As the struggle for the Union concluded in the East and war-weary soldiers clamored to be sent home to their families, it became difficult for the U.S. Army to find volunteers to fight Indians in the West. Congress sanctioned the recruitment of soldiers from the ranks of Confederate prisoners of war and authorized the formation of the African American Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries and Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, the famous Buffalo Soldiers—as they were christened by the Indians, in reference to the texture of the soldiers’ hair. The black troops were segregated and paid significantly less than white soldiers, but they compiled an extraordinary record for discipline, courage, and high morale; over the next quarter-century fourteen troopers won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Thus, in 1865, regiments of Yankee veterans, “White-washed Rebs,” and former slaves joined together to keep Indians on reservations by punishing the “hostiles” who left them. The Americans had managed to create a frontier of inclusion through exclusion.
Ralph Morrison, murdered and scalped on the plains of western Kansas, 1868. Photograph by William Soule. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
FURTHER READING
Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice, The Old Southwest, 1795–1830: Frontiers in Conflict (1996)
Brian Delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (2009)
William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966)
Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (2012)
Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (1968)
Albert L. Hurtado, John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier (2008)
Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003)
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013)
David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987)
Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (2008)
John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (1979)
Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (1993)
7
Machine
Between the end of the Mexican War and the end of World War I, the American West jumped categories. Observers have described this transition variously as proceeding from frontier to region, free to settled, open to closed, mobile to permanent, exuberant to rational, mixed to monochrome, primitive to modern. Western people, places, and animals were incorporated into larger entities, organizations, and relationships. The process began in the mid-nineteenth century as the national economy entered a period of sustained industrial growth. The nation developed—building canals, railroads, and telegraphs, attracting immigrant workers, legalizing corporations, and erecting hierarchies of wealth and class—while it simultaneously settled the West. The twin movements fueled each other. Western colonization supplied raw materials and provided new markets for industrial capitalism. The West helped to build the nation as the nation built the West.
It would be a mistake to attach a single, unidirectional storyline to what transpired. In many ways industrial capitalism introduced yet more chaos and conflict into locales that already had plenty. Colonization prompted booms and busts, and westerners suffered through the vertigo that came with riding the huge swells and valleys of cyclical economics. Industrial capitalism created astonishing monuments to human ingenuity and labor in the West—railroads that crossed deserts and tunneled through mountains, underground mines that honeycombed the earth, cattle drives that turned bison habitats into bovine paradises, and wheat fields that stretched for miles. These accomplishments also produced men of great wealth and power, men like Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, James J. Hill, Henry Villard, John D. Rockefeller, George Hearst, Levi Strauss, and Charles Goodnight. But don’t give them too much credit for making the modern West. In the words of historian Richard White, these captains of industries were “not that smart.” They failed as often as they succeeded and often displayed a remarkable lack of insight and mastery over themselves and others, much less the universe. For White, their shortcomings raise an important question about modernity: “How, when powerful people can on close examination seem so ignorant and inept; how, when so much work is done stupidly, shoddily, haphazardly, and selfishly, how, then does the modern world function at all?”1
WESTERN RAILROADS
Between 1849 and 1920, the American West was aligned with impersonal large-scale organizations. The federal state exited the Civil War greatly enlarged and empowered, and it grew even more powerful administering the people and resources of the West. Yet the national government paled in comparison to some corporations, especially the railroads, the first truly large-scale economic organizations in American history. The government and the corporations twisted around each other like a double helix. Indeed, the primary skill of many a western tycoon was manipulating the national political process to secure profits and kneecap rivals. The power of these men and organizations was very real and often very dangerous. The wealthy killed people, not necessarily with their own hands, but through their partnership with the army and police forces of the federal state. Yet this power was never total. People resisted, squeezing their own triggers or organizing their own large-scale organizations in labor unions, farmers’ alliances, and populist political parties. Squabbles and bumbling defined the industrial West along with technological marvels and titanic undertakings. The region resembled a runaway train more than a well-planned and regulated colony. It pulled into modernity, but only after a hellishly wild ride.
. . .
The exuberant origins of the West’s major industries—mining, lumbering, railroading, ranching, and farming—suggested none of the sober, top-down management and efficiency of supposedly mature capitalist undertakings. The new era began with the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada of California on January 24, 1848. People rushed west in an emotional state described in the language of disease. They had caught a fever and made decisions in a state of delirium. The California Gold Rush epitomized the irrationality of western mining booms, but all the other industries also had their wacky moments. The rushes, frenzies, bubbles, and fevers that gripped millions and laid the foundation for the region’s economic development were an essential part of modernization. The region was crazed from the start.
John Sutter, a Swiss-born impresario with a huge Spanish land grant along the Sacramento River, attempted to suppress reports of the discovery of gold in a mill race being dug by his employees, but the news reached San Francisco in May. The California Star denounced the stories as “a sham, a superb take-in as was ever got up to guzzle the gullible,” but within days the town had been emptied of shovel-ready men. The cry of gold quickly spread throughout the territory. One man described the effect of the news: “A frenzy seized my soul. Piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye with their rich appliances; thousands of slaves, bowing to my beck and call; myriads of fair virgins contending with each other for my love, were among the fancies of my fevered imagination. The Rothschilds, Girards, and Astors appeared to me but poor people. In short, I had a very violent attack of Gold Fever.” Editors suspended publication of their newspapers, and city councils adjourned for months. Californios, American and Mexican settlers, and indigenous Indians poured into the Sierra foothills.2
Fanning outward, they learned that the mother lode of gold ore was contained in a vein of quartz rock that stretched for more than a hundred miles along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada range. Icy streams cut and eroded the rock, washing out the gold and depositing it in the alluvial sands of the rivers. A man needed little knowledge and minimal sk
ill to swish the sand in a flat pan with enough water to wash away the lighter ores, leaving behind the heavier gold grains at the bottom. But the work was backbreaking, and the icy waters could quickly bring on a nasty case of rheumatism. This was known as placer mining, and during the summer of 1848 many men struck a bonanza. Those were Spanish terms, placera meaning alluvial sand, bonanza translated as rich ore, suggesting the critical role the Mexican miners played in educating the first rushers. At first there were plenty of streams for all who came, and the forty-eighters told stories of panning gold worth thousands of dollars in only a few days. A territorial report estimated that ten million dollars was taken out of Sierra streams that first year.
One of the first depictions of the California Gold Rush. Lithograph, 1849. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
In early December 1848, President Polk kicked off a global rush to California when he confirmed the discovery in his State of the Union address. His announcement hit while the country was still awash with thousands of dislocated and unsettled veterans of the Mexican War, not only in the United States but in Mexico as well. In Europe, residents of the capital cities were recovering from the revolutions of 1848, which had pushed a fearful establishment into severely repressive measures. In Ireland, rural people were in flight from a blight on potatoes, which supplied the food of the masses. In China, people were pushed from their homeland by peasant rebellions and the British-sponsored Opium Wars. By slim clippers around Cape Horn, by square-rigged ships from Hawaii, Australia, and China, over the Isthmus of Panama and across the plains and mountains, tens of thousands of eager men jostled into California.
There their fevered dreams hit rock walls. The easily obtained placer gold soon ran thin, and the miner’s take had been drastically reduced before the first of the forty-niners arrived. The big moneymakers of the Gold Rush were the men and women who supplied the miners with food, clothes, equipment, and entertainment. Levi Strauss, a young Jewish dry goods merchant from New York, made his fortune by manufacturing the durable canvas and denim pants (“levis”) that became standard-issue work duds. “I find that all shrewd calculating men,” Henry Kent noted soon after arriving in California, “get into other business besides mining.”3
Placer mining gave way to quartz mining, which required the application of industrial processes to extract the gold from the surrounding quartz. In 1852, only four years after the initial discovery, 108 crushing mills were pounding out the ores that time and the river had not yet reached. As early as 1853, men were employing high-pressured jets of water to flush mountains of alluvial deposits into rivers. “The effect of this continuous stream of water coming with such force must be seen to be appreciated,” wrote a horrified observer, for “whatever it struck it tore away earth, gravel and boulders. . . . It is impossible to conceive of anything more desolate, more utterly forbidding, than a region which has been subjected to this hydraulic mining treatment.” Crushing and hydraulic operations required large capital investments as well as substantial labor forces, so the disillusioned men who had rushed across the continent or sailed across the oceans to get rich quick were forced to go to work for wages. Mining ceased to be an individual pursuit and became a corporate enterprise. “I think all of the old mining ground that is now called worked out will yet pay millions of dollars by working them systematically,” wrote miner Seldon Goff in 1850. “Capitalists will take hold of it and make money out of it.”4
The California experience provided the lodestone for the exploitation of the Far West in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mineral rushes scattered migrants across the West, breaking the pattern of contiguous territorial absorption that had previously defined the nation’s expansion. Mining shot-gunned people across the map, sending them into remote deserts and high mountain valleys where no right-minded farmer would go. The census of 1850 revealed the pattern that would characterize the industrial West: clusters of settlement separated by hundreds of miles of undeveloped territory. From California, prospectors spread out, making a series of strikes that spawned a seemingly endless round of rushes: the Fraser River of British Columbia in 1858; the Colorado Rockies west of the settlement of Denver and the Washoe country of Nevada in 1859; Idaho and Montana in 1860 and 1862; the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in 1876; Leadville, Colorado, and Tombstone, Arizona, in 1877; the Coeur d’Alene region of Idaho in 1883; and, closing out the era, the northern Yukon country of Canada in 1896, quickly spreading to Nome and Fairbanks, Alaska. Each rush created new isolated centers of population.
Hydraulic mining in California. Photograph by Lawrence and Houseworth, c. 1860. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Practically every rush also presented the familiar kaleidoscope of lonely prospectors with their mules and pans, crowds of jostling men of every conceivable nationality, jerry-built saloons and stores clustered along muddy streets, prostitutes and dance-hall girls, outlaws, claim jumpers, and vigilance committees—all soon followed by stamp mills and smelters, slag heaps and underground burrows, company towns and labor unions, leading finally to strikes with the fist instead of the shovel. Mining added a significant dimension to the social, economic, and imaginative development of the West.
. . .
The California Gold Rush epitomized the splintering effect of industrial colonization. American miners claimed special rights and privileges due to their gender, race, and nationality. California, they argued, belonged to the white citizens of the United States. Yet Gold Rush society was composed of a polyglot collection of nationalities. Louisa Amelia Clappe, who wrote observant letters to eastern newspapers under the pseudonym Dame Shirley, walked through the mining camp called Indian Bar in the Sierras and overheard conversations in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Kanakan (Hawaiian), as well as various American Indian languages. The camp, she wrote, was “a perambulating picture gallery, illustrative of national variety.”5
But for the lapse of a few years, of course, American citizens would have been the foreigners. In the California mining regions, however, there had been no previously settled Californio population, and with the flood of forty-niners, Americans instantly formed a majority. But some fifteen to twenty thousand Latino miners were not far behind—Californios and Mexicans, as well as Peruvians and Chileans. Many were experienced placer miners and in demand as technical advisers. It was one of the few glimmers of interethnic cooperation.
As it became evident that not everyone was going to get rich in the goldfields, race fused with claims to ownership of the land and its resources. “Mexicans have no business in this country,” a reader wrote the Stockton Times. “The men were made to be shot at, and the women were made for our purposes. I’m a white man—I am! A Mexican is pretty near black. I hate all Mexicans.” The influx of expert Mexican miners from Sonora intensified hostilities. They knew where to look and how to extract the gold. Americans learned from them, wrote English observer William Kelly, but “as soon as [one] got an inkling of the system, with peculiar bad taste and ingenious feeling he organized a crusade against the obliging strangers.”6
The state backed the crusaders. In January 1849, the military governor of California issued an order warning foreigners that they were mining “in direct violation of the laws.” There were, in fact, no such laws. Indeed, until the federal government formally opened the public domain to private mining in 1866, practically every miner in the West was an illegal trespasser. But the order sanctioned the white vigilantes who were enacting their own racial codes in the diggings. The mass expulsions of Mexicans began in the spring of 1850 when the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners’ Tax, a prohibitive monthly levy of twenty dollars on all “aliens.” Over the next several months, mobs of American miners accompanied tax assessors on their rounds, collecting the tax from Mexican miners who could pay and driving the rest away. Ramon Jil Navarro, a Chilean forty-niner who worked a valuable claim near the Mokelumne River with a group of his cou
ntrymen, awoke one morning to find notices tacked on the pines and oaks notifying all “foreigners” to abandon the country. A few days later a mob of Americans descended on his camp. They “despoiled every man of everything of value he had on his person,” Navarro wrote, “then they demolished each house, not leaving a single wall standing, but taking care to steal the canvas that covered the roofs.” Although Navarro’s comrades were Chileans, most of the expelled miners probably would have qualified as citizens under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But American officials and mobs ignored laws and logic to nab the gold. Just as the hydraulic mining hoses eroded hillsides, their racist ideology swept away rights, precedence, tenure, fairness, and decency.7
Mexican miners. From William Redmond Ryan, Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California in 1848–9 (London, 1850). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Chinese and American miners in California. Photograph by Joseph B. Stark-weather. California State Library.
. . .
The place of thousands of departing Sonorans, Chileans, and Peruvians was soon taken by another group of immigrant miners. Several hundred Chinese arrived in California in 1849, and within a year they were passing through the Golden Gate by the thousands. “Americans are very rich people,” read one Chinese circular promoting migration to California. “They want the Chinamen to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description.” By 1859 an estimated thirty-five thousand Chinese were working in the California goldfields, and they joined in the rush to each subsequent strike in the West. Dressed in their distinctive blue cotton shirts, baggy pants, and broad-brimmed hats, with a single long braid, or queue, hanging down their backs, the Chinese looked and labored for their main chance, often forming companies to work over the deposits rejected by American miners and making them pay.8
The American West Page 26