As this story suggests, much of the violence was condoned, even sponsored by government officials. In 1851 federal commissioners negotiated a set of treaties with the California tribes, creating a series of reservations scattered across the state, but the governor and legislature opposed the treaties, claiming that they set aside too much land, and instead argued for the removal of all Indians from the state. The treaties were forwarded to the United States Senate, which followed the lead of California’s congressional delegation and tabled them in 1853, in effect withdrawing the federal government from its constitutional responsibility to oversee Indian affairs in California. The state assumed unprecedented authority. In a special message to the legislature, Governor Peter Burnett rhetorically shrugged his shoulders at the inevitable, homicidal course of white civilization, declaring that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Over the next few years, with the encouragement and sponsorship of the state, thousands of Indians were murdered by miners, ranchers, and militia. It was the starkest case of genocide in the history of American frontiers.33
California settlers attack an Indian village. Illustration by J. Ross Browne, from Harper’s Magazine, August 1861.
The “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” passed by the legislature in 1850 added greatly to the suffering. The pretense was that the law provided a way of disciplining dangerous Indian vagrants and caring for dependent Indian orphans, but in fact, under its cover of legality, thousands of Indian men, women, and children were kidnapped and sold to Anglo and Mexican employers. One federal agent apprehended three kidnappers with a group of nine Indian children ranging in ages from three to ten years of age. The men defended themselves by claiming that taking the children was “an act of charity” because their parents had been killed. How do you know that? asked the agent. Because, one of the kidnappers replied, “I killed some of them myself.” A legalized form of slavery, the so-called protection act continued the Californian tradition begun by the Spanish of using forced Indian labor to profit from colonization. The 1850 law was finally invalidated by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude within the United States.34
As a result of the genocidal violence, the forced labor, and epidemic diseases, the Indian population of California, estimated at 150,000 in 1848, fell to 30,000 by 1860–120,000 lives lost in just twelve years, a record of human destruction unmatched in American history. A minority of the remaining natives lived in isolated rancherias, but most clustered in dingy shanties on the outskirts of towns like San Jose, San Diego, and Los Angeles, eking out a livelihood as day laborers. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that California Indians were able to use the courts to obtain some compensation for the lands stolen from them during the Gold Rush, but the final awards totaled less than a thousand dollars per survivor.
. . .
In his memoirs, William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding general of the U.S. Army following the Civil War, pointed to the expansion of the open-range cattle industry as a decisive factor in the conquest of the West. “This was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy to-day,” he wrote, “in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle-ranchers.” Sherman pegged the animal succession—cattle did replace bison—but he mistook the agency. Cowboys and cattlemen won the grass, but they did not eliminate the ruminant competition. The enormous bison herds were done in by white and Indian overhunting, exotic diseases, shifts in weather patterns, and habitat destruction. No one group deserved sole credit or blame for their destruction.35
“Shooting Buffalo on the Line of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad.” From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 3, 1873. Library of Congress.
Plains Indians had long hunted the bison, and the level of their predation increased with the dispersal of horses in the eighteenth century. From a peak of perhaps thirty million, the number of buffalo declined to perhaps ten million by the mid-nineteenth century, partly as a result of commercial overhunting by Indians (for tradable bison robes), but also because of environmental competition from growing herds of wild horses and the spread of bovine diseases introduced by cattle crossing with settlers on the Overland Trail. By overgrazing, cutting timber, and fouling water sources, overland migrants contributed to the degeneration of habitats crucial for the health and survival of the bison. The confluence of factors created a crisis for buffalo-hunting Indians by the 1860s.
The extension of railroad lines onto the Great Plains and the development in 1870 of a technique for converting buffalo hide into commercial leather (for belts to drive industrial machines) sealed the bison’s fate. Lured by hide profits, swarms of hunters invaded the plains. Using a high-powered rifle, a skilled hunter could kill dozens of animals in an afternoon. And unlike the hunter of buffalo robes, who was limited to taking his catch in the winter when the coat was thick, hide hunting was a year-round business. General Philip Sheridan applauded. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary,” he declared. “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” As the buffalo hunters did their work, Indians also accelerated their kills, attempting to capture their share of the market. In Dodge City, Kansas, mountainous stacks of buffalo hides awaited shipment to eastern tanneries. Historians estimate that in the five years between 1870 and 1875, five or six million bison were slaughtered on the southern plains, virtually wiping out the southern herds. The hunt then shifted to the north. “It was the summer of my twentieth year [1883],” the Sioux holy man Black Elk later testified, that “the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus [white men].” With the exception of a small wild herd in northern Alberta and a few remnant individuals preserved by sentimental ranchers, the North American bison had been destroyed. Bone collectors piled up the skeletons for rail shipment to factories that ground them up for fertilizer.36
Mountain of bison skulls, c. 1880. Wikimedia Commons.
Soon the range where the buffalo had roamed was being stocked with Texas longhorns. Battle-ready versions of the domesticated cattle brought north by the Spanish, the longhorns evolved to fend for themselves in arid and predator-rich environments. Their horns could span six feet. Their ornery dispositions were matched by their racy flavor. By the end of the eighteenth century, several million grazed on the thousand hills of the California coastal range and on the grasslands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in Texas. Cattle tenders—vaqueros—evolved with their herds. They developed into superb horsemen and ropers, and by the 1760s Tejanos were driving their cattle to market in New Orleans.
It was in Louisiana that Anglo Americans first encountered Hispanic traditions of cattle raising. Herding had long been an occupation in the backcountry of the colonial South. Settlers built cow pens many miles from their farms to corral their stock, leaving them in the care of African or mixed-ancestry slaves and indentured servants. Using dogs rather than horses to tend their short-horned British breeds, these footsore herders, known as “cow-boys,” pressed into the Appalachian foothills in pursuit of fresh grazing land. About the time of the Louisiana Purchase, backcountry cowboys and Indian drovers leapfrogged the Mississippi floodplain, and soon both groups were learning and adapting the vaquero traditions of horsemanship and roping. The large number of Spanish loanwords in the lingo of western cattle raising—lariat, lasso, rodeo, rancho—testify to this process of cultural fusion.
After the Texas revolution, ranchers violently replaced rancheros across savannas of south Texas. Cattlemen shipped their stock to market by steamer from Brownsville or Galveston, or combined their herds and drove them northeast to Shreveport or New Orleans, following old Tejano trails. Some Texans, however, were lured farther north in an attempt to tap eastern markets in the United States. Texans first trailed longho
rns up what was known as the Shawnee Trail to Missouri in 1842, and by 1850 a sizable market for Texas beef had developed in Kansas City. But the Civil War brought to an end these early northern drives, just as the Union naval blockade closed off the Caribbean markets. When Texans went off to fight for the Confederacy, their neglected stock scattered across the countryside, and by 1865 an estimated five to six million emancipated longhorns were grazing on the Texas range.
Cattle outfits sold this free beef to industrial America. Following the war, they gathered herds and drove them north to railheads in Kansas—Topeka, Abilene, Wichita, Ellsworth, and Dodge City. After a bumpy journey, most Texas longhorns ended their lives on the killing-room floors of Kansas City or South Side Chicago, where they were processed along mechanized “disassembly lines.” In the 1880s cattlemen drove herds even farther north into Wyoming and Montana, opening new ranches along the watercourses. These invaders took over the niche once reserved for the bison. They became the mammals who turned cellulose into protein and fat, giving their human partners access to the incredible reservoir of sunshine stored in the waving stems of grass.
In 1880 buffalo in Montana far outnumbered the 250,000 cattle; three years later, the buffalo were gone while the range stock had increased to 600,000. Yet, while both gobbled vegetation and supplied leather and T-bones, the beeves and the bison were not interchangeable. The cattle grazed differently, clipping some native grass species to death, which created openings for invasive, inedible species like Russian thistle. The cows were also industrialized animals. They sucked energy from the Great Plains and moved it to tables in New York and Boston. The cattle were straws, conducting energy from one ecosystem to others. To capture this bounty, cattle-raisers jammed as many straws into the grasslands as they could. Very quickly, the herds exceeded the carrying capacity of the range. The weather turned, got drier and colder. The grass dwindled. And thousands of cattle died.
TEXAS CATTLE TRAILS
One of the first published images of American cowboys. From Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1874.
Waiting for a Chinook. Painting by Charles M. Russell, 1886. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University.
The Great Plains phased in and out of extended droughts every twenty years or so. The plants and animals that flourished there evolved to survive, even take advantage of, the cycle. Some grasses, for instance, plunged their roots deep into the soil and weathered the dry spells for the most part underground. American ranchers and farmers moved onto the plains after the Civil War during a particularly wet period. Some thought that the rain would last forever. Cultivated fields, they hypothesized, tamed arid environments. Rain would follow their plows.
But drought returned, the ranching bubble burst, and the wheat farmers retreated from the driest sections of the plains, only to return when precipitation again bumped up during the 1910s. The climate of the Great Plains did not cooperate with industrial colonization. No matter the size and efficiency of the organizations and institutions, no matter how big and plentiful the machines, the jet stream wavered and El Niños happened. Rain fell for years, and then rays baked the place to a crisp.
. . .
The United States experienced its first nationwide labor upheaval in 1877. The railroads had connected the continent, organizing Americans into massive networks of production and consumption. Workers, riders, owners, operators, and politicians were joined in a web of rails. When trouble jangled the web, everyone felt the reverberations. During the depression of the 1870s, workers suffered a series of crippling wage cuts; by the middle of the decade, for example, for a grueling twelve-hour day brakemen were being paid only $1.75, down from $2.50 ten years before. When, in the summer of 1877, the nation’s four largest railroad companies adopted yet another 10 percent wage cut, eastern workers left their jobs and seized control of switching yards and depots. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops, there were armed confrontations, and during the two weeks of the strike more than a hundred people died. The managers of the western railroads at first thought themselves immune to the disorder. “Our people did not think that we would have serious trouble,” a prominent San Franciscan later remembered. “The Central [Pacific] Railroad and the system have never had serious trouble with their operatives.” In spite of his prediction, the strike spread westward, first to Saint Louis and Kansas City, then to the Union Pacific yards at Omaha, then across the plains to the Central Pacific facilities at Ogden, Utah, and finally to the Pacific coast.37
The protest wave hit San Francisco and spilt into the crevices of animosity that radiated through the multicultural, industrial West. Several thousand people gathered before City Hall to hear Dennis Kearney of the Workingmen’s Party of California harangue the Big Four. With one breath Kearney argued for popular control of the railroad—“the Central Pacific men are thieves and will soon feel the power of the workingmen”—then with his next appealed to the crowd’s worst prejudices—“I will give the Central Pacific just three months to discharge their Chinamen, and if that is not done Stanford and his crowd will have to take the consequences.” That set off two days of anti-Chinese rioting. Mobs attacked Chinatown, beating men and women and burning buildings. Four people were killed.
Dennis Kearney of the Workingmen’s Party incites San Franciscans to attack Chinatown. Engraving based on a drawing by H. A. Rodgers, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 20, 1880.
The railroad did not fire the Chinese in response to the demands of the Workingmen’s Party, but Congress took note of the anti-Chinese sentiment sweeping the West. The Burlingame Treaty with China, signed in 1868 while Chinese laborers were still hard at work on the transcontinental line, had pledged an open door for Chinese immigration. But in 1882, intoning that “the coming of the Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities,” Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending further immigration of “all persons of the Chinese race” for ten years. Thereafter the Chinese exclusion was repeatedly extended until it became permanent as part of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.38
Exclusion prompted more anti-Chinese violence. Scapegoats for any number of “native” white frustrations, racist populists attacked the Chinese in dozens of western locales. Perhaps the most barbaric incident took place in 1885 in the railroad town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, when the Union Pacific attempted to replace white workers with lower-paid Chinese. In a coordinated attack, workers invaded the Chinese section of town, shooting, burning, and looting, while a group of wives and mothers cheered and fired shots at the fleeing Chinese. Chinatown was burned to the ground, and twenty-eight Chinese died in the flames. In the aftermath of this massacre, there were attacks on Chinatowns all over the West.
Attack on the Chinese, Rock Springs, Wyoming, September 2, 1885. Engraving based on a drawing by T. de Thulstrup, Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1885.
Racism eroded class solidarity throughout the West. The West’s manifold ethnic and racial divisions aided industrialists. They played workers off one another and erected a labor system that paid “non-natives” less than citizens. Industrialization thus increased racial and ethnic antagonisms and undercut the goal of working-class solidarity, although the West did experience flashes of labor cooperation. Eugene Debs, leader of the American Railway Union (ARU), organized railroad workers across the West in sympathy with the striking workers at the Pullman sleeping car company in Chicago. In 1894 strikers occupied and held rail yards in Omaha, Ogden, Oakland, and Los Angeles; they burned bridges along the transcontinental line in Nevada.
One of the most dramatic and memorable incidents took place on a hot and humid July Fourth in Sacramento. Local militiamen were ordered to the train station to disperse strikers. They arrived to find hundreds of ARU members and sympathizers before the depot, waving American flags. People called out militiamen by name, urging them to put down their guns. “Frank, if you kill me you make your sister a widow,” one man was heard calling out. Grad
ually the soldiers lowered their guns and wandered away to the shade, where ARU women served them lemonade. Community support for the strike also ran high in Los Angeles, where again the militia was called out. “If we had to fight Indians or a common enemy there would be some fun and excitement,” one soldier told a reporter. “But this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on strike for what they consider their rights is a horse of another color.”39
. . .
Both strikers and Indians stood in the way of development. But for Indians the situation was much more desperate. For them the spread of mining, for example, was an unmitigated disaster. The California experience was repeated in the Colorado rush of 1859, which led directly to the massacre of the Southern Cheyennes at Sand Creek. Thus when gold was discovered in the Yellowstone country of Montana, luring thousands of miners, the Sioux (longtime allies of the Cheyennes) took it as an ominous sign. As the army worked to construct forts along the road to protect miners, Oglala chief Red Cloud prepared to evict them. “The white men have crowded the Indians back year by year,” he declared in a meeting at Fort Laramie. “And now our last hunting ground, the home of the people, is to be taken from us. Our women and children will starve, but for my part I prefer to die fighting rather than by starvation.”40
In the three years of combat that followed, the Sioux and Cheyennes defeated most of the American forces sent against them. The federal government decided to abandon the forts along the Bozeman Trail, settling for an Indian agreement guaranteeing the security of the main east-west overland routes through the central plains, critical for the construction of the transcontinental railroad. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, federal commissioners carved out a “Great Sioux Reservation” stretching from the Missouri River westward through the Black Hills, “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians.” Sioux rights to the adjacent Powder River country of Montana were left deliberately vague.41
The American West Page 29