The American West

by Robert V Hine

  Arapaho Ghost Dancers. Photograph by James Mooney, c. 1895. National Archives.

  Sitting Bull, still an influential community leader among the Sioux, sent emissaries to meet with Wovoka. They returned to the northern plains in the summer of 1890, stirred by his message. Chiefs like Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Reservation and Big Foot at Cheyenne River transformed Wovoka’s pacifist message into a movement far more militant and confrontational. Sioux Ghost Dancers, including men, women, and children, came together for rituals lasting for several days and nights, singing and dancing themselves into trances. Anthropologist James Mooney translated a Sioux song that he believed “summarized the whole hope of the ghost dance.”

  The whole world is coming,

  A nation is coming, a nation is coming,

  The eagle has brought the message to the tribe.

  The father says so, the father says so.

  Over the whole earth they are coming.

  The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming.

  The Crow has brought the message to his tribe,

  The father says so, the father says so.

  These sentiments terrified Indian agents who had labored for years to suppress all traces of “pagan” religion among the Sioux. To them, the Ghost Dance crossed the line from revival into rebellion. “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy,” one agent telegraphed his superiors. “We need protection and we need it now.”25

  The Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s old unit, eager for payback for the devastating defeat at the Little Big Horn—responded to the call. But Sioux Ghost Dancers, led by Chief Big Foot, took refuge in the region known as the Badlands, in the northwest corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Frustrated, federal officials ordered the arrest of traditional chiefs. “Let the soldiers come and take me away and kill me,” Sitting Bull taunted when he heard the news of his impending arrest, but it was Sioux reservation police who came to his door. “We are of the same blood, we are all Sioux, we are relatives,” Sitting Bull said, trying to shame them. “If the white men want me to die, they ought not to put up the Indians to kill me.” Sitting Bull’s friends and family tried to protect him, but in the subsequent skirmish eight men were shot, and afterward Sitting Bull and his seventeen-year-old son lay dead.26

  Burial of the dead at Wounded Knee. Photograph by George Trager, 1890. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  In late December 1890, a few days after Sitting Bull’s death, the Seventh Cavalry caught up with Big Foot and his band of ghost dancers and directed them to set up camp on Wounded Knee Creek. Miles away, at the main Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a young man named Black Elk learned that the troops had surrounded the dancers. “I felt that something terrible was going to happen,” he later remembered, and “that night I could hardly sleep at all.” Early the following morning, he awoke to the sound of distant gunfire. He and several other young men galloped to Wounded Knee. Topping a ridge, Black Elk and his co-riders looked down: “What we saw was terrible,” he remembered. “Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there.” Black Elk saw what was left of human beings “torn to pieces” by “the wagon guns.” He watched a baby trying to suck milk from its dead mother. The ugly panorama made him wish he “had died too.”27

  What triggered such carnage? The soldiers had been disarming the Sioux when a gun accidently went off. Troops raked the Indian camp with rapid-fire artillery. The Sioux fought back as best they could. The gunfire killed 146 Indians, including 44 women and 18 children. The Seventh Cavalry lost 25 soldiers, most killed by the crossfire of their own weapons. After the battle a blizzard swept the scene, covering the bodies and freezing them in postures of terror and defense.

  At Wounded Knee, a community desperate to survive on its own terms met an organization willing to kill to deny those terms. It’s easy to view community as a historical force for good, and westerners seemed at their most heroic when they banded together to mitigate the disruptions of modernity. By uniting, people shared their burdens and joys. They cultivated a common purpose, a sense of belonging. Communities brought order to a chaotic universe. Yet, some groups’ foundational beliefs appalled others, and groups with power used it to dissolve communities without it. Their acts of destruction sometimes strengthened their communal ties. Hate bonded as well as love, and the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee serve as a stark reminder that community was never an easy or unadulterated undertaking.

  . . .

  In the American myth, the frontier was supposed to transform immigrants into generic Americans. But aside from the English and Canadians—who preferred to colonize as individual families, perhaps because they assumed that the English-speaking American or Canadian nation was their community—European immigrants tended to travel west and plant themselves in groups, retaining many of their ethnic traditions through the second generations. These immigrant communities were also “covenant communities,” for in nearly all of them the immigrant church became “an institutional rallying point,” in the words of historian Kathleen Neils Conzen. “Nobody made us build them, and they weren’t put up with tax money,” Norwegian immigrant farmer Carl Hanson remarked about the Lutheran churches that appeared on the northern plains. “We scraped the money together for them, not from our surplus, but out of our poverty, because we needed them.” The immigrant church was the institution charged with upholding values and preserving continuity with the premigration past. It offered the first and often only defense against the rapid and total assimilation of immigrant children. Here, too, religion was the key to community survival in atomized modernity.28

  The Irish proved adept at building churches and communities in the West. Often they came west to work as miners, clustering in the mining districts of states such as Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada, where the proportion of Irish-born greatly exceeded the national average. At the end of the nineteenth century the copper center of Butte was the most Irish city in America. Under the management of Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant, the Anaconda mining corporation favored the employment of Irishmen. Butte miners told the joke of the Irishman who sent a letter back home encouraging his brother to come over. “Don’t stop in the United States,” he wrote, “Come right on out to Butte.” The Irish community in Butte was rooted in strong kinship ties, ethnic associations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and, most important, the Catholic parish, staffed almost entirely by Irish priests.29

  German immigrants arrive at Lincoln, Nebraska, c. 1895. Nebraska State Historical Society.

  Germans in the West also tended to migrate in chains of kin and cluster in ethnic enclaves. Hessians began arriving in Texas during the 1830s, soon after they obtained a grant of land from Stephen Austin. By 1860 more than thirty thousand populated the Texas hill country, clustered in little farming communities with a Lutheran church planted at the center. Many of these stone churches still stand, and conversations in German can sometimes be heard in the vicinity of New Braunfels, south of Austin. Other common German destinations were Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Nebraska, where Catholic Rhinelanders began settling in the 1850s. These communities displayed remarkable persistence rates well into the twentieth century. A second-generation German American later recalled how he ended up staying on the family farm in Minnesota. “Dad said, ‘I am getting old and cannot work the farm anymore.’ That’s how I was hooked with it; I couldn’t say no and leave them sit alone. I could have gotten a job somewhere, gone away. But I couldn’t do that to my parents.” Thousands of rural sons did say “no” and left to go farther west, into cities far from their origins. But kinship and community ties proved strong among German Americans. Language, religion, and rural traditions glued many in place.30

  After the Civil War, each of the states and territories of the upper Midwest and northern plains recruited European immigrants
, publishing guides in a variety of languages and sending agents across the Atlantic to pitch the advantages of their lands. They found plenty of listeners in the tens of thousands of rural Europeans being thrown off their farms through economic and industrial consolidation. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from a third to a half of the population of the northern plains was foreign-born, the highest proportion of any region in the nation. The countryside was a patchwork of culturally homogeneous communities of Germans, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and especially Scandinavians.

  Norwegian American singers in costume at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, 1925. Minnesota Historical Society.

  THE FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION IN 1900

  These immigrants built and attended churches. In Isanti County, fifty miles north of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, more than seven hundred Swedish households made up seven distinct communities, each with its own Lutheran church and pastor. The role of the church as a conservative force cannot be underestimated. Through its ceremonies and its holidays, it helped perpetuate the old customs of the homeland. A pastor, newly arrived from Sweden, wrote of how impressed he was “to see the people coming to Church in festive array, with clothes cut according to the ancient style, the man dressed in the leather apron, the woman with the short waist, red stockings, and large shoes.” Church-run “Swede schools” supplemented public education, teaching children to sing Swedish songs and to read the Swedish Bible, Swedish history, and Swedish literature. The church also presided over a pattern of in-marriage. Eight out of ten marriages in these communities were between men and women of the same congregations. Similar patterns were present within other rural immigrant communities.31

  Cultural homogeneity characterized ethnic communities until the early twentieth century, when to the chagrin of church elders, who equated cultural change with spiritual decline, the third generation began to move toward assimilation. Swedish congregations in rural Minnesota engaged in a prolonged and divisive debate over whether God could hear prayers in English. During the “Americanization” frenzy of World War I—when a number of midwestern governors issued proclamations forbidding the public use of languages other than English (even on the telephone)—Swedish churches finally began to hold their worship services in English.

  The drop in the public use of homeland languages paired with increased outmigration and intermarriage fueled assimilation, which alarmed critics like Ole Rølvaag, Norwegian immigrant who became a professor of literature at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota. Famous for his novel Giants of the Earth (1927), Rølvaag warned fellow Norwegians that they risked losing the “intimate spiritual association with our own people” by becoming “American.” Lecturing to a class on immigration history he urged his students to “show the greatest faithfulness to your race, to the cultural and spiritual heritage which you have received and which you may receive in still larger measure. You must not erase your racial characteristics in order to become better Americans.” Rølvaag believed that American culture had little to offer except a preoccupation with material success. “I have met with none but crippled souls,” he wrote of his encounters with farmers in the Minnesota countryside. “They are dead, dead, living dead! Their highest interests are hogs, cattle and horses.” Strict adherence to community distinctiveness, especially the old religion and culture fused into bones and blood through race, was the only solution to a looming future of a 4-H zombie apocalypse. Rølvaag represented an especially intense denunciation of the “highly praised melting pot,” but he was not the only doomsayer preaching the rejection of American sameness. Black Elk, for example, used the carnage of Wounded Knee and the federal government’s assimilation policy to argue for a similar return to traditional communal Indian values to counter the ruin of modernity. He, too, sought to repair the damage of acquisitive individualism through spiritual rebirth.32

  . . .

  The barren sameness of western community life sometimes even panicked the primary beneficiaries of industrial colonization—native-born, English-speaking white people. Sinclair Lewis skewered humdrum normality in his novel Main Street (1920). When Carol Kennicott, Lewis’s main character, arrives at Gopher Prairie, it seems scarcely more impressive than a hazel thicket: “There was no dignity in it, nor any hope of greatness. . . . It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.” Feeling its plainness and flimsiness, Carol walks its length and breadth in just thirty-six minutes. The residents, she concludes, were as “drab as their houses, as flat as their fields.” The modern West, like Kennicott, was in danger of being bored to death. Lewis knew the sensation of small-town stultification. He had grown up in a small town and fashioned Gopher Prairie after similar burgs from Peoria to Petaluma. “Main Street,” he wrote, “is the culmination of Main Street everywhere.” The identical grid pattern, ignoring the terrain, borrowed from Philadelphia because it communicated regularity. The same false fronts dressed up the dry-goods store and the post office, the saloon and the livery stable, the schoolhouse and the church. From the Mississippi River valley to the Pacific coast, these towns were shockingly similar, an idea of place beat to death through repetition.33

  For decades Americans had held up small towns as the best the nation had to offer. Writer Zona Gale looked back on her Wisconsin hometown of Portage with quiet affection. The main street of “Friendship Village” (1908) held memories of tulip beds and twilight bonfires, with people concerned enough to help one another through illness and hard times. The fellowship of small communities warmed the memories of writers like Gale, but other observers found this nostalgia old-fashioned and misguided after World War I. Lewis’s Main Street—published the same year the Census Bureau announced that the population of urban America outnumbered rural America for the first time—marked an attitudinal sea change. Novelists Hamlin Garland and Edgar Lee Masters had depicted the crimped lives of small-town residents before Lewis, but with Main Street the cynical view became the dominant perspective.34

  Main Street, Sioux City, Iowa. Photograph by B. H. Gurnsey, 1869. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University.

  The myth of small-town life had pictured a homogeneous, classless society in which anyone with ambition, thrift, and diligence could easily move upward. But in fact class structured small towns. During the early years, economic lines blurred, but by the end of the Civil War, when industrial colonization reached full-steam, rigid class lines appeared nearly everywhere, even in supposedly wide-open cattle towns of the Great Plains, where within a few years of their founding the richest 20 percent of the population controlled more than 80 percent of the real estate. The working classes were divided between craftworkers, transients, and drifters. African Americans, Mexicans, Asians, and Indians were isolated at the bottom of the social ladder.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the atmosphere of small western towns seemed increasingly uneasy. The industrial promise of links between farm and market had not been fulfilled; clearly, the railroads served eastern capital almost exclusively. Conflicts within the community burst into public view, especially as the quarter-century of depression from 1873 to 1898 exposed the vulnerability of the poor. The hardening of class lines bred dissatisfaction, and small-town newspaper editors had to admit the existence of discord. Social conflict became the rule rather than the exception, and cohesiveness degenerated into narrow morality. Frederick Russell Burnham, who lived in a small Midwest town in the 1870s, thought that most people spent half their life trying to reform someone else in a quiet fervor of “intolerant religiosity.” This oppressive, narrow morality—peeping through keyholes—was the cause of Carol Kennicott’s rebellion in Main Street. Intellectuals fled to the cities and began to describe their former environment as smug, prejudiced, sterile, and joyless.35

  Much of the trouble stemmed from the backward glance of many small communities. Dedicated to timeless virtues and the good old days, townspeople saw corruption in industrial values and sighed, in the wor
ds of poet Vachel Lindsay, “for the sweet life wrenched and torn by thundering commerce, fierce and bare.” True, towns often courted small-scale industry in the hope of creating more jobs and revenue, but monopolies, large-scale corporations, and the interventions of the federal government tossed communities about like corks in a swell. Turning inward, the residents of small western towns developed intense localism as a shield against unwelcome change. Confronting fears that the “end of the frontier” would bring an end to the assimilation of foreigners, the white middle class of the small town lashed out against “un-American” immigrants. Fear and loathing marked the end of one West and the creation of another.36

  . . .

  The closing of the frontier prompted fears of scarcity and the loss of identity as industrialization prompted the rearrangement of global populations. In the Pacific and Indian Oceans, people from all points rushed to California, Australia, India, and South Africa. In these places, Europeans and Euro-Americans encountered immigrant workers from China, India, Hawaii, Japan, and Indonesia. Racial animosities flared when white immigrants declared a racial monopoly on resources and opportunity. From South Africa to Australia to California, democratic political movements rallied around immigration restrictions to protect places deemed “white men’s countries.”