pawnees. Mounted on Spanish-introducedhorses, peoples like the Cheyenne and the Sioux trans-formed themselves within just a few generations fromfoot-traveling, crop-growing villagers to wide-rangingnomadic traders and deadly efficient buffalo hunters—so deadly that they threatened to extinguish the vastbison herds that had lured them onto the plains in thefirst place.

When white soldiers and settlers edged onto theplains in the decades just before the Civil War, theyaccelerated a fateful cycle that exacerbated alreadyfierce enmities among the Indians and ultimatelyundermined the foundations of Native American culture. White intruders unwittingly spread cholera,typhoid, and smallpox among the native peoples of the

plains, with devastating results. Equally harmful, whitesput further pressure on the steadily shrinking bisonpopulation by hunting and by grazing their own live-

As early as the Coronado expedition in1541, Spanish explorers marveled at thePlains Indians’ reliance on the buffalo:

“With the skins [the Indians] build their

houses; with the skins they clothe and

shoe themselves; from the skins they

make ropes and also obtain wool.

From the sinews they make thread,

with which they sew their clothing

and likewise their tents. From the

bones they shape awls, and the dung

they use for firewood, since there is

no fuel in all that land. The bladders

serve as jugs and drinking vessels.

They sustain themselves on the flesh

of the animals, eating it slightly roasted

and sometimes uncooked. Taking it in

their teeth, they pull with one hand; with

the other they hold a large flint knife

and cut off mouthfuls, swallowing it

half chewed, like birds. They eat

raw fat, without warming it.”

The Buffalo Hunt, by FredericRemington, 1890 A New Yorkerwho first went west at the age ofnineteen as a cowboy and ranchcook, Remington (1861–1909)became the foremost artist of thevanishing way of life of the old Far West. Once a common sight on the high plains, the kind of buffalo kill that Remington recordshere was a great rarity by the timehe painted this scene in 1890. Theonce-vast herds of bison had longsince been reduced to a pitiful fewby the white man’s rifles.

596 CHAPTER 26 The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896

stock on the prairie grasses. As the once-mammoth buffalo herds dwindled, warfare intensified among theplains tribes for ever-scarcer hunting grounds. “I amtraveling all over this country, and am cutting the treesof my brothers,” an Arikara Indian told a U.S. Army officer along the Platte River in 1835. “I am killing theirbuffalo before my friends arrive so that when they comeup, they can find no buffalo.”

The federal government tried to pacify the PlainsIndians by signing treaties with the “chiefs” of various“tribes” at Fort Laramie in 1851 and at Fort Atkinson in1853. The treaties marked the beginnings of the reserva-tion system in the West. They established boundaries forthe territory of each tribe and attempted to separate the

Indians into two great “colonies” to the north and south of a corridor of intended white settlement.

But the white treaty makers misunderstood bothIndian government and Indian society. “Tribes” and“chiefs” were often fictions of the white imagination,which could not grasp the fact that Native Americans,living in scattered bands, usually recognized no author-ity outside their immediate family, or perhaps a villageelder. And the nomadic culture of the Plains Indians wasutterly alien to the concept of living out one’s life in theconfinement of a defined territory.

In the 1860s the federal government intensified this policy and herded the Indians into still smaller confines, principally the “Great Sioux reservation” inDakota Territory, and Indian Territory in present-dayOklahoma, into which dozens of southern Plains tribeswere forced.

The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands only when they had received solemn promises fromWashington that they would be left alone and providedwith food, clothing, and other supplies. Regrettably, the federal Indian agents were often corrupt. Theypalmed off moth-eaten blankets, spoiled beef, and otherdefective provisions on the friendless Indians. One ofthese cheating officials, on an annual salary of $1,500,returned home after four years with an estimated “savings” of $50,000.

For more than a decade after the Civil War, fiercewarfare between Indians and the U.S. Army raged in

One disheartened Indian complained to the white Sioux Commission created by Congress,

“Tell your people that since the Great

Father promised that we should never

be removed we have been moved five

times. . . . I think you had better put

the Indians on wheels and you can

run them about wherever you wish.”

Pawnee Indians in Front of TheirLodge, c. 1868 The Pawnees ofcentral Nebraska never made waron the United States, which theyregarded as an ally in their ownstruggles against the maraudingSioux.

The Indian Wars 597

various parts of the West. Army troops, many of themrecent immigrants who had, ironically, fled Europe toavoid military service, met formidable adversaries in thePlains Indians, whose superb horsemanship gave thembaffling mobility. Fully one-fifth of all U.S. Army person-nel on the frontier were African American—dubbed“Buffalo Soldiers” by the Indians, supposedly because ofthe resemblance of their hair to the bison’s furry coat.

Receding Native Population

The Indian wars in the West were often savage clashes.Aggressive whites sometimes shot peaceful Indians onsight, just to make sure they would give no trouble. AtSand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, Colonel J. M. Chivington’smilitia massacred in cold blood some four hundred Indi-ans who apparently thought they had been promisedimmunity. Women were shot praying for mercy, childrenhad their brains dashed out, and braves were tortured,scalped, and unspeakably mutilated.

Cruelty begot cruelty. In 1866 a Sioux war partyattempting to block construction of the Bozeman Trail to

the Montana goldfields ambushed Captain William J. Fet-terman’s command of eighty-one soldiers and civilians inWyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The Indians left not a sin-gle survivor and grotesquely mutilated the corpses. Onetrooper’s face was spitted with 105 arrows. George Arm-strong Custer, the buckskin-clad “boy general” of CivilWar fame, now demoted to colonel and turned Indianfighter, wrote that Fetterman’s annihilation “awakened abitter feeling toward the savage perpetrators.” The cycleof ferocious warfare intensified.

The Fetterman massacre led to one of the few—though short-lived—Indian triumphs in the plains wars.In another Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, the gov-ernment abandoned the Bozeman Trail. The sprawling“Great Sioux reservation” was guaranteed to the Siouxtribes. But in 1874 a new round of warfare with the PlainsIndians began when Custer led a “scientific” expeditioninto the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Siouxreservation) and announced that he had discovered gold.Hordes of greedy gold-seekers swarmed into the Siouxlands. The aggrieved Sioux took to the warpath, inspiredby the influential and wily Sitting Bull.

Colonel Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, nearly half of themimmigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to return

On the Southern Plains, by Frederic Remington, 1907


them to the reservation. Attacking what turned out to be asuperior force of some 2,500 well-armed warriors campedalong the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana,the “White Chief with Yellow Hair” and his 264 officersand men were completely wiped out in 1876 when twosupporting columns failed to come to their rescue.* But ina series of battles across the northern plains in the ensu-ing months, the U.S. Army relentlessly hunted down theIndians who had humiliated Custer.

A young lieutenant told Colonel Chivingtonthat to attack the Indians would be a violation of pledges:

”His reply was, bringing his fist down

close to my face, ‘Damn any man who

sympathizes with Indians.’ I told him

what pledges were given the Indians.

He replied that he ‘had come to kill

Indians, and believed it to be honorable

to kill Indians under any and all

circumstances.’ ”

Seattle

Portland

Austin

Esmeralda

LasVegas

Cedar City

Amarillo

Jacksboro

Wichita

Topeka

Lincoln

ColoradoCity

Salt LakeCity

Denver

Cheyenne

Bismarck

Dodge City

Fort Worth

Waco

Austin

SanAntonio

SantaFe

LosAngeles

San Diego

Bisbee

Sacramento

San José

CarsonCity

Ft. Ridgely1862

Red River War1874–1875

Sand CreekMassacre

1864

Canyonde Chelly

1864

Salt River Canyon1872

Camp Grant Massacre

1871

WoundedKnee1890

LittleBighorn

1876

Battle of BearPaw Mountain

1877

BLACK HILLS

RO

CK

Y

MO

UN

TA

INS

CO

AS

TR

AN

GE

S

CALIFORNIA

NEVADA

ARIZONA TERR. NEW MEXICO TERR.

INDIAN TERR.

KANSAS

NEBRASKA

COLORADO

S.D.

N.D.

WYOMING

IOWA

MINN.

WISC.

ILL.

ARK.

LA.

MISS.

ALA.

TENN.

KY.

IND.

MICH.

MO.

TEXAS

MEX I CO

UTAH TERR.

OREGON

WASHINGTON

C A N A D A

IDAHO

MONTANA

MODOCBANNOCK

NEZ PERCÉ

PAIUTE

NAVAJOARAPAHO

KIOWA

COMANCHE

SOUTHERN CHEYENNE

SHOSHONI

CHEYENNE

ARAPAHO

SIOUX

San Francisco

Sonoma

Canyon de losEmbudos 1886

Geronimoescapes

SkeletonCanyon 1886

Geronimosurrenders

Phoenix

Chief Joseph's route

Fort

Major Indian battles

Ft.Reno

Ft. Laramie

Ft.Lapwaj

Ft.Hall

Ft.Klamath

Ft.Harney

Ft.Bidwell

Ft. Churchill

Ft.McDermit

Ft.Halleck

Ft.Cameron

Ft.Crittenden

Ft.Crawford Ft.

Garland

Ft. Craig

Ft.Bridger

Ft. Niobrara

Ft. Kearney

Ft.Riley

Ft.Larned

Ft. Reno

Ft. Randall

Ft.Sully

Ft. Berthold

Ft.Abercrombie

Ft.Yates

Ft. Meade

Ft.Sumner

Ft.Quitman

Ft. Lyon

Ft. ColvilleFt.Townsend

Indian Wars, 1860–1890 Surrendering in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé declared,“Our chiefs are killed. . . . The old men are all dead. . . . The little children are freezing todeath. . . . I want to have time to look for my children. . . . Hear me, my chiefs. My heart issick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

*When whites wiped out Indians, the engagement (in white historybooks) was usually a “battle”; when Indians wiped out whites, it wasa “massacre.” “Strategy” when practiced by Indians was “treachery.”

Subduing the Indians 599

One band of Nez Percé Indians in northeastern Oregon were goaded into daring flight in 1877, whenU.S. authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation.Chief Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen-hundred-mile, three-month trek across the

Continental Divide toward Canada. There Joseph hopedto rendezvous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refugenorth of the border after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.Betrayed into believing they would be returned to theirancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Percés instead weresent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40 percentof them perished from disease. The survivors wereeventually allowed to return to Idaho.

Fierce Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexicowere the most difficult to subdue. Led by Geronimo,whose eyes blazed hatred of the whites, they were pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun-flashing heliograph, a communication device thatimpressed the Indians as “big medicine.” Scattered remnants of the warriors were finally persuaded to surrender after the Apache women had been exiled to Florida. The Apaches ultimately became successfulfarmers in Oklahoma.

This relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites atlast shattered the spirit of the Indians. The vanquishedNative Americans were finally ghettoized on reserva-tions where they could theoretically preserve their cultural autonomy but were in fact compelled to eke outa sullen existence as wards of the government. Theirwhite masters had at last discovered that the Indianswere much cheaper to feed than to fight. Even so, formany decades they were almost ignored to death.

The “taming” of the Indians was engineered by anumber of factors. Of cardinal importance was therailroad, which shot an iron arrow through the heartof the West. Locomotives could bring out unlimitednumbers of troops, farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders,and settlers. The Indians were also ravaged by thewhite people’s diseases, to which they showed littleresistance, and by their firewater, to which theyshowed almost no resistance. Above all, the virtualextermination of the buffalo doomed the Plains Indians’nomadic way of life.

Bellowing Herds of Bison

Tens of millions of buffalo—described by early Spaniardsas “hunchback cows”—blackened the western prairieswhen white Americans first arrived. These shaggy, lumbering animals were the staff of life for Native Americans (see “Makers of America: The Plains Indians,”pp. 600–601). Their flesh provided food; their dried dungprovided fuel (“buffalo chips”); their hides providedclothing, lariats, and harnesses.

Geronimo (c. 1823–1909) Also Known by His ApacheName, Goyahkla (One Who Yawns) In 1851 Mexicantroops killed Geronimo’s mother and wife and three of his children, initiating Geronimo’s lifelong hatredof Mexicans—though in later life, ironically, herepeatedly fled the intolerable confinement of reservations in the United States and sought refuge—and freedom—in Mexico. Persuaded at last to surrender to American authorities in 1886, he spent the remainder of his life on reservations in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma.

The last of the native peoples of North America to bowbefore the military might of the whites, the Indians of

the northern Great Plains long defended their lands andtheir ways of life against the American cavalry. After theend of the Indian wars, toward the close of the nineteenthcentury, the Plains tribes struggled on, jealously guardingtheir communities against white encroachment. Crowdedonto reservations, subject to ever-changing federal Indianpolicies, assailed by corrupt settlers and Indian agents, thePlains Indians have nonetheless preserved much of theirancestral culture to this day.

Before Europeans first appeared in North America inthe sixteenth century, the vast plain from northern Texasto Saskatchewan was home to some thirty differenttribes. There was no typical Plains Indian; each tribespoke a distinct language, practiced its own religion, andformed its own government. When members of different

bands met on the prairies, communication depended ona special sign language.

Indians had first trod the arid plains to pursuesprawling herds of antelope, elk, and especially buffalo.But these early peoples of the plains were not exclusivelyhunters: the women were expert farmers, coaxing lushgardens of pumpkins, squash, corn, and beans from thedry but fertile soil. Still, the shaggy pelt and heavy flesh ofthe buffalo constituted the staff of life on the plains.Hunted by men, the great bison were butchered bywomen, who used every part of the beast. They fashionedhorns and hooves into spoons, and intestines into containers. They stretched sinews into strong bowstringsand wove buffalo hair into ropes. Meat not immediatelyeaten was pounded into pemmican—thin strips ofsmoked or sun-dried buffalo flesh mixed with berriesand stuffed into rawhide bags.

600

The Plains Indians

A Comanche Village, by George Catlin, 1834

The nomadic Plains Indians sought what shelter theycould in small bands throughout the winter, gatheringtogether in summer for religious ceremonies, socializing,and communal buffalo hunts. At first these seasonalmigrations required arduous loading and carting. TheIndians carried all their possessions or heaped them onwheelless carts called travois, which were dragged bydogs—their only beasts of burden.

Then in the sixteenth century, the mounted Spanishconquistadores ventured into the New World. Theirsteeds—some of them escaping to become mustangs,the wild horses of the American West, and othersacquired by the Indians in trade—quickly spread overthe plains. The horse revolutionized Indian societies,turning the Plains tribes into efficient hunting machinesthat promised to banish hunger from the prairies. Butthe plains pony also ignited a furious competition forgrazing lands, for trade goods, and for ever more horses,so that wars of aggression and of revenge becameincreasingly bitter and frequent.

The European invasion soon eclipsed the short-livedera of the horse. After many battles the Plains Indiansfound themselves crammed together on tiny reservations,clinging with tired but determined fingers to their tradi-tions. Although much of Plains Indian culture persists tothis day, the Indians’ free-ranging way of life has passedinto memory. As Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux, put it, “Oncewe were happy in our own country and we were seldomhungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggedslived together like relatives, and there was plenty for themand for us. But then the Wasichus [white people] came,and they made little islands for us . . . and always theseislands are becoming smaller, for around them surges thegnawing flood of Wasichus.”

601

Chan-Chä-Uiá-Teüin, Teton Sioux Woman, by KarlBodmer, c. 1830s Bodmer, a German artist, paintedthis woman’s portrait during an expedition to theGreat Plains. Her name means “Woman of the CrowNation,” which seems to suggest that she was takencaptive from the Sioux’s mortal enemies, the Crows.

(above) A Sioux CarvingHorses were essential tothe culture of the PlainsIndians, and they oftencarved likenesses of horses killed in battle.Note the red-stained holes depicting this horse’s wounds.

(right) A CheyenneCradleboard for Carrying a Baby


When the Civil War closed, some 15 million of thesemeaty beasts were still grazing on the western plains. In1868 a Kansas Pacific locomotive had to wait eight hoursfor a herd to amble across the tracks. Much of the foodsupply of the railroad construction gangs came fromleathery buffalo steaks. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—sinewy, telescope-eyed, and a crack shot—killed over4,000 animals in eighteen months while employed bythe Kansas Pacific.

With the building of the railroad, the massacre ofthe herds began in deadly earnest. The creatures wereslain for their hides, for their tongues or a few otherchoice cuts, or for sheer amusement. “Sportsmen” onlurching railroad trains would lean out the windows andblaze away at the animals to satisfy their lust for slaugh-ter or excitement. Such wholesale butchery left fewerthan a thousand buffalo alive by 1885, and the once-numerous beasts were in danger of complete extinction.The whole story is a shocking example of the greed andwaste that accompanied the conquest of the continent.

The End of the Trail

By the 1880s the national conscience began to stiruneasily over the plight of the Indians. Helen Hunt

Jackson, a Massachusetts writer of children’s literature,pricked the moral sense of Americans in 1881 when shepublished A Century of Dishonor. The book chronicledthe sorry record of government ruthlessness and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later novelRamona (1884), a love story of injustice to the Cal-ifornia Indians, sold some 600,000 copies and furtherinspired sympathy for the Indians.

Debate seesawed. Humanitarians wanted to treatthe Indians kindly and persuade them thereby to “walk the white man’s road.” Yet hard-liners insisted onthe current policy of forced containment and brutal

The IndianRemoval Actof 1830eliminatedall Indianland rightseast of the MississippiRiver.

The Dawes Act in 1887 changedcommon tribal lands into individualallotments. Nearly 90 million acresof tribal land were lost before theact was repealed in 1932. Sincethen, through court battles and federal recognition of old claims,some Indian lands have beenrestored to the tribes.

Indian lands

1790 1860 1880

1890 2000

Vanishing Lands Once masters of the continent, Native Americans have beensqueezed into just 2 percent of U.S. territory. (Source: Copyright © 2000 by The New

York Times. Reprinted by permission.)

Civil War veteran and long-time Indianfighter General Philip Sheridan (1831–1888)reflected on the wars against the Indians:

”We took away their country and their

means of support, broke up their mode

of living, their habits of life, introduced

disease and decay among them, and it

was for this and against this they made

war. Could anyone expect less?”

Federal Indian Policy 603

punishment. Neither side showed much respect forNative American culture. Christian reformers, who oftenadministered educational facilities on the reservations,sometimes withheld food to force the Indians to give uptheir tribal religion and assimilate to white society. In1884 these zealous white souls joined with military menin successfully persuading the federal government tooutlaw the sacred Sun Dance. When the “Ghost Dance”cult later spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army bloodilystamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle ofWounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked, an esti-mated two hundred Indian men, women, and childrenwere killed, as well as twenty-nine invading soldiers.

The misbegotten offspring of the movement toreform Indian policy was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Reflecting the forced-civilization views of the reformers, the act dissolved many tribes as legalentities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set upindividual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. If the Indians behaved themselves like “good white settlers,” they would get full title to their holdings, aswell as citizenship, in twenty-five years. The proba-tionary period was later extended, but full citizenshipwas granted to all Indians in 1924.

Reservation land not allotted to the Indians underthe Dawes Act was to be sold to railroads and white settlers, with the proceeds used by the federal govern-ment to educate and “civilize” the native peoples. In1879 the government had already funded the CarlisleIndian School in Pennsylvania, where Native Americanchildren, separated from their tribes, were taught English and inculcated with white values and customs.“Kill the Indian and save the man” was the schoolfounder’s motto. In the 1890s the government expandedits network of Indian boarding schools and sent “field

matrons” to the reservations to teach Native Americanwomen the art of sewing and to preach the virtues ofchastity and hygiene.

The Dawes Act struck directly at tribal organizationand tried to make rugged individualists out of the Indians. This legislation ignored the inherent reliance oftraditional Indian culture on tribally held land, literallypulling the land out from under them. By 1900 Indianshad lost 50 percent of the 156 million acres they hadheld just two decades earlier. The forced-assimilationdoctrine of the Dawes Act remained the cornerstone of the government’s official Indian policy for nearly half a century, until the Indian Reorganization Act (the “Indian New Deal”) of 1934 partially reversed theindividualistic approach and belatedly tried to restorethe tribal basis of Indian life (see p. 784).

Under these new federal policies, defective thoughthey were, the Indian population started to mount

The Indian spokesman Plenty Coups said in 1909,

“I see no longer the curling smoke

rising from our lodge poles. I hear no

longer the songs of the women as they

prepare the meal. The antelope have

gone; the buffalo wallows are empty.

Only the wail of the coyote is heard.

The white man’s medicine is stronger

than ours. . . . We are like birds with

a broken wing.”

Lakotas ReceivingRations at StandingRock Reservation, ca. 1881 Once thescourge of the Plains,the Lakota (Sioux)were reduced by the 1890s to thehumiliation of livingon government handouts.


slowly. The total number had been reduced by 1887 to about 243,000—the result of bullets, bottles, and bacteria—but the census of 2000 counted more than 1.5 million Native Americans, urban and rural.

Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker

The conquest of the Indians and the coming of the railroad were life-giving boons to the mining frontier.The golden gravel of California continued to yield “paydirt,” and in 1858 an electrifying discovery convulsedColorado. Avid “fifty-niners” or “Pikes Peakers” rushedwest to rip at the ramparts of the Rockies. But there weremore miners than minerals, and many gold-grubbers,with “Pikes Peak or Bust” inscribed on the canvas oftheir covered wagons, creaked wearily back with theadded inscription, “Busted, by Gosh.” Yet countlessbearded fortune-seekers stayed on, some to strip awaythe silver deposits, others to extract nonmetallic wealthfrom the earth in the form of golden grain.

“Fifty-niners” also poured feverishly into Nevada in1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had beenuncovered. A fantastic amount of gold and silver, worthmore than $340 million, was mined by the “Kings of theComstock” from 1860 to 1890. The scantily populatedstate of Nevada, “child of the Comstock Lode,” was prematurely railroaded into the Union in 1864, partly toprovide three electoral votes for President Lincoln.

Smaller “lucky strikes” drew frantic gold- and silver-seekers into Montana, Idaho, and other western states.Boomtowns, known as “Helldorados,” sprouted from thedesert sands like magic. Every third cabin was a saloon,where sweat-stained miners drank adulterated liquor(“rotgut”) in the company of accommodating women.Lynch law and hempen vigilante justice, as in early California, preserved a crude semblance of order in thetowns. And when the “diggings” petered out, the gold-seekers decamped, leaving eerily picturesque “ghosttowns,” such as Virginia City, Nevada, silhouetted in thedesert. Begun with a boom, these towns ended with awhimper.

Once the loose surface gold was gobbled up, ore-breaking machinery was imported to smash the gold-bearing quartz. This operation was so expensive that itcould ordinarily be undertaken only by corporationspooling the wealth of stockholders. Gradually the age ofbig business came to the mining industry. Dusty,bewhiskered miners, dishpans in hand, were replacedby impersonal corporations, with their costly machinery

and trained engineers. The once-independent gold-washer became just another day laborer.

Yet the mining frontier had played a vital role insubduing the continent. Magnetlike, it attracted popula-tion and wealth, while advertising the wonders of theWild West. Women as well as men found opportunity,running boardinghouses or working as prostitutes. Theywon a kind of equality on the rough frontier that earnedthem the vote in Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado(1893), and Idaho (1896) long before their sisters in theEast could cast a ballot.

The amassing of precious metals helped finance the Civil War, facilitated the building of railroads, and

Dance-Hall Girl, Virginia City, Nevada, c. 1890Women as well as men sought their fortunes in thefrontier West—especially in wide-open mining townslike Virginia City.

The Mining and Cattle Frontiers 605

intensified the already bitter conflict between whitesand Indians. The outpouring of silver and gold enabledthe Treasury to resume specie payments in 1879 andinjected the silver issue into American politics. “SilverSenators,” representing the thinly peopled “acreagestates” of the West, used their disproportionate influ-ence to promote the interests of the silver miners.Finally, the mining frontier added to American folkloreand literature, as the writings of Bret Harte and MarkTwain so colorfully attest.

Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive

When the Civil War ended, the grassy plains of Texassupported several million tough, long-horned cattle.These scrawny beasts, whose horn spreads sometimesreached eight feet, were killed primarily for their hides.There was no way of getting their meat profitably to market.

The problem of marketing was neatly solved whenthe transcontinental railroads thrust their iron fingersinto the West. Cattle could now be shipped bodily to the

stockyards, and under “beef barons” like the Swifts and Armours, the highly industrialized meatpackingbusiness sprang into existence as a main pillar of theeconomy. Drawing upon the gigantic stockyards atKansas City and Chicago, the meatpackers could shiptheir fresh products to the East Coast in the newly perfected refrigerator cars.

A spectacular feeder of the new slaughterhouseswas the “Long Drive.” Texas cowboys—black, white,and Mexican—drove herds numbering from one thou-sand to ten thousand head slowly over the unfencedand unpeopled plains until they reached a railroad terminal. The bawling beasts grazed en route on thefree government grass. Favorite terminal points wereflyspecked “cow towns” like Dodge City—“the BibulousBabylon of the Frontier”—and Abilene (Kansas), Ogallala (Nebraska), and Cheyenne (Wyoming). AtAbilene order was maintained by Marshal James B.(“Wild Bill”) Hickok, a fabulous gunman who reputedlykilled only in self-defense or in the line of duty andwho was fatally shot in the back in 1876, while playingpoker.

As long as lush grass was available, the Long Driveproved profitable—that is, to the luckier cattlemen who escaped Indians, stampedes, cattle fever, and otherhazards. From 1866 to 1888, bellowing herds, totaling

Pueblo

Dodge City

Denver

Ogallala

Abilene

Cheyenne

Omaha

Atchison

Topeka

Kansas City

NEBRASKA IOWA

WYOMING

COLORADO

NEW

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TEXAS

OKLAHOMA

KANSASMO.

ARK.

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R.R .

Cattle Trails

Dressed to Kill Cowboys came in all varieties andsizes in the wild and woolly frontier West—and in allkinds of garb as well.


over 4 million steers, were driven northward from thebeef bowl of Texas. The steer was king in a Cattle Kingdom richly carpeted with grass.

What the Lord giveth, the Lord also can taketh away.The railroad made the Long Drive, and the railroadunmade the Long Drive, primarily because the locomo-tives ran both ways. The same rails that bore the cattlefrom the open range to the kitchen range brought outthe homesteader and the sheepherder. Both of theseintruders, sometimes amid flying bullets, built barbed-wire fences that were too numerous to be cut down by the cowboys. Furthermore, the terrible winter of1886–1887, with blinding blizzards reaching 68 degreesbelow zero, left thousands of dazed cattle starving andfreezing. Overexpansion and overgrazing likewise tooktheir toll, as the cowboys slowly gave way to plowboys.

The only escape for the stockmen was to make cattle-raising a big business and avoid the perils of overproduction. Breeders learned to fence theirranches, lay in winter feed, import blooded bulls, andproduce fewer and meatier animals. They also learnedto organize. The Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association,especially in the 1880s, virtually controlled the state andits legislature.

This was the heyday of the cowboy. The equipmentof the cowhand—from “shooting irons” and ten-gallonhat to chaps and spurs—served a useful, not an orna-

mental, function. A “genuwine” gun-toting cowpuncher,riding where men were men and smelled like horses,could justifiably boast of his toughness.

These bowlegged Knights of the Saddle, with theircolorful trappings and cattle-lulling songs, became part of American folklore. Many of them, perhaps fivethousand, were blacks, who especially enjoyed the newfound freedom of the open range.

The Farmers’ Frontier

Miners and cattlemen created the romantic legend ofthe West, but it was the sober sodbuster who wrote thefinal chapter of frontier history. A fresh day dawnedfor western farmers with the Homestead Act of 1862.The new law allowed a settler to acquire as much as160 acres of land (a quarter-section) by living on it forfive years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee ofabout $30.

The Homestead Act marked a drastic departurefrom previous policy. Before the act, public land hadbeen sold primarily for revenue; now it was to be givenaway to encourage a rapid filling of empty spaces and to provide a stimulus to the family farm—“the backboneof democracy.” The new law was a godsend to a host of

The Homesteader’s Wife, by Harvey DunnWomen as well as mentoiled without shade orrespite on the sun-scorchedand wind-parched GreatPlains.

See

DBQ 8

Landmark Land Laws 607

farmers who could not afford to buy large holdings.During the forty years after its passage, about half a million families took advantage of the Homestead Act tocarve out new homes in the vast open stretches. Yet fivetimes that many families purchased their land from therailroads, the land companies, or the states.

The Homestead Act often turned out to be a cruelhoax. The standard 160 acres, quite adequate in thewell-watered Mississippi basin, frequently provedpitifully inadequate on the rain-scarce Great Plains.Thousands of homesteaders, perhaps two out ofthree, were forced to give up the one-sided struggleagainst drought. Uncle Sam, it was said, bet 160 acresagainst ten dollars that the settlers could not live on their homesteads for five years. One of theseunsuccessful gambles in Greer County, western Okla-homa, inspired a folk song:

Hurrah for Greer County! The land of the free,The land of the bedbug, grasshopper, and flea;I’ll sing of its praises, I’ll tell of its fame,While starving to death on my government

claim.

Naked fraud was spawned by the Homestead Actand similar laws. Perhaps ten times more of the publicdomain wound up in the clutches of land-grabbing

promoters than in the hands of bona fide farmers.Unscrupulous corporations would use “dummy” home-steaders—often their employees or aliens bribed withcash or a bottle of beer—to grab the best propertiescontaining timber, minerals, and oil. Settlers wouldlater swear that they had “improved” the property byerecting a “twelve by fourteen” dwelling, which turnedout to measure twelve by fourteen inches.

The railways also played a major role in developingthe agricultural West, largely through the profitable marketing of crops. Some railroad companies inducedAmericans and European immigrants to buy the cheapland earlier granted to the railroads by the government.The Northern Pacific Railroad at one time had nearly athousand paid agents in Europe distributing roseateleaflets in various languages.

Shattering the myth of the Great American Desertopened the gateways to the agricultural West evenwider. The windswept prairies were for the most parttreeless, and the tough sod had been pounded solid bymillions of buffalo hooves. Pioneer explorers and trap-pers had assumed that the soil must be sterile, simplybecause it was not heavily watered and did not supportimmense forests. But once the prairie sod was brokenwith heavy iron plows pulled by four yokes of oxen—the “plow that broke the plains”—the earth proved

WASH.30.8%

ORE.49.7%

CALIF.47.0%

NEV.91.7%

IDAHO65.0%

MONTANA31.3%

WYO.50.6%

UTAH66.5% COLO.

34.9%

ARIZ.50.1%

S.D.4.8%

KANSAS1.1%

OKLA.3.0%

MICH.10.0%

N.Y.1.1%

N.D.3.0% MINN.

6.9%

IOWA0.9%NEBR.

3.0%

MO.5.1%

ARK.12.0%

TEXAS1.9 %

N.M.34.2%

MISS.6.6%

ALA.3.7%

GA.6.2%

FLA. 13.3%

TENN. 7.3%

N.C.11.1%

S.C.6.4%

VA.10.0%

W.VA.3.0%

PA.2.5%

OHIO1.7%IND.

2.3%ILL.

1.9%

WISC.5.7%

KY.6.6%

ME.0.8%

N.H. 14.4%

VT.7.6%

MASS. 2.1%

R.I. 0.8%CONN. 0.5%

N.J. 3.9%

DEL. 2.9%

MD. 3.3%

D.C. 29.5%

LA.5.2%

5–10%

Under 5%

Percentage of publiclands within eachstate, 2002

20–40%

10–20%

Over 40%

Myth and Reality in the West American folklore pictures the western UnitedStates as a land of rugged individualists who tamed the wild region with gritand brawn. The reality is that the federal government is by far the West’s largestlandowner—and that federal projects, especially dam-building, have done moreto shape the region than all the cowboys and farmers put together. (Sources:Center of the American West and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2003.)


astonishingly fruitful. “Sodbusters” poured onto theprairies. Lacking trees for lumber and fuel, they builthomes from the very sod they dug from the ground andburned corncobs for warmth.

Lured by higher wheat prices resulting from cropfailures elsewhere in the world, settlers in the 1870srashly pushed still farther west, onto the poor, marginallands beyond the 100th meridian. That imaginary line,running north to south from the Dakotas through west Texas, separated two climatological regions—awell-watered area to the east, and a semiarid area to the west. Bewhiskered and one-armed geologist John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River’s GrandCanyon and director of the U.S. Geological Survey,warned in 1874 that beyond the 100th meridian so littlerain fell that agriculture was impossible without massiveirrigation.

Ignoring Powell’s advice, farmers heedlessly chewedup the crusty earth in western Kansas, eastern Colorado,and Montana. They quickly went broke as a six-yeardrought in the 1880s further desiccated the alreadydusty region. Western Kansas lost half its populationbetween 1888 and 1892. “There is no God west ofSalina,” one hapless homesteader declared.

In the wake of the devastating drought, the newtechnique of “dry farming” took root on the plains. Itsmethods of frequent shallow cultivation supposedlywere adapted to the arid western environment, but overtime “dry farming” created a finely pulverized surface

soil that contributed to the notorious “Dust Bowl” sev-eral decades later (see p. 783).

Other adaptations to the western environment weremore successful. Tough strains of wheat, resistant tocold and drought, were imported from Russia and blossomed into billowing yellow carpets. Wise farmersabandoned corn in favor of sorghum and other drought-resistant grains. Barbed wire, perfected by Joseph F.Glidden in 1874, solved the problem of how to buildfences on the treeless prairies.

Eventually federally financed irrigation projects—on a colossal scale, beyond even what John Wesley Powell had dreamed—caused the Great AmericanDesert to bloom. A century after Powell’s predictions,arching dams had tamed the Missouri and ColumbiaRivers and had so penned up and diverted the canyon-gnawing Colorado that its mouth in the Gulf of Cali-fornia was dry. More than 45 million acres were irrigatedin seventeen western states. In the long run, thehydraulic engineers had more to do with shaping themodern West than all the trappers, miners, cavalrymen,and cowboys ever did. As one engineer boasted, “Weenjoy pushing rivers around.”

The Far West Comes of Age

The Great West experienced a fantastic growth in population from the 1870s to the 1890s. A parade of newwestern states proudly joined the Union. BoomtownColorado, offspring of the Pikes Peak gold rush, wasgreeted in 1876 as “the Centennial State.” In 1889–1890 aRepublican Congress, eagerly seeking more Republicanelectoral and congressional votes, admitted in a whole-sale lot six new states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Mon-tana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. The MormonChurch formally and belatedly banned polygamy in1890, but not until 1896 was Utah deemed worthy ofadmission. Only Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizonaremained to be lifted into statehood from contiguousterritory on the mainland of North America.

In a last gaudy fling, the federal government madeavailable to settlers vast stretches of fertile plains formerly occupied by the Indians in the district of Oklahoma (“the Beautiful Land”). Scores of overeagerand well-armed “sooners,” illegally jumping the gun,had entered Oklahoma Territory. They had to be evictedrepeatedly by federal troops, who on occasion wouldshoot the intruders’ horses. On April 22, 1889, all was inreadiness for the legal opening, and some 50,000

In making the arduous journey across the western prairies, many women settlers discovered new confidence in their abilities.Early on in her trek, Mary Richardson Walker(1811–1897) confided in her diary that

“my circumstances are rather trying.

So much danger attends me on every

hand. A long journey before me, going

I know not whither, without mother

or sister to attend me, can I expect to

survive it all?”

Only a month later, she recorded that

“in the afternoon we rode thirty-five miles

without stopping. Pretty well tired out,

all of us. Stood it pretty well myself.”

Examining the Evidence 609

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Transcontinental Jour-

ney, 1879 The celebrated Scottish writer Robert LouisStevenson, author of such enduring classics as TreasureIsland, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde, journeyed from Scotland to California in 1879to rendezvous with his American fiancée, FrancesOsbourne. Between New York and San Francisco, Steven-son traveled on the transcontinental railroad line com-pleted just ten years earlier, and he dutifully recorded hisimpressions of America, the West in particular, as hemade his way toward California. Stevenson’s account ofhis trip provides an unusually gifted writer’s vivid portrait

of the trans-Mississippi West at the close of the era of theIndian wars. Like all travelogues, Stevenson’s colorful talemay reveal as much about the traveler as it does aboutthe things he saw. Yet historians frequently make use ofsuch documents to reconstruct the original appearanceand texture of places that were once the exotic destina-tions of adventurous travelers, before they were trans-formed by the onrush of modernity. In the passagesreproduced here, inspired by the view as Stevenson’strain passed through Nebraska and Wyoming, what fea-tures of the landscape does the author find most remark-able? How does he portray the railroad?

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

. . . We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska. . . . It was a worldalmost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched fromhorizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched theskirts of heaven. . . . [G]razing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct aswe drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake untilthey melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. The train toiledover this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions itbegan to assume in our regard. . . .[That] evening we left Laramie [Wyoming]. . . . And yet when day came, it was to shine upon thesame broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Onlydown the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. That train was the onepiece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysisof man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilder-ness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12 from the Atlantic to theGolden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust anddeath, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in theseuncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men fromEurope, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murderinglike wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the‘bad medicine waggon’ charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoilwas conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortuneand a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievementof the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all thedegrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most variedsubject for an enduring literary work. . . .

Source: Across the Plains, by Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897).


“boomers” were poised expectantly on the boundary line.At high noon the bugle shrilled, and a horde of “eighty-niners” poured in on lathered horses or careening vehicles. That night a lonely spot on the prairie hadmushroomed into the tent city of Guthrie, with over10,000 people. By the end of the year, Oklahoma boasted60,000 inhabitants, and Congress made it a territory. In1907 it became the “Sooner State.”

The Fading Frontier

In 1890—a watershed date—the superintendent of thecensus announced that for the first time in America’sexperience, a frontier line was no longer discernible. All

the unsettled areas were now broken into by isolatedbodies of settlement. The “closing” of the frontierinspired one of the most influential essays ever writtenabout American history—Frederick Jackson Turner’s“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”in 1893.

As the nineteenth century neared its sunset, thewestward-tramping American people were disturbed tofind that their fabled free land was going or had gone.The secretary of war had prophesied in 1827 that fivehundred years would be needed to fill the West. But as the nation finally recognized that its land was notinexhaustible, seeds were planted to preserve the vanishing resource. The government set aside land fornational parks—first Yellowstone in 1872, followed byYosemite and Sequoia in 1890.

0

400 Mi.

400 Km.

0 200

200

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

Wheat

SheepWheat

Wheat

Wine

Beefcattle

Fruit

Wine

Wheat

Wheat

WheatWheat

Wheat

Wheat

Wheat

Wheat

Wheat

Wheat

Corn

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Beefcattle

Dairy

Dairy

Dairy

Corn CornCorn

Hogs

Tobacco

Cotton

Cotton

Cotton

Sugarcane

Rice

Rice

Corn

Corn

Cotton

Cotton

Tobacco

Tobacco

Tobacco

Rice

Hogs

Hay

Hay CornWheat

Sheep

Corn Corn

Corn

Wheat

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

Mean annualrainfall (inches)

Over 80

60–80

40–60

20–40

10–20

Under 10

20 inch rainfall line

100°

100°

Wheat

GREAT BASIN

GR

EA

TP

LA

IN

S

Average Annual Precipitation, with Major Agricultural Products as of 1900Northern Hemisphere storms typically circle the globe in a west-to-east direction.Much of the life-nourishing water in these storms is dumped as rainfall on thewestern slopes of the Pacific coastal ranges and the Rocky Mountains, creatinghuge “rain shadows” in the Great Basin and in the western Great Plains.Westward-faring pioneers had to learn new agricultural techniques when theypushed settlement into the drought-prone regions west of the 100th meridian, asreflected in the patterns of crop distribution by 1900.

The Vanishing Frontier 611

But the frontier was more than a place; it was also astate of mind and a symbol of opportunity. Its passingended a romantic phase of the nation’s internal devel-opment and created new economic and psychologicalproblems.

Traditionally footloose, Americans have been noto-rious for their mobility. The nation’s farmers, unlike thepeasants of Europe, have seldom remained rooted totheir soil. The land, sold for a profit as settlement closedin, was often the settler’s most profitable crop.

Much has been said about the frontier as a “safetyvalve.” The theory is that when hard times came, theunemployed who cluttered the city pavements merelymoved west, took up farming, and prospered.

In truth, relatively few city dwellers, at least in thepopulous eastern centers, migrated to the frontier during depressions. Most of them did not know how to farm; few of them could raise enough money totransport themselves west and then pay for livestockand expensive machinery.

But the safety-valve theory does have some validity.Free acreage did lure to the West a host of immigrantfarmers who otherwise might have remained in theeastern cities to clog the job markets and to crowd the festering and already overpopulated slums. And thevery possibility of westward migration may haveinduced urban employers to maintain wage rates highenough to discourage workers from leaving. But the realsafety valve by the late nineteenth century was in western cities like Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco,where failed farmers, busted miners, and displaced easterners found ways to seek their fortunes. Indeed, afterabout 1880 the area from the Rocky Mountains to the

Pacific Coast was the most urbanized region in America,measured by the percentage of people living in cities.

U.S. history cannot be properly understood unlessit is viewed in light of the westward-moving experience.As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “American historyhas been in a large degree the history of the colonizationof the Great West.” The story of settling and taming thetrans-Mississippi West in the late nineteenth centurywas but the last chapter in the saga of colonizing various American “wests” since Columbus’s day—fromthe West Indies to the Chesapeake shore, from the valleys of the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers to the valleys of the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers.

And yet the trans-Mississippi West formed a distinctchapter in that saga and retains even to this day muchof its uniqueness. There the Native American peoplesmade their last and most desperate struggle against colonization, and there most Native Americans livetoday. There “Anglo” culture collided most directly with Hispanic culture—the historic rival of the Anglo-Americans for dominance in the New World—and theSouthwest remains the most Hispanicized region inAmerica. There America faced across the Pacific to Asia, and there most Asian Americans dwell today. Therethe scale and severity of the environment posed theirlargest challenges to human ambitions, and there theenvironment, with its aridity and still-magical empti-ness, continues to mold social and political life, and theAmerican imagination, as in no other part of the nation.And in no other region has the federal government, withits vast landholdings, its subsidies to the railroads, andits massive irrigation projects, played so conspicuous arole in economic and social development.

FR

ON

TIE

R L

INE

EN

DS

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940

Acres

11,000,000

10,000,000

9,000,000

8,000,000

7,000,000

6,000,000

5,000,000

4,000,000

3,000,000

2,000,000

1,000,000

0

Homesteads from thePublic Lands (acreagelegally transferred toprivate ownership)See the related map on p. 607.


The westward-moving pioneers and the countrythey confronted have assumed mythic proportions inthe American mind. They have been immortalized bysuch writers as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Helen HuntJackson, and Francis Parkman, and by such painters asGeorge Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Albert Bier-stadt. For better or worse, those pioneers planted theseeds of civilization in the immense western wilderness.The life we live, they dreamed of; the life they lived, wecan only dream.

The Farm Becomes a Factory

The situation of American farmers, once jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades, was rapidly changing. They had raisedtheir own food, fashioned their own clothing, andbartered for other necessities with neighbors. Now highprices persuaded farmers to concentrate on growingsingle “cash” crops, such as wheat or corn, and use theirprofits to buy foodstuffs at the general store and manu-factured goods in town or by mail order. The Chicagofirm of Aaron Montgomery Ward sent out its first catalogue—a single sheet—in 1872.

Large-scale farmers, especially in the immensegrain-producing areas of the Mississippi Valley, werenow both specialists and businesspeople. As cogs in thevast industrial machine, these farmers were intimatelytied to banking, railroading, and manufacturing. Theyhad to buy expensive machinery in order to plant and

harvest their crops. A powerful steam engine coulddrag behind it simultaneously the plow, seeder, andharrow. The speed of harvesting wheat was dramati-cally increased in the 1870s by the invention of thetwine binder and then in the 1880s by the “combine”—the combined reaper-thresher, which was drawn bytwenty to forty horses and which both reaped andbagged the grain. Widespread use of such costly equipment naturally called for first-class management.But the farmers, often unskilled as businesspeople,were inclined to blame the banks and railroads or thevolatility of the global marketplace, rather than theirown shortcomings, for their losses.

This amazing mechanization of agriculture in thepostwar years was almost as striking as the mechaniza-tion of industry. In fact, agricultural modernizationdrove many marginal farmers off the land, thus swellingthe ranks of the new industrial work force. As the rural population steadily decreased, those farmers who remained achieved miracles of production, makingAmerica the world’s breadbasket and butcher shop. The farm was attaining the status of a factory—an outdoor grain factory. Bonanza wheat farms of the Minnesota–North Dakota area, for example, were enormous. By 1890 at least a half-dozen of them werelarger than fifteen thousand acres, with communicationby telephone from one part to another. These bonanzafarms foreshadowed the gigantic agribusinesses of thenext century.

Agriculture was a big business from its earliest days in California’s phenomenally productive (and phe-

Harvesting in Washington State Humans, horses, and machine join forces inthis turn-of-the-century scene.

Struggling Farmers 613

nomenally irrigated) Central Valley. California farms,carved out of giant Spanish Mexican land grants andthe railroads’ huge holdings, were from the outsetmore than three times larger than the national aver-age. The reformer Henry George in 1871 describedthe Golden State as “not a country of farms but acountry of plantations and estates.” With the adventof the railroad refrigerator car in the 1880s, Californiafruit and vegetable crops, raised on sprawling tractsby ill-paid migrant Mexican and Chinese farmhands,sold at a handsome profit in the rich urban marketsof the East.

Deflation Dooms the Debtor

Once the farmers became chained to a one-crop economy—wheat or corn—they were in the same leakyboat with the southern cotton growers. As long as pricesstayed high, all went well. But when they skidded in the1880s, bankruptcy fell like a blight on the farm belts.

The grain farmers were no longer the masters oftheir own destinies. They were engaged in one of themost fiercely competitive of businesses, for the price oftheir product was determined in a world market by theworld output. If the wheat fields of Argentina, Russia,and other foreign countries flourished, the price of thefarmers’ grain would fall and American sodbusterswould face ruin, as they did in the 1880s and 1890s.

Low prices and a deflated currency were the chiefworries of the frustrated farmers—North, South, andWest. If a family had borrowed $1,000 in 1855, whenwheat was worth about a dollar a bushel, they expectedto pay back the equivalent of one thousand bushels,plus interest, when the mortgage fell due. But if they let their debt run to 1890, when wheat had fallen toabout fifty cents a bushel, they would have to pay backthe price of two thousand bushels for the $1,000 theyhad borrowed, plus interest. This unexpected burdenstruck them as unjust, though their steely-eyed credi-tors often branded the complaining farmers as slipperyand dishonest rascals.

The deflationary pinch on the debtor flowed partlyfrom the static money supply. There were simply notenough dollars to go around, and as a result, prices wereforced down. In 1870 the currency in circulation foreach person was $19.42; in 1890 it was only $22.67. Yetduring these twenty years, business and industrialactivity, increasing manyfold, had intensified thescramble for available currency.

The forgotten farmers were caught on a treadmill.Despite unremitting toil, they operated year after yearat a loss and lived off their fat as best they could. In avicious circle, their farm machinery increased theiroutput of grain, lowered the price, and drove themeven deeper into debt. Mortgages engulfed home-steads at an alarming rate; by 1890 Nebraska alonereported more than 100,000 farms blanketed with mort-gages. The repeated crash of the sheriff-auctioneer’shammer kept announcing to the world that anothersturdy American farmer had become landless in alanded nation.

Ruinous rates of interest, running from 8 to 40 percent, were charged on mortgages, largely by agentsof eastern loan companies. The windburned sons anddaughters of the sod, who felt that they deserved praisefor developing the country, cried out in despair againstthe loan sharks and the Wall Street octopus.

Farm tenancy rather than farm ownership wasspreading like stinkweed. The trend was especiallymarked in the sharecropping South, where cottonprices also sank dismayingly. By 1880 one-fourth of allAmerican farms were operated by tenants. The UnitedStates was ready to feed the world, but under the newindustrial feudalism, the farmers were about to sinkinto a status suggesting Old World serfdom.

Unhappy Farmers

Even Mother Nature ceased smiling, as her powerfulforces conspired against agriculture. Mile-wide cloudsof grasshoppers, leaving “nothing but the mortgage,”periodically ravaged prairie farms. The terrible cotton-boll weevil was also wreaking havoc in the South bythe early 1890s.

A contemporary farm protest song, “TheKansas Fool,” ran,

The bankers followed us out west;

And did in mortgages invest;

They looked ahead and shrewdly planned,

And soon they’ll have our Kansas land.


The good earth was going sour. Floods added to thewaste of erosion, which had already washed the topsoiloff millions of once-lush southern acres. Expensive fertil-izers were urgently needed. A long succession of droughtsseared the trans-Mississippi West, beginning in the sum-mer of 1887. Whole towns were abandoned. “Going hometo the wife’s folks” and “In God we trusted, in Kansas webusted” were typical laments of many impoverishedfarmers, as they fled their weather-beaten shacks andsun-baked sod houses. One irate “poet” snarled,

Fifty miles to water,A hundred miles to wood,To hell with this damned country,I’m going home for good.

To add to their miseries, the soil-tillers weregouged by their government—local, state, andnational. Their land was overassessed, and they paidpainful local taxes, whereas wealthy easterners couldconceal their stocks and bonds in safe-deposit boxes.High protective tariffs in these years poured profitsinto the pockets of manufacturers. Farmers, on theother hand, had no choice but to sell their low-pricedproducts in a fiercely competitive, unprotected worldmarket, while buying high-priced manufacturedgoods in a protected home market.

The farmers were also “farmed” by the corporationsand processors. They were at the mercy of the harvester

trust, the barbed-wire trust, and the fertilizer trust, all of which could control output and raise prices to extor-tionate levels. Middlemen took a juicy “cut” from theselling price of the goods that the farmers bought, whileoperators pushed storage rates to the ceiling at grainwarehouses and elevators.

In addition, the railroad octopus had the graingrowers in its grip. Freight rates could be so high that thefarmers sometimes lost less if they burned their corn forfuel than if they shipped it. If they raised their voices inprotest, the ruthless railroad operators might let theirgrain spoil in damp places or refuse to provide themwith cars when needed.

Farmers still made up nearly one-half the popula-tion in 1890, but they were hopelessly disorganized.The manufacturers and the railroad barons knew howto combine to promote their interests, and so,increasingly, did industrial workers. But the farmerswere by nature independent and individualistic—dead set against consolidation or regimentation. Noreally effective Carnegie or Gompers arose amongthem to preach the gospel of economic integrationand concentration. They never did organize success-fully to restrict production until forced to by the fed-eral government nearly half a century later, inFranklin Roosevelt’s New Deal days. What they didmanage to organize was a monumental politicaluprising.

Nebraska Homesteaders in Front of Their Sod House, 1887These two brothers and theirfamilies had escaped to Canadafrom the slave South during theCivil War. Returning to the UnitedStates in the 1880s, they tookadvantage of the Homestead Act to stake out farms in CusterCounty, Nebraska.

Agrarian Unrest 615

The Farmers’ GrievancesThis poster from 1875 expressesone of the agrarian radicals’ fundamental premises: that all other walks of life weredependent—or even parasitic—on the indispensable work offarmers. In his famous “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 (see p. 620), Populist presidential candidate William JenningsBryan put it this way: “Burndown your cities and leave our farms, and your cities willspring up again as if by magic;but destroy our farms and thegrass will grow in the streets ofevery city in the country.”

The Farmers Take Their Stand

Agrarian unrest had flared forth earlier, in the Green-back movement shortly after the Civil War. Prices saggedin 1868, and a host of farmers unsuccessfully soughtrelief from low prices and high indebtedness bydemanding an inflation of the currency with papermoney.

The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry—better known as the Grange—was organized in 1867.Its leading spirit was Oliver H. Kelley, a shrewd andenergetic Minnesota farmer then working as a clerk inWashington. Kelley’s first objective was to enhance thelives of isolated farmers through social, educational,and fraternal activities. Farm men and women, cursedwith loneliness in widely separated farmhouses, foundthe Grange’s picnics, concerts, and lectures a godsend.Kelley, a Mason, even found farmers receptive to hismumbo-jumbo of passwords and secret rituals, as wellas his four-ply hierarchy, ranging (for men) fromLaborer to Husbandman and (for women) from Maidto Matron. The Grange spread like an old-time prairiefire and by 1875 claimed 800,000 members, chiefly inthe Midwest and South. Buzzing with gossip, these calicoed and callous folk often met in red school-houses around potbellied stoves.

The Grangers gradually raised their goals fromindividual self-improvement to improvement of thefarmers’ collective plight. In a determined effort toescape the clutches of the trusts, they establishedcooperatively owned stores for consumers and cooper-atively owned grain elevators and warehouses for pro-ducers. Their most ambitious experiment was anattempt to manufacture harvesting machinery, but thisventure, partly as a result of mismanagement, ended infinancial disaster.

Embattled Grangers also went into politics, enjoy-ing their most gratifying success in the grain-growingregions of the upper Mississippi Valley, chiefly in Illinois,Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. There, through statelegislation, they strove to regulate railway rates and thestorage fees charged by railroads and by the operators ofwarehouses and grain elevators. Many of the statecourts, notably in Illinois, were disposed to recognizethe principle of public control of private business for thegeneral welfare. A number of the so-called GrangerLaws, however, were badly drawn, and they were bitterlyfought through the high courts by the well-paid lawyersof the “interests.” Following judicial reverses, mostseverely at the hands of the Supreme Court in the famousWabash decision of 1886 (see p. 538), the Grangers’ influence faded. But their organization has lived on as avocal champion of farm interests, while brightening rurallife with social activities.


Farmers’ grievances likewise found a vent in theGreenback Labor party, which combined the inflation-ary appeal of the earlier Greenbackers with a programfor improving the lot of labor. In 1878, the high-watermark of the movement, the Greenback Laborites polledover a million votes and elected fourteen members ofCongress. In the presidential election of 1880, theGreenbackers ran General James B. Weaver, an oldGranger who was a favorite of Civil War veterans andwho possessed a remarkable voice and bearing. Hespoke to perhaps a half-million citizens in a hundredor so speeches but polled only 3 percent of the totalpopular vote.

Prelude to

Populism

A striking manifestation of rural discontent came throughthe Farmers’ Alliance, founded in Texas in the late 1870s(see p. 523). Farmers came together in the Alliance tosocialize, but more importantly to break the stranglinggrip of the railroads and manufacturers through coop-erative buying and selling. Local chapters spreadthroughout the South and the Great Plains during the1880s, until by 1890 members numbered more than amillion hard-bitten souls.

Unfortunately, the Alliance weakened itself byignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers, share-croppers, and farmworkers. Even more debilitating wasthe Alliance’s exclusion of blacks, who counted fornearly half the agricultural population of the South. Inthe 1880s a separate Colored Farmers’ National Allianceemerged to attract black farmers, and by 1890 member-ship numbered more than 250,000. The long history ofracial division in the South, however, made it difficult forwhite and black farmers to work together in the sameorganization.

Out of the Farmers’ Alliances a new political partyemerged in the early 1890s—the People’s party. Betterknown as the Populists, these frustrated farmers attackedWall Street and the “money trust.” They called for nation-alizing the railroads, telephone, and telegraph; institutinga graduated income tax; and creating a new federal “sub-treasury”—a scheme to provide farmers with loans forcrops stored in government-owned warehouses, wherethey could be held until market prices rose. They alsowanted the free and unlimited coinage of silver—yetanother of the debtors’ demands for inflation that echoedcontinuously throughout the Gilded Age.

Numerous fiery prophets leapt forward to trumpetthe Populist cause. The free coinage of silver struckmany Populists as a cure-all, especially after the circu-lation of an enormously popular pamphlet titled Coin’sFinancial School (1894). Written by William Hope Harvey, it was illustrated by clever woodcuts, one ofwhich depicted the gold ogre beheading the beautifulsilver maiden. In fiction parading as fact, the bookletshowed how the “little professor”—“Coin” Harvey—overwhelmed the bankers and professors of economicswith his brilliant arguments on behalf of free silver.Another notorious spellbinder was red-haired IgnatiusDonnelly of Minnesota, three times elected to Con-gress. The queen of the Populist “calamity howlers” wasMary Elizabeth (“Mary Yellin’”) Lease, a tall, athleticwoman known as the “Kansas Pythoness.” She reportedlydemanded that Kansans should raise “less corn andmore hell.” The big-city New York Evening Post snarled,“We don’t want any more states until we can civilizeKansas.” To many easterners, complaint, not corn, wasrural America’s staple crop.

Mary E. Lease (1853–1933) She was so eloquent as tobe called the “Patrick Henry in Petticoats.”

Populists and Pullman Strikers 617

Yet the Populists, despite their oddities, were not tobe laughed away. They were leading a deadly earnestand impassioned campaign to relieve the farmers’many miseries. Smiles faded from Republican andDemocratic faces alike as countless thousands of Pop-ulists began to sing “Good-bye, My Party, Good-bye.” In1892 the Populists had jolted the traditional parties bywinning several congressional seats and polling morethan 1 million votes for their presidential candidate,James B. Weaver. Racial divisions continued to hobblethe Populists in the South, but in the West their rankswere swelling. Could the People’s party now reachbeyond its regional bases in agrarian America, joinhands with urban workers, and mount a successfulattack on the northeastern citadels of power?

Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike

The panic of 1893 and the severe ensuing depressionstrengthened the Populists’ argument that farmers andlaborers alike were being victimized by an oppressiveeconomic and political system. Ragged armies of theunemployed began marching to protest their plight. Inthe growing hordes of displaced industrial toilers, thePopulists saw potential political allies.

The most famous marcher was “General” Jacob S.Coxey, a wealthy Ohio quarry owner. He set out for

Washington in 1894 with a few score of supporters and aswarm of newspaper reporters. His platform included a demand that the government relieve unemploymentby an inflationary public works program, supported bysome $500 million in legal tender notes to be issued by the Treasury. Coxey himself rode in a carriage withhis wife and infant son, appropriately named Legal Ten-der Coxey, while his tiny “army” tramped along behind,singing,

We’re coming, Grover Cleveland,500,000 strong,

We’re marching on to Washingtonto right the nation’s wrong.

The “Commonweal Army” of Coxeyites finally straggledinto the nation’s capital, but the invasion took on theaspects of a comic opera when “General” Coxey and his“lieutenants” were arrested for walking on the grass.

Elsewhere, violent flare-ups accompanied laborprotests, notably in Chicago. Most dramatic was thecrippling Pullman strike of 1894. Eugene V. Debs, acharismatic labor leader, had helped organize theAmerican Railway Union of about 150,000 members.The Pullman Palace Car Company, which maintained amodel town near Chicago for its employees, was hithard by the depression and cut wages by about one-third, while holding the line on rent for the companyhouses. The workers finally struck—in some placesoverturning Pullman cars—and paralyzed railway traffic

Coxey’s Army Enters theDistrict of Columbia, 1894They are shown here clearinga lock on the Chesapeake andOhio Canal. Jacob SechlerCoxey arrived in the Capitalwith only about 500 men, far short of the 100,000 hepredicted would come tomake a “living petition” of the unemployed.


from Chicago to the Pacific coast. The American Federa-tion of Labor conspicuously declined to support thePullman strikers, thus enhancing the AF of L’s reputationfor “respectability” even while weakening labor’s causeby driving a large wedge into the workers’ ranks.

The turmoil in Chicago was serious but not yet completely out of hand. At least this was the judgmentof Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, a friend of thedowntrodden, who had pardoned the HaymarketSquare anarchists the year before (see p. 552). But U.S.attorney general Richard Olney, an archconservativeand an ex–railroad attorney, urged the dispatch of fed-eral troops. His legal grounds were that the strikers wereinterfering with the transit of the U.S. mail. PresidentCleveland supported Olney with the ringing declaration,

“If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postalcard in Chicago, that card will be delivered.”

To the delight of conservatives, federal troops, bayo-nets fixed, crushed the Pullman strike. Debs was sen-tenced to six months’ imprisonment for contempt of courtbecause he had defied a federal court injunction to ceasestriking. Ironically, the lean labor agitator spent much ofhis enforced leisure reading radical literature, which led tohis later leadership of the socialist movement in America.

Embittered cries of “government by injunction”now burst from organized labor. This was the first timethat such a legal weapon had been used conspicuouslyby Washington to break a strike, and it was all the moredistasteful because defiant workers who were held incontempt could be imprisoned without a jury trial.Signs multiplied that employers were striving to smashlabor unions by court action. Nonlabor elements of thecountry, including the Populists and other debtors,were likewise incensed. They saw in the brutal Pullmanepisode further proof of an unholy alliance betweenbusiness and the courts.

Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan

The smoldering grievances of the long-suffering farmers and the depression-plagued laborers gave omi-

After the Pullman strike collapsed, EugeneDebs (1855–1926) said,

“No strike has ever been lost.”

In 1897 he declared,

“The issue is Socialism versus

Capitalism. I am for Socialism

because I am for humanity.”

The Pullman Strike, 1894Illinois National Guardsmenfire on Pullman Companystrikers, July 7, 1894. Policeclubs and U.S. Army rifles and bayonets finally brokethe back of a strike that halted railroads throughoutthe country.

McKinley Versus Bryan 619

nous significance to the election of 1896. Conservativesof all stripes feared an impending upheaval, whiledown-and-out husbandmen and discontented workerscast about desperately for political salvation. Increasingly,monetary policy—whether to maintain the gold standardor inflate the currency by monetizing silver—loomed as the issue on which the election would turn.

The leading candidate for the Republican presiden-tial nomination in 1896 was former congressmanWilliam McKinley of Ohio, sponsor of the ill-starred tariff bill of 1890 (see p. 523). He had established a creditable Civil War record, having risen to the rank of major; he hailed from the electorally potent state ofOhio; and he could point to long years of honorableservice in Congress, where he had made many friendswith his kindly and conciliatory manner.

As a presidential candidate, McKinley was largelythe creature of a fellow Ohioan, Marcus Alonzo Hanna,

who had made his fortune in the iron business and nowcoveted the role of president maker. “I love McKinley,”he once said. As a wholehearted Hamiltonian, Hannabelieved that a prime function of government was toaid business. Honest, earnest, tough, and direct, hebecame the personification of big industry in politics.He was often caricatured in cartoons, quite unfairly, asa bloated bully in a loud checkered suit with a dollarsign in each square. He believed that in some measureprosperity “trickled down” to the laborer, whose dinnerpail was full when business flourished. Critics assailedthis idea as equivalent to feeding the horses in order tofeed the sparrows.

The hardheaded Hanna, although something of a novice in politics, organized his preconvention cam-paign for McKinley with consummate skill and with aliberal outpouring of his own money. The conventionsteamroller, well lubricated with Hanna’s dollars, nomi-nated McKinley on the first ballot in St. Louis in June1896. The Republican platform cleverly straddled the

McKinley Campaign Headquarters, Chicago, 1896Those few black Americans who could exercise theirright to vote in the 1890s still remained faithful to “the party of Lincoln.”

Crying for Protection, 1896 Uncle Sam is called on in this cartoon to nurse so-called infant industries—some of which had in fact long since grown into vigorous adulthood.


money question but leaned toward hard-money poli-cies. It declared for the gold standard, even thoughMcKinley’s voting record in Congress had been embar-rassingly friendly to silver. The platform also condemnedhard times and Democratic incapacity, while pouringpraise on the protective tariff.

Dissension riddled the Democratic camp. Clevelandno longer led his party. The depression had driven thelast nail into his political coffin. Dubbed “the StuffedProphet,” he was undeniably the most unpopular manin the country. Labor-debtor groups remembered toovividly his intervention in the Pullman strike, the back-stairs Morgan bond deal, and especially his stubbornhard-money policies. Ultraconservative in finance,Cleveland now looked more like a Republican than aDemocrat on the money issue.

Rudderless, the Democratic convention met inChicago in July 1896, with the silverites lusting for victory. Shouting insults at the absent Cleveland, thedelegates refused, by a suicidal vote of 564 to 357, to endorse their own administration. They had the enthu-siasm and the numbers; all they lacked was a leader.

A new Moses suddenly appeared in the person ofWilliam Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Then only thirty-six years of age and known as “the Boy Orator of thePlatte,”* he stepped confidently onto the platformbefore fifteen thousand people. His masterful presencewas set off by a peninsular jaw and raven-black hair. Heradiated honesty, sincerity, and energy.

The convention-hall setting was made to order for amagnificent oratorical effort. A hush fell over the delegatesas Bryan stood before them. With an organlike voice thatrolled into the outer corners of the huge hall, he delivereda fervent plea for silver. Rising to supreme heights of eloquence, he thundered, “We will answer their demandsfor a gold standard by saying to them: ‘You shall not pressdown upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, youshall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’”

The Cross of Gold speech was a sensation. Swept offits feet in a tumultuous scene, the Democratic conven-tion nominated Bryan the next day on the fifth ballot.The platform demanded inflation through the unlimitedcoinage of silver at the ratio of 16 ounces of silver to 1 ofgold, though the market ratio was about 32 to 1. Thismeant that the silver in a dollar would be worth aboutfifty cents.

Democratic “Gold Bugs,” unable to swallow Bryan,bolted their party over the silver issue. A conservativesenator from New York, when asked if he was a Democrat still, reportedly replied, “Yes, I am a Democratstill—very still.” The Democratic minority, includingCleveland, charged that the Populist-silverites hadstolen both the name and the clothes of their party. Theynominated a lost-cause ticket of their own, and many ofthem, including Cleveland, not too secretly hoped for aMcKinley victory.

The Populists now faced a dilemma, because theDemocratic majority had appropriated their mainplank—“16 to 1,” that “heaven-born ratio.” The bulk ofthe Populists, fearing a hard-money McKinley victory,endorsed both “fusion” with the Democrats and Bryanfor president, sacrificing their identity in the mix.Singing “The Jolly Silver Dollar of the Dads,” theybecame in effect the “Demo-Pop” party, though a hand-ful of the original Populists refused to support Bryanand went down with their colors nailed to the mast.

Class Conflict: Plowholders

Versus Bondholders

Mark Hanna smugly assumed that he could make thetariff the focus of the campaign. But Bryan, a dynamo ofenergy, forced the free-trade issue into the backseatwhen he took to the stump in behalf of free silver.Sweeping through 27 states and traveling 18,000 miles,he made nearly 600 speeches—36 in one day—and eveninvaded the East, “the enemy’s country.” Vachel Lindsaycaught the spirit of his oratorical orgy:

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders

from the West.*

Free silver became almost as much a religious as a finan-cial issue. Hordes of fanatical free-silverites hailed Bryanas the messiah to lead them out of the wilderness of debt.They sang “We’ll All Have Our Pockets Lined with Silver”and “No Crown of Thorns, No Cross of Gold.”

*One contemporary sneered that Bryan, like the Platte River in hishome state of Nebraska, was “six inches deep and six miles wide atthe mouth.”

*Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon &Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Poems of VachelLindsay, Revised Edition by Vachel Lindsay. Copyright © 1920 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed 1948 by Elizabeth C.Lindsay.

The Free Silver Campaign 621

Bryan created panic among eastern conservativeswith his threat of converting their holdings overnightinto fifty-cent dollars. The “Gold Bugs” respondedwith their own free and unlimited coinage of verbiage.They vented their alarm in abusive epithets, ringingfrom “fanatic” and “madman” to “traitor” and “mur-derer.” “In God We Trust, with Bryan We Bust,” theRepublicans sneered, while one eastern clergymancried, “That platform was made in Hell.” Widespreadfear of Bryan and the “silver lunacy” enabled “DollarMark” Hanna, now chairman of the RepublicanNational Committee, to shine as a money-raiser. He“shook down” the trusts and plutocrats and piled upan enormous “slush fund” for a “campaign of educa-tion”—or of propaganda, depending on one’s point ofview. Reminding the voters of Cleveland’s “Democraticpanic,” Republicans appealed to the “belly vote” withtheir prize slogan, “McKinley and the Full DinnerPail.” The McKinleyites amassed the most formidable

political campaign chest thus far in American history.At all levels—national, state, and local—it amountedto about $16 million, as contrasted with about $1 mil-lion for the poorer Democrats (roughly “16 to 1”). Withsome justification, the Bryanites accused Hanna of“buying” the election and of floating McKinley into theWhite House on a tidal wave of mud and money.

Bryan’s cyclonic campaign began to lose steam asthe weeks passed. Fear was probably Hanna’s strongestally, as it was Bryan’s worst enemy. Republican busi-nesspeople placed contracts with manufacturers, con-tingent on the election of McKinley. A few factoryowners, with thinly veiled intimidation, paid off theirworkers and told them not to come to work onWednesday morning if Bryan won. Reports also circulated that employers were threatening to pay theiremployees in fifty-cent pieces, instead of in dollars, ifBryan triumphed. Such were some of the “dirty tricks” ofthe “Stop Bryan, Save America” crusade.

Hanna’s campaign methods paid off. On electionday McKinley triumphed decisively. The vote was 271 to 176 in the Electoral College and 7,102,246 to

William Jennings Bryan, Campaigning (Again) in 1908The premier orator of his day, Bryan also became aperennial presidential candidate, running in 1896,1900, and 1908. He lost every time.

The Sacrilegious Candidate A hostile cartoonistmakes sport of Bryan’s notorious Cross of Gold speech in 1896.


6,492,559 in the popular election. Driven by fear andexcitement, an unprecedented outpouring of votersflocked to the polls. McKinley ran strongly in the popu-lous East, where he carried every county of New

England, and in the upper Mississippi Valley. Bryan’sstates, concentrated in the debt-burdened South andthe trans-Mississippi West, boasted more acreage thanMcKinley’s but less population.

The free-silver election of 1896 was perhaps themost significant political turning point since Lincoln’svictories in 1860 and 1864. Despite Bryan’s strength inthe South and West, the results vividly demonstrated hislack of appeal to the unmortgaged farmer and especiallyto the eastern urban laborer. Many wage earners in theEast voted for their jobs and full dinner pails, threatenedas they were by free silver, free trade, and fireless facto-ries. Living precariously on a fixed wage, the factoryworkers had no reason to favor inflation, which was theheart of the Bryanites’ program.

The Bryan-McKinley battle heralded the advent of anew era in American politics. At first glance the electionseemed to be the age-old story of the underprivilegedmany against the privileged few, of the indebted back-country against the wealthier seaboard, of the countryagainst the city, of the agrarians against the industrial-ists, of Main Street against Wall Street, of the nobodiesagainst the somebodies. Yet when Bryan made his evan-gelical appeal to all those supposed foes of the existing

In gold-standard Britain, there was muchrelief over McKinley’s victory. The LondonStandard commented,

”The hopelessly ignorant and savagely

covetous waifs and strays of American

civilization voted for Bryan, but the

bulk of the solid sense, business

integrity, and social stability sided

with McKinley. The nation is to be

heartily congratulated.”

Campaign Gimcracks, 1896These mechanical cards predicted Republican prosperity with McKinleyand economic ruin withBryan.

The Election of 1896 623

social order, not enough of them banded together toform a political majority.

The outcome was instead a resounding victory forbig business, the big cities, middle-class values, andfinancial conservatism. Bryan’s defeat marked the lastserious effort to win the White House with mostly agrar-ian votes. The future of presidential politics lay not onthe farms, with their dwindling population, but in themushrooming cities, with their growing hordes offreshly arriving immigrants.

The smashing Republican victory of 1896 also her-alded a Republican grip on the White House for sixteenconsecutive years—indeed, for all but eight of the nextthirty-six years. McKinley’s election thus imparted anew character to the American political system. Thelong reign of Republican political dominance that itushered in was accompanied by diminishing voter par-ticipation in elections, the weakening of party organiza-tions, and the fading away of issues like the moneyquestion and civil-service reform, which came to bereplaced by concern for industrial regulation and thewelfare of labor. Scholars have dubbed this new politicalera the period of the “fourth party system.”*

Republican Stand-pattism Enthroned

An eminently “safe” McKinley took the inaugural oath in1897. With his impeccable white vest, he seemed never

to perspire, even in oppressively muggy Washington.Though a man of considerable ability, he was an ear-to-the-ground politician who seldom got far out of linewith majority opinion. His cautious, conservativenature caused him to shy away from the flaming bannerof reform. Business was given a free rein, and the trusts,which had trusted him in 1896, were allowed to developmore mighty muscles without serious restraints.

Almost as soon as McKinley took office, the tariffissue, which had played second fiddle to silver in the “Battle of ’96,” quickly forced itself to the fore. The currentWilson-Gorman law was not raising enough revenue tocover the annual Treasury deficits, and the Republicantrusts thought that they had purchased the right to addi-

WASH.4

ORE.4

CALIF.8

(+1 Dem.)

NEV.3

IDAHO3

MONTANA3

WYO.3

UTAH3 COLO.

4

ARIZONATERR.

S.D.4

KANSAS10

OKLAHOMATERR.

MICH.14

N.Y.36

N.D.3 MINN.

9

IOWA13NEBR.

8

MO.17

ARK.8

LA.8

TEXAS15

NEW MEXICOTERR.

MISS.9

ALA.11

GA.13

FLA.4

TENN. 12

N.C.11

S.C.9

VA.12

W.VA.6

PA.32

OHIO23

IND.15

ILL.24

WISC.12

KY 12(+1 Dem.)

ME.6

N.H.4

VT.4

MASS.15

R.I. 4

CONN. 6N.J. 10

DEL. 3

MD. 8

McKinley—Republican

Bryan—Democratic

Presidential Election of 1896 (with electoral vote by state)This election tolled the death knell of the Gilded Age political party system, with its razor-close elections,strong party loyalties, and high voterturnouts. For years after 1896,Republicans predominated, and citizens showed a declining interestin either joining parties or voting.

*The first party system, marked by doubts about the very legitimacyof parties, embraced the Federalist-Republican clashes of the 1790sand early 1800s. The second party system took shape after 1828 withthe emergence of mass-based politics in the Jacksonian era and pit-ted Democrats against Whigs. The third party system, beginning in1860, was characterized by the precarious equilibrium betweenRepublicans and Democrats, as well as the remarkably high electoralparticipation rates that endured from the end of the Civil War toMcKinley’s election. The fourth party system is described above. Thefifth party system emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the1930s, initiating a long period of Democratic ascendancy. Each “sys-tem,” with the conspicuous exception of the fifth, lasted about threeand one-half decades—a cyclical regularity that has long intriguedpolitical scientists and historians. Debate still rages about whetherthe country passed into a sixth party system with Richard Nixon’selection in 1968— or a seventh with George W. Bush’s decisive victoryin 2004.


tional tariff protection by their lush contributions toHanna’s war chest. In due course the Dingley Tariff Bill wasjammed through the House in 1897, under the poundinggavel of the rethroned “Czar” Reed. The proposed newrates were high, but not high enough to satisfy thepaunchy lobbyists, who once again descended upon theSenate. Over 850 amendments were tacked onto the over-burdened bill. The resulting piece of patchwork finallyestablished the average rates at 46.5 percent, substantiallyhigher than the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894and in some categories even higher than the McKinley Actof 1890. (See the chart in the Appendix.)

Prosperity, long lurking around the corner, began toreturn with a rush in 1897, the first year of McKinley’sterm. The depression of 1893 had run its course, andfarm prices rose. Paint-thirsty midwestern barns blos-somed in new colors, and the wheels of industryresumed their hum. Republican politicians, like crowing

roosters believing they caused the sun to rise, claimedcredit for attracting the sunlight of prosperity.

With the return of prosperity, the money issue thathad overshadowed politics since the Civil War graduallyfaded away. The Gold Standard Act of 1900, passed overlast-ditch silverite opposition, provided that the papercurrency be redeemed freely in gold. Nature and sciencegradually provided an inflation that the “Gold Bug” Easthad fought so frantically to prevent. Electrifying discover-ies of new gold deposits in Canada’s fabled Klondike, aswell as in Alaska, South Africa, and Australia, brought hugequantities of gold onto world markets, as did the perfect-ing of the cheap cyanide process for extracting gold fromlow-grade ore. Moderate inflation thus took care of thecurrency needs of an explosively expanding nation, as itscirculatory system greatly improved. The tide of “silverheresy” rapidly receded, and the “Popocratic” fish wereleft gasping high and dry on a golden-sanded beach.

Chronology

c. 1700- New Indian peoples move onto 1800 Great Plains

1858 Pikes Peak gold rush

1859 Nevada Comstock Lode discovered

1862 Homestead Act

1864 Sand Creek massacreNevada admitted to Union

1867 National Grange organized

1876 Battle of the Little BighornColorado admitted to the Union

1877 Nez Percé Indian War

1881 Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century of Dishonor

1884 Federal government outlaws Indian Sun Dance

1885-

1890 Local chapters of Farmers’ Alliance formed

1887 Dawes Severalty Act

1889 Oklahoma opened to settlement

1889- North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana,1890 Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming

admitted to Union

1890 Census Bureau declares frontier line endedEmergence of People’s party (Populists)Battle of Wounded Knee

1892 Populist party candidate James B. Weaver polls more than 1 million votes in presidential election

1893 Frederick Jackson Turner publishes “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

1894 “Coxey’s Army” marches on WashingtonPullman strike

1896 Utah admitted to UnionMcKinley defeats Bryan for presidency

1897 Dingley Tariff Act

1900 Gold Standard Act

1907 Oklahoma admitted to Union

1924 Indians granted U.S. citizenship

1934 Indian Reorganization Act

For more than half a century, the Turner thesis dom-inated historical writing about the West. In his

famous essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontierin American History,” historian Frederick JacksonTurner argued that the frontier experience moldedboth region and nation. Not only the West, Turnerinsisted, but the national character had been uniquelyshaped by the westward movement. Pioneers hadbrought the raw West into the embrace of civilization.And the struggle to overcome the hazards of the west-ern wilderness—including distance, deserts, drought,and Indians—had transformed Europeans into tough,inventive, and self-reliant Americans.

Turner’s thesis raised a question that Americansfound especially intriguing in 1893. Just three yearsearlier, the superintendent of the census declaredthat the frontier, defined as a zone with little or nosettled population, had closed forever. What newforces, Turner now asked, would shape a distinctiveAmerican national character, now that the testingground of the frontier had been plowed and tamed?

Turner’s hypothesis that the American characterwas forged in the western wilderness is surely amongthe most provocative statements ever made aboutthe formative influences on the nation’s develop-ment. But as the frontier era recedes ever further intothe past, scholars are less persuaded that Turner’sthesis adequately explains the national character.American society is still conspicuously different fromEuropean and other cultures, even though Turner’sfrontier disappeared more than a century ago.

Modern scholars charge that Turner based histhesis on several questionable assumptions.Historian David J. Weber, for example, suggests thatthe line of the frontier did not define the quaveringedge of “civilization” but marked the boundarybetween diverse cultures, each with its own claims tolegitimacy and, indeed, to legitimate possession ofthe land. The frontier should therefore be understoodnot as the place where “civilization” triumphed over

“savagery,” but as the principal site of interactionbetween those cultures.

Several so-called New Western historians takethis argument still further. Scholars such as PatriciaNelson Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worstersuggest that the cultural and ecological damageinflicted by advancing “civilization” must be reck-oned with in any final accounting of what the pio-neers accomplished. These same scholars insist thatthe West did not lose its regional identity after thefrontier line was no longer recognizable in 1890. TheWest, they argue, is still a unique part of the nationalmosaic, a region whose history, culture, and identityremain every bit as distinctive as those of NewEngland or the Old South.

But where Turner saw the frontier as the princi-pal shaper of the region’s character, the New Westernhistorians emphasize the effects of ethnic and racialconfrontation, topography, climate, and the roles ofgovernment and big business as the factors that havemade the modern West. The New Western historiansthus reject Turner’s emphasis on the triumphal civi-lizing of the wilderness. As they see the matter,European and American settlers did not tame theWest, but rather conquered it, by suppressing theNative American and Hispanic peoples who had pre-ceded them into the region. But those conquestswere less than complete, so the argument goes, andthe West therefore remains, uniquely amongAmerican regions, an unsettled arena of commin-gling and competition among those groups.Moreover, in these accounts the West’s distinctivelychallenging climate and geography yielded to humanhabitation not through the efforts of heroic individ-ual pioneers, but only through massive corporate—and especially federal government—investments intransportation systems (like the transcontinentalrailroad) and irrigation projects (like the watering ofCalifornia’s Central Valley). Such developments stillgive western life its special character today.

Was the West Really “Won”?

625

For further reading, see the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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