Many Chinese came to California as sojourners—as did many Sonorans, Chileans, and Americans. They intended to return as soon as their savings warranted, and every year thousands of them sailed home. Also like their Gold Rush colleagues, the Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly male. Most were married, but almost none brought their wives along. Respectable Chinese women were expected to remain at home, and families believed that keeping them there would encourage the return of their husbands. The California census of 1852 listed only seven Chinese women in the state, and over the next three decades most of the women who immigrated from China were prostitutes, many of them enslaved.
WESTERN MINING
In the cities, towns, and mining camps of the West, Chinese men clustered in “Chinatowns” for protection and camaraderie. In the eyes of many white Americans, this huddling made the Chinese even more suspect than the Mexicans. A California newspaper described groups of twenty or thirty Chinese “inhabiting close cabins, so small that one . . . would not be of sufficient size to allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it.” White Americans, however, helped create the clannishness they loathed by targeting the Chinese for abuse and exclusion. In 1852 the California legislature passed a foreign miners’ tax aimed specifically at the Chinese. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1870 voided the law, Chinese miners had contributed more than five million dollars to the state’s coffers, a quarter of the state’s revenue for those years.9
Two Chinese toughs, Blackfoot, Idaho, c. 1870. Idaho State Historical Society.
The Chinese helped finance a state that offered them none of the rudimentary protections states are formed to provide. In the case of People v. Hall (1854), the California Supreme Court stripped the Chinese of the most basic legal rights. George Hall and two white companions had been convicted and sentenced to hang for the murder of a Chinese man. Hall’s attorneys appealed on the grounds that Chinese testimony was inadmissible, since the statutes excluded the evidence of African Americans, Indians, and other peoples of color. “This continent,” argued the court, twisting reason into ornate pretzels, “was first peopled by Asiatics, who crossed Behring’s Straits.” This made the Chinese virtual Indians, which disqualified them from testifying against white Americans. They were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.” Hall’s conviction was overturned and the murderer set free.10
The Chinese responded to antagonism in a variety of ways. They were among the first on the scene as mining districts spread across the West. In Idaho, where they made up nearly 50 percent of the miners in the Boise gold district by 1870, they used their numbers to enforce their own kind of justice. They also turned to the Idaho courts to oppose a territorial foreign miners’ tax in 1864. They lost the suit, but the local courts accepted testimony from Chinese witnesses, and most Chinese miners refused to pay the tax with no punishment inflicted. Idaho proved that numbers mattered, and the Chinese continued to use the courts to settle claims among themselves and with Americans. “Although hardly perfect,” argues historian Liping Zhu, Idaho “offered Chinese immigrants opportunities far beyond the proverbial ‘Chinaman’s chance.’” In spite of prejudice, discrimination, and attempts at removal, the Chinese, the Mexicans, and immigrants from dozens of European countries made the West their new home. Whether the American “natives” liked it or not, the West would be shared by a motley crew of humanity.11
. . .
The corporatization and industrialization of the West did not mean an end to irrational exuberance. Dreams of quick wealth shifted from alluvial sand to stock portfolios. The western millionaires that capitalized most on the active imaginations of investors, newspaper editors, and congressional representatives were the Big Four—Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker—the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which built the California-to-Utah section of the first transcontinental line, completed in 1869. The rails carried the hopes for prosperity of many Americans. “The iron key has been found to unlock our golden treasures,” gushed the editor of the Helena Independent. “With the railroads come population, industry, and capital, and with them come the elements of prosperity and greatness to Montana.” Once it was in place, argued the railroad barons, the national railroad system would undergird a fabulously valuable exchange of people and products between East and West. Thousands of settlers would stream onto the plains and over the mountains to the Pacific coast, settling on farms, ranches, and in dozens of rapidly growing cities and towns, scattered like oases across the western countryside. And indeed, the late nineteenth-century West would have been inconceivable without the railroad. “The West is purely a railroad enterprise,” declared an executive of one of the transcontinental lines, then with a wink adding, “we started it in our publicity department.”12
The transcontinentals needed vigorous publicity departments because the notion of a railroad economic bonanza was much like the visions of gold in the streambeds just waiting to be panned—it was a fantasy that existed mainly in people’s minds. At the time of their construction, the railroads confronted a West that was conspicuously lacking in customers. That’s why few knowledgeable eastern railroad men wanted anything to do with the transcontinentals. The smart money passed, leaving the door open for the Big Four. As principal stockholders of California’s first giant corporation, they grew resplendently wealthy, but their nickname came neither from their wealth nor from their power but from their bulk, weighing in collectively at some 860 pounds. Each man hailed from modest roots in the Northeast, and each would later attribute his success to Yankee virtues of diligence and thrift. But, as Crocker once admitted, “luck had a hell of a lot to do with it,” as did the entrepreneurs’ willingness to play hard and fast with the rules when necessary.13
Leland Stanford, c. 1870. Wikimedia Commons.
The Big Four were all forty-niners. Huntington had come to California via Panama, where, like thousands of others, he was stranded for three months clamoring for passage up the coast to San Francisco. During that time, shrewdly buying and selling whatever he could get his hands on, he increased his initial grubstake by nearly 300 percent. Arriving in California, he immediately grasped the fact that fortune lay not in the gravel at the bottom of a pan but in the sale of the pan itself, and he opened a Sacramento miner’s supply. Crocker told a similar story. After trudging cross-country in 1850, his few possessions “tied up in a cotton handkerchief,” he worked briefly in the mines before seeing the light and becoming a partner in a general store. Hopkins and Stanford—the first an accountant, the other a glad-handing lobbyist—learned the same lesson before their overland treks, and both went west intending to become prosperous merchants in the gold region.14
In 1861, in an upstairs room of the Sacramento store jointly owned by Huntington and Hopkins, this group gathered to hear the pitch of a zealot railroad builder named Theodore Judah. It was not the first time that Judah spread his plans, surveys, and dreams before potential investors. But the Big Four were the first to respond favorably, each pledging to buy fifteen thousand dollars of stock in the company for which Judah had drawn up the articles of incorporation. When Judah died unexpectedly, the operations fell directly to the Big Four. Although they barely knew each other—and would never become friends—they quickly developed an effective division of labor. Hard-headed Crocker supervised construction while inscrutable Hopkins kept the books; Huntington used his talents bidding for supplies in the East while Stanford worked the politicians in Sacramento and Washington, an assignment made easier when in 1861 he won election as California’s first Republican governor. The Big Four were about to undertake one of the most spectacular construction projects of the age, yet as Crocker remembered, “none of us knew anything about railroad building.”15
Not so the leader of the Union Pacific, the Kansas-to-Utah partner corporation to the Central Pacific. Thomas C. Durant, the chief manager of the Union Pacific
, learned the railroad business as construction manager for the Chicago and Little Rock Island line built across Iowa during the 1850s. Because every Iowan wanted to be as close to the railroad as possible, Durant threatened to bypass towns or counties that failed to buy sufficient bonds. There are stories of him laying out town sites, auctioning off lots to speculators, then shifting the line to cheaper adjoining land and repeating the whole process. In 1858 Congress awarded the company a large land grant if it completed the Iowa project within ten years. Knowing that this was more than enough time, Durant slowed construction, reasoning that the longer the company took, the more valuable the land would become. It was a preview of what was to come with the construction of the Union Pacific.
Durant invented a way of making fantastic profits on transcontinental lines that looked like boondoggles on paper. Instead of earning their profits through the shipping of people and goods, the transcontinentals would pay off a lucky few through their construction. Durant set up a subsidiary corporation, the Crédit Mobilier, wholly owned by UP stockholders. Through dummy third parties, he channeled all construction contracts to Crédit Mobilier, which in turn exaggerated expenses by double or triple. Though the accounts of the Union Pacific showed little profit, the Crédit Mobilier paid handsome dividends. It was one of the most ingenious swindles in American history. The con was plain enough to see, but Durant used an enormous slush fund to keep official Washington from looking too closely. Republican congressman Oakes Ames, appointed head of the Crédit Mobilier, distributed UP stock certificates, as he put it, “where they will do the most good for us.” When the scandal finally broke into the open, the subsequent congressional investigation revealed that the entire Republican leadership, including the vice president and the chairmen of some of the most important House and Senate committees, had accepted Ames’s bribes.16
The Central Pacific had its own version of the same scam, the Credit and Finance Corporation, which overcharged by millions. But the Big Four avoided public exposure because their records “just happened” to be destroyed in a fire. Huntington distributed more than his fair share of graft, remaining confident in his own righteousness while performing magic with the company’s millions. “If you have to pay money to have the right thing done, it is only just and fair to do so,” he exclaimed. In his day Huntington corrupted officeholders, lawmen, and regulatory commissioners, just as he pressured and blackmailed newsmen to manipulate public opinion. An acquaintance captured the man’s spirit: “Tigerish and irrational in his ravenous pursuit, he was always on the scent, incapable of fatigue, delighted in his strength and the use of it, and full of the love of combat. If the Great Wall of China were put in his path, he would attack it with his nails.”17
The shenanigans of the railroad tycoons toed the line between farce and tragedy. They captured the spirit of an age filled with slick operators and shifty deals. These fat cats, however, did what they did not because of their cartoonish, mustache-twirling villainy. The federal government encouraged the building of the transcontinental railroads by guaranteeing the right-of-way, supplying low-interest loans, and offering enormous land grants, and the railroad executives corrupted politicians to keep these subsidies coming. The federal government encouraged nefarious behavior by taking on the risk of transcontinental transportation, and the American people were left holding the bag when the operational profits (as opposed to the inflated construction costs) failed to materialize.
. . .
Other western industries had their bubbles popped, too. Fly-by-night mining corporations peddled stock in worthless or nonexistent shafts, while investments in cattle businesses reached a fevered pitch in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1881 James Brisbin published Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains, which carried a delirious message of quick wealth that rivaled golden dreams. Capital poured in from New York, London, and Edinburgh. Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, was one of many investors who turned to ranching for fun and profit, investing tens of thousands of dollars in a Badlands ranch in the Dakota Territory. In 1883 Scots investors dumped $2.5 million into the huge Swan Land and Cattle Company, which controlled more than six hundred thousand acres of Nebraska and Wyoming range. Another Scots firm, the Espuela Cattle Company, opened a half-million-acre spread in Texas called the Spur Ranch. British investors financed Charlie Goodnight’s huge JA Ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon of Texas. A movement of consolidation swept over the cattle country, inaugurating the brief ascendancy of what historian J. C. Mutchler calls the “super ranch.” Sprawling over three million acres in ten counties in the Texas Panhandle was the XIT (which stood for Ten in Texas). Richard King, owner of the enormous King Ranch of south Texas, employed three hundred cowboys to work his sixty-five thousand cattle. On John Chisum’s Rancho Grande, a massive spread straddling the Texas–New Mexico border that covered a territory the size of southern New England, wranglers branded eighteen thousand calves in a single season in 1884.18
While cattle barons dreamed of spreads that breached horizons—a vision destined to crash when their vast herds ate up all the available grass—western farmers inherited smaller-scale expectations that would prove equally ecstatic. That was not supposed to happen. In the nation’s folklore, farmers were thought to be especially virtuous. They were supposed to be the backbone of American independence, their self-sufficiency protecting them from the machinations of tyrants. They owned property and managed the labor of family members and hired workers, so in theory, running a farm prepared them to run the country. Tending crops, herding livestock, and leading households made rural folks into model democrats.
At midcentury Americans continued to believe in the Jeffersonian promise that ordinary citizens could move west, stake modest claims to land, and rise to the ideal level of comfortable sufficiency, neither rich nor poor but simply happy and content. The promise depended on the availability of western land—boundless, fertile, and cheap. In post–Civil War America that availability was underwritten by the Homestead Act, a plan to grant rather than sell public domain land, passed by the Republican Congress in the spring of 1862. The legislation grew out of the political struggles of squatters versus speculators that had animated land policy debates since the passage of the first Land Ordinance of 1785. It was intended to extend and revitalize a nostalgic vision of American success and democracy. The results—as in western railroads, ranches, and mines—combined epic accomplishment with spectacular failure.
The new Republican Party embraced the homestead program as part of its effort to build a political alliance between the North and the West. In exchange for northern votes for homestead legislation, westerners would support higher tariffs to protect infant industries like textiles and iron. Under Republican auspices, the homestead program took on an antislavery cast. “A country cut up into small farms, occupied by many independent proprietors who live by their own toil,” George Washington Julian of Indiana told his fellow congressmen, would present a “formidable barrier against the introduction of slavery.” Southern legislators, fearing that the agitation for free land inevitably would lead to “free soil”—the political movement to bar slavery from the territories—became implacable opponents of the homestead bill.19
The Republican electoral triumph of 1860 and the subsequent secession of the southern states, along with the mass departure of southern politicians from Washington, removed the final obstacle to the passage of the “Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain.” The measure took effect on January 1, 1863, the same day as the Emancipation Proclamation. Persons over the age of twenty-one—without regard to race or ethnicity, women as well as men, immigrants as well as citizens—were eligible to file for up to 160 acres of the public domain. Homesteaders had to cultivate the land, construct a house or barn, and reside on the claim for five years, after which they would receive full title for the payment of a ten-dollar filing fee. By 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order withdrawing the remaining public domain
land in the contiguous forty-eight states, the Homestead Act had created farms for more than four hundred thousand families.20
A homesteading family on the plains. Detail of a photograph by Solomon D. Butcher, 1886. Library of Congress.
It was an achievement of historic proportions, unlike anything tried by any other nation. Still, it should be kept in perspective. Over the same seventy-year period, for every 160 acres of western land given away, another 400 acres was sold. A total of more than 700 million acres passed into private hands through purchase rather than grant. Contrary to American myth, most western settlers were not homesteaders. Most took up public land under the terms of previous laws. Because only surveyed land was open to homesteading, and government surveys of the vast West proceeded at a snail’s pace, to get the land they wanted many settlers did what Americans had always done—squatting to establish a preemption claim and purchasing later. Furthermore, homesteading was not available on the land taken from western Indian nations (approximately 100 million acres after 1862) or on the alternating sections the government retained for itself along the rail lines. These plots, with minor exceptions, were available for cash purchase only. The federal government gave away, in the form of subsidies, 183 million acres to the western railroads—an area larger than the state of Texas—and that land was sold at top dollar. Lands along the rail lines, of course, were the most attractive, since by definition they offered access to transportation, without which commercial farming in the trans-Mississippi West was infeasible.
The American West Page 27