Joaquin Murietta. From the Sacramento Steamer, April 22, 1853. Author’s collection.
Juan Cortina. Drawing by C. E. H. Bonwill, 1864. Library of Congress.
In the valley of the Rio Grande in Texas, where Tejanos long remained a majority, discontent moved beyond social banditry into guerrilla warfare. The Texas Rangers, an irregular force originating during the Texas rebellion, administered the law in south Texas, often through assassination and lynching. The Rangers considered Mexicans their natural enemies. “I can maintain a better stomach at the killing of a Mexican than at the crushing of a body louse,” a Ranger boasted in the 1850s. Such arrogance and bullying inspired Tejano counterpunchers, including Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, son of a respected ranchero family and veteran of the Mexican War. One day in 1859, while Cortina was conducting business in the predominantly Anglo town of Brownsville, he saw the marshal pistol-whipping an old vaquero who worked for his family. Jumping on his horse and charging forward, Cortina fired a shot and wounded the marshal; then, swinging the old man up behind him, he galloped out of town to the cheers of Tejanos on the street. When the authorities filed charges of attempted murder, Cortina and seventy-five supporters returned to free all the prisoners in the jail, killing four Brownsvillians in the process, two of them Anglos with notorious reputations for abusing Mexicans.29
Proclaiming the “sacred right of self preservation,” Cortina issued a broadside to Tejanos. “You have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts,” he declared, and “to me is entrusted the work of breaking the chains of your slavery.” During the subsequent Cortina War, several hundred Mexican rebels destroyed the property of dozens of Anglos. Cortina was finally chased into Mexico by federal troops under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, but for the next two decades he continued to harass the empire of liberty, and Tejanos celebrated him in corridos, the folk ballads of the border region.30
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between two nations, drew a line between them, and granted American citizenship to Mexican residents. But violence persisted well into the twentieth century. From Texas to California and beyond, thousands of ethnic Mexicans were lynched by vigilantes and mobs from 1848 to 1928, the date of the last recorded instance of an extralegal execution of a Mexican American. The mob violence, Ranger atrocities, and Mexican American retaliatory strikes suggested the unsettled character of the region. Borders divided people and drew them together. Blood flowed as powerful men tried to etch and enforce lines of difference and inequality in a borderland that fused the destinies of the humans living along its many seams.
. . .
Wars tend to alienate people. To motivate their populations to kill on a massive scale, nations cultivate the otherness of their opponents. They dehumanize their enemies, calling them animals, barbarians, and exemplars of moral rot and insufferable habits. A society marinating in slavery and bigotry, the nineteenth-century United States specialized in deploying race to discredit its foes. But international combat and ideological racism were not the only engines of difference in the American West. Religion fractured nineteenth-century North Americans. Anti-Catholicism fueled the Mexican War and its aftermath, and Protestants contributed their own intramural schisms to the smorgasbord of churches, sects, and belief systems. Religious difference eroded Americans’ sense of union. When they surveyed the religious landscape, they saw cracks and tumult, prompting intense worry about the future of the country.
No group kicked up more anxiety than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons, as they were popularly known, were a uniquely American religious sect. They were also uniquely western. In 1847 thousands of Mormons left the Mississippi valley headed for the isolated desert country of the Great Basin, between the Rockies and Sierra Nevada. They emigrated to escape violence and persecution. The West promised a haven outside the United States where they could be different in peace.
Joseph Smith was the founder of the new sect. A seeker and a visionary, Smith claimed to have discovered, near his home in upstate New York, a set of hammered golden plates covered with strange hieroglyphs. With divine assistance, he said, he had translated those plates into the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. The text told the tale of one of the lost tribes of Israel that had wandered to the shores of the New World. Eventually they were blessed by the arrival of Jesus, who after his crucifixion had come to found his true church in America. In the fullness of time, however, decadence overwhelmed the tribe, and it fell into warring factions, which fought a climactic battle reminiscent of Armageddon. The few survivors were the ancestors of the American Indians. The Book of Mormon, with its references to America as a “land of promise,” offered what historian Jan Shipps calls a “powerful and provocative synthesis of biblical experience and the American dream.”31
In those days, upstate New York boiled over with religious enthusiasm. In this churning environment, which brought forth prophets and sects in bunches, Smith soon built a following of several hundred. The communitarian emphasis of the Latter-Day Saints appealed to many people vexed by the isolation and competition of market society that pitted neighbors against neighbors and churches against churches. Smith founded an exclusively Mormon community at Kirkland, Ohio, as well as a satellite settlement in western Missouri where he hoped to build a new “Kingdom of God.” Pooling labor and resources, and distributing goods according to the needs of the members, the Mormons hammered out doctrines that placed the group above the individual. The Mormons kept their distance from “gentile” Americans, and Smith and his inner circle ruled the group as a theocracy. In Missouri, surrounding farmers grew suspicious of the Mormons’ economic collectivism and political authoritarianism, especially when it was practiced by antislavery Yankees, and the Mormons soon found themselves under attack by hostile vigilantes. Smith responded by organizing his men into military companies, which only inflamed the conflict. In 1838 there was an explosion of violence, encouraged by Missouri’s governor, that drove Smith and his followers from the state.
The Mormons reassembled on the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois. With renewed vigor they set to building once again, and their new community—which Smith christened Nauvoo—soon became one of the state’s largest towns, with more than fifteen thousand residents. Smith oversaw the construction of an enormous temple and organized a large military force known as the Nauvoo Legion. He announced his intention to run for president of the United States and with his closest advisers sketched out a plan for a fabulous Mormon empire in the American West. But trouble followed the Saints, and the Mormons were soon battling with their fellow Americans once again.
In the eyes of many Illinoisans, it was their practice of “plural marriage” that dragged the Mormons outside the perimeter of white Protestant sympathy. For years there had been rumors of sexual improprieties among the Mormon elite, and the evidence suggests that Smith and his inner circle had been practicing polygamy since the early 1840s. Radical change defined the age as expanding commerce and industry reshuffled older ways of living. Utopian reformers began to experiment with different ways of organizing social life, and especially the relationships between men and women. The Shakers advocated celibacy, the Oneidans—a utopian community in New York—preached “free love.” But plural marriage was a big leap into alternative ways of living, and many Mormons declined to make the jump. When a group of disaffected members published a broadside condemning plural marriage and other secret practices of the Mormon elite, Smith had their press destroyed by the Nauvoo Legion. The dissidents pressed charges, and state authorities arrested Smith and his brother, Hyrum, for destruction of private property. In June 1844, as they awaited trial, an enraged anti-Mormon mob broke into the jail and murdered both men.
The murder of Joseph and Hiram Smith. Lithograph by G. W. Fasel, 1851. Library of Congress.
For the subsequent two years, the Mormons endured a terrible struggle as factions jostled for control of the sect. Eventu
ally Brigham Young, one of the most talented of Smith’s loyal elite, seized leadership. A supporter of the Mormon vision of a western empire, Young laid plans for an exodus that would finally remove the Saints from harm’s way. The great migration began in early 1846. As the Mormons evacuated Nauvoo, hostile mobs bombarded the town with cannon, destroying the great temple, the proudest of Smith’s achievements. The Saints first moved to temporary winter quarters near Omaha, Nebraska. Then, in the spring of 1847, several thousand set out on the Overland Trail, keeping to the north side of the Platte to avoid conflict with other migrating Americans. Crossing the plains and the mountains, they arrived that fall at the Great Salt Lake, where Young determined to build a permanent refuge. By 1852 more than ten thousand people were residing in the new Mormon utopia of Salt Lake City, irrigating the desert and making it bloom.
. . .
Brigham Young used the opportunity of a forced migration to seize the leadership of his church and steer its development. In the end, ethnic cleansing may have empowered the Latter-Day Saints. At the very least, the process of removal kept their movement together and contributed to the migrants’ sense of being a chosen people.
American Indians, by contrast, were mostly weakened by their ordeal of removal, largely because they were denied the right to determine their own fate. The principal agent in their western migration was a federal government with fundamentally divided loyalties. In 1849 Congress, in an attempt to govern the territory acquired from Mexico, created the Department of the Interior, consolidating in one agency the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the General Land Office and soon adding the Territorial Office. The federal department charged with protecting Indian rights thus also became responsible for assessing the value of their homelands and distributing it to settlers, creating new territories and states. That this did not strike Americans as an absurd contradiction speaks volumes about the attitude of the government.
Wide open, dry, and blistering, hostile to pigs and corn, the Great Plains were hardly a solace to eastern Indian nations used to growing things in humid environments. Despite the daunting challenges they presented, the western lands would at least be the Indians’ in perpetuity, and both native peoples and emigrant Indians signed federal treaties promising to safeguard their homelands “for as long as the grass grows and the waters run.” But the geopolitical reality of continentalism invalidated this premise. With new territory on the Pacific coast, the midsection of the continent suddenly became a region binding a nation instead of acting as an outlying dumping ground. Already thousands of Americans were traveling across the Overland Trail to reach Oregon and California. Few Americans claimed land or built homes at this early date, yet their travel exacted a cost. Wagon trains consumed the cottonwoods of the river bottoms for campfires, turning to ashes the strips of bark Indian equestrians used to keep their horses alive through the winter and destroying the windbreaks bison huddled under to survive blizzards. The immigrants grazed their livestock on the crops of native farmers and hunted bison and antelope by the thousands. They blundered into conflicts with Indian hunting parties or sometimes with war parties battling with other native warriors for access to hunting territories. “How are we to develop, cherish, and protect our immense interests and possessions on the Pacific, with a vast wilderness fifteen hundred miles in breadth, filled with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication?” asked Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. “The Indian barrier must be removed.”32
Fort Laramie. Painting by Alfred Jacob Miller, 1838. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
In the 1850s the United States negotiated treaties that reconfigured the Indian Country. In 1851 federal officials called on the tribes of the northern plains to send delegates to a conference at Fort Laramie on the North Platte River. More than twelve thousand Indians gathered to watch leaders from the Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Assiniboines, Mandans, and Arikaras negotiate with the Americans. In exchange for annuities to compensate for lost game, tribal leaders granted the United States the right to establish posts and roads across the plains. In 1853 the tribes of the southern plains—including the Southern Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas—agreed to similar provisions in the Treaty of Fort Atkinson, which secured the Santa Fe Trail for Americans. These agreements granted American travelers freedom of movement and presaged the end of a meaningful Indian Country by placing limits on native crossings.
Nomadism frustrated the Americans’ sense of order and control. They pressed the plains’ bison hunters and horse growers to agree to territorial boundaries and to stay within them, hinting at the reservation system that in coming years would become the hallmark of federal Indian policy. Blood would flow on both sides as the colonial impulse to keep people in place battled the nomadic compulsion to move freely.
. . .
The American West challenged the federal government. With Oregon, Texas, California, and the new Southwest, the unorganized territory of the nation amounted to nearly half of all the country’s land. In this vast region, the federal government would assume unprecedented authority over the next forty years. Federal armies would fight native peoples, federal engineers would survey land, and federal bureaucrats would administer territories. By exercising power in the West, argues historian Richard White, the federal government greatly expanded its presence in the everyday lives of all Americans. In the federal system, states counter balanced the powers of the central government. “The West provided an arena for the expansion of federal powers that was initially available nowhere else in the country,” says White. “The West itself served as the kindergarten of the American state.”33
Still, before the state could be schooled in the West, the nation had to endure a bitter divorce. The Mexican War opened a divisive and violent new conflict on the question of slavery’s extension that led directly to the Civil War. The West launched the sectional crises that ended the Union, and the consequences of a war that barely touched the region boomeranged back in full force once the conflict was over. During the Civil War the size and power of the federal government grew exponentially. Following secession, the Republican Party seized control of Congress and enacted key western laws that had been blocked by southern opposition. These laws partnered the federal government with industrial capitalism, a union itself forged in the heat of battle as the North used its manufacturing prowess to break the South. When the United States government granted huge swaths of land and issued low-interest bonds to finance a privately owned transcontinental railroad, it asserted new powers, performed new functions, and used new mechanisms it learned during the war. The West may have been the kindergarten of the American state, but the Civil War bulked the toddler up and supplied it with a gang of arm-twisting friends with names like Jay Cooke, Leland Stanford, and John D. Rockefeller.
The sectional controversy bloomed in the first months of the Mexican War when Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that applied the antislavery restriction of the Northwest Ordinance to the land acquired from Mexico: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” The debate over what became known as the Wilmot Proviso shattered the expansionist coalition. The amendment passed the House, but southerners in the Senate blocked it. The Compromise of 1850—actually a series of bills passed by shifting coalitions—finally broke the impasse. California, which rejected slavery in its own state constitution in 1849, was admitted as a free state, skipping the territorial interlude altogether. New Mexico and Utah territories were organized without restrictions on slavery, the residents of each territory left to decide the question themselves in good time, a solution the Democrats called “popular sovereignty.” As a further sop to southerners, bitterly disappointed over California, the nation’s fugitive slave law was significantly strengthened.34
But the peace of 1850 was short-lived, broken only four years later when Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed
a bill to organize the old Louisiana Purchase territory beyond the Missouri River into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Eager to promote a transcontinental railroad with a terminus in his home state, Douglas proposed abandoning the old Missouri Compromise line to garner votes from southern Democrats. Instead, he argued, the principal of popular sovereignty should decide the issue.
Nebraska was considered too far north for slavery. But slave owners in adjacent Missouri saw Kansas as a prize they might grab, and soon the prairie became a killing field where men took sides and fought for their uncompromising beliefs. Proslavery militias crossed the border to battle heavily armed abolitionist settlers from New England. “Kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory,” advised Missouri senator and militia leader David Rice Atchison. In the spring of 1856, a “posse” of eight hundred proslavery Missourians invaded antislavery Lawrence, Kansas, demolishing the two newspaper offices, plundering shops and homes, and killing one man. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts condemned this “Crime against Kansas,” and in response to this “insult,” he received a savage beating from a proslavery colleague on the Senate floor. When abolitionist settler John Brown learned of the assault, he vowed to “fight fire with fire.” In an act designed to “strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people,” he and four of his sons seized five peaceful proslavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and laid open their skulls with broadswords.35
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