The American West

by Robert V Hine

  Appealing to reason, Turner’s words moved hearts. Even if parts of the frontier thesis were factually wrong, it felt right. Every period of history appears rough and conflicted to those experiencing the dips and swells of the moment, but the second half of the nineteenth century was especially tumultuous for an industrializing United States juggling several distinct regions. North and South coalesced into arguing “sections”—ornery regions—and fought a civil war that ended slavery and settled the question of whether the individual states were sovereign. Like the South, the West was brought into the nation through federal intervention and violence. Reconstruction, western historian Elliott West observes, was a national program that integrated all the regions into the union—at gunpoint. Warfare and industrialization empowered the federal government and enlarged corporate entities like the railroads. They could reach out to the far corners of the West and into the daily lives of farmers, workers, and Indians. These changes prompted anxiety. Americans looked for answers and solace.4

  Indian to Filipino: “Be good, or you will be dead!” Cartoon by Victor Gilam, Judge, April 22, 1899.

  Turner’s frontier thesis both stoked and calmed vexations. Some interpreted the “closing of the frontier” to mean that Americans should colonize other places and people. After reading Turner’s essay, Woodrow Wilson wrote that with the continent occupied “and reduced to the uses of civilization,” the nation must inevitably turn to “new frontiers in the Indies and in the Far Pacific.” Future president Theodore Roosevelt agreed, arguing that America’s westering tradition should transition to the seizure of colonies. He likened Filipinos to Apaches and condemned anti-imperialists as “Indian lovers.” If the United States was “morally bound to abandon the Philippines,” he blustered during the debate on annexation after the Spanish-American War, “we were also morally bound to abandon Arizona to the Apaches.”5

  Just as expansionists of the 1840s had marshaled public enthusiasm for westering to justify a war against Mexico, so imperialists of the 1890s exploited fears of the end of frontier opportunity to build support for the creation of an American overseas empire. As historian William Appleman Williams observed, it offers “a classic illustration of the transformation of an idea into an ideology.” But even as Roosevelt was acclaimed for the charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba with his cowboy cavalry, Turner was lamenting the “wreckage of the Spanish War.” Rather than expansion overseas, Turner placed his hopes for the American future in the expansion of higher education. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote. “In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Turner made a case for what amounted to a moral equivalent to westering.6

  . . .

  Americans looked for new frontiers, but they also looked back to the passing of the old ones. The individual most identified with frontier nostalgia was William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. As a teenager he tramped to the Colorado gold rush; he fought with an irregular force of border Unionists (Jayhawkers) during the Civil War, scouted for the frontier army in campaigns against the Comanches, Sioux, and Kiowas, and earned his nickname hunting buffalo to feed railroad construction gangs. In 1869 dime novelist Ned Buntline wrote Cody up in the fanciful Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men as “the greatest scout of the West.” Honor motivated all his actions, whether protecting public virtue or rescuing white women from dastardly attacks by Indians. Before Cody’s death in 1917, he had been the subject of no fewer than fifteen hundred dime novels.

  Cody was such a showman, such a ham actor, that he tried his best to live the role in which Buntline had cast him. He went on the stage playing himself and organized a troop of cowboy and Indian actors who reenacted actual events in western history. In 1882 Cody organized the greatest of his shows, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” which toured the United States and the world for the next three decades. The performance began with an overture played by thirty-six “cowboy” musicians wearing flannel shirts and slouch hats. Laced throughout were exhibitions of shooting and riding. Annie Oakley, the sweetheart of the show, entered trippingly, throwing kisses. Then her rifle would begin to crack as she dispatched glass balls, clay pigeons, and little three-by-five-inch cards embossed with her picture, thrown high, sliced by her bullets, then tossed to the delighted audience. Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys, clung to bucking broncs and led a group in square dances and Virginia reels on horseback.

  There was always a large contingent of Indians, mostly Sioux, performing their dances and displaying life as it had been lived on the plains. Sitting Bull joined the tour for the 1885 season, but when the great Sioux chief appeared in his ceremonial feathers, the audience hissed him, and he refused to tour for another season. Reformers complained that Cody exploited his Indian performers, but most of the historical evidence suggests that Indians enjoyed the work and considered themselves well treated. Black Elk, a young Oglala dancer who later became a famous spiritual leader, came down with a bad case of homesickness while touring with Cody in England in the early 1890s. Cody gave him a ticket home and ninety dollars. “Then he gave me a big dinner,” Black Elk remembered. “Pahuska [Long Hair] had a strong heart.”7

  Sitting Bull and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Photograph by W. R. Cross, c. 1885. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Authenticity through historic reenactment was the highlight of the Wild West. Hunters chased buffalo, Indians attacked the Deadwood stage, and the Pony Express once again delivered the mail to isolated frontier outposts. The climax was a staging of “Custer’s Last Fight,” with Buffalo Bill arriving just after Custer’s demise, the words “Too Late” projected by lantern slide on a background screen. In the grand finale, Cody led a galloping victory lap of all the company’s players—“The Congress of Rough Riders of the World”—with the American flag proudly flying in the company van. The whole spectacle, in the words of the souvenir program, was designed to illustrate “the inevitable law of the survival of the fittest.”8

  . . .

  Simultaneous with Turner’s thesis and Cody’s Wild West, a group of prominent easterners brought the frontier to literary and artistic attention. The most notable among them was Theodore Roosevelt. No one rode the frontier hobbyhorse harder or into more divergent fields. Roosevelt and a number of friends—including writer Owen Wister and artist Frederic Remington—turned a lament over the passing of an epoch into an ideology that shaped American culture and politics well into the twentieth century. All three were born into prominent families in the era of the Civil War and educated at Harvard or Yale. At a critical point in their early twenties, each man went west seeking personal regeneration. The experience convinced all three that only by coming to grips with the experience of westering could Americans preserve the traditional values being swept away by the rush of industrialization. Most importantly, these men—and they wallowed in their manliness—sought to encourage a rugged version of American manhood. Their heroes were all “men with the bark on.”

  Roosevelt’s encounter with the West followed the devastating death of his young wife (in childbirth) and his mother (from disease) on the same day in 1884. Leaving his baby daughter in the care of the extended family, he left New York and for three years lived on a Dakota cattle ranch, “far off from mankind.” This western sojourn became a critical test of his manhood. The cowboys at first ridiculed him for his city ways, but after Roosevelt demonstrated his vigor by flooring a bully with a lucky punch, they came to admire him. Roosevelt learned to hunt and graduated from killing deer to stalking panthers. He joined a posse and participated in the capture of a gang of desperadoes. “We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst,” he wrote, “but we felt the beat of hearty life in our being, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.” He returned to New York in 1886, a rough-and-tumble westerner. This experience would inform all his subsequent work—as author of hunting memoirs, including the best-selling Ranch Life an
d the Hunting Trail (1887), a multivolume history, The Winning of the West (1889–96), and a dozen other popular books with similar themes; as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, conservationist, sports hunter, and advocate of “the strenuous life”; as commander of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War; and finally as America’s first and foremost “cowboy president.” An appreciation of the West and its traditions, Roosevelt believed, would cultivate “that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.” To save their country, Americans must reach to the frontier and rediscover their testicular fortitude.9

  Theodore Roosevelt, c. 1910. Library of Congress.

  Owen Wister also traveled west to recover both his health and his pride. At twenty-five in 1885 he traded a career as a Harvard-educated Boston businessman for a manager’s position on a large Wyoming cattle ranch, sleeping outdoors with the cowboys, bathing in an icy creek, drinking his steaming coffee from a tin cup, and joining in the roundup. “The slumbering Saxon awoke in him,” Wister wrote in a story with autobiographical implications, and he reinvented himself as “kin with the drifting vagabonds who swore and galloped by his side.” He soon returned to his eastern home but began writing and publishing short stories, essays, and novels about cattle country. His ultimate triumph came with The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), a runaway best seller and the model for countless subsequent western novels.10

  Set in the mythical country of the open range, The Virginian is staged as a series of tests of manhood. The hero—the nameless Virginian of the title, who lives by a code of honor—rides at the head of a posse that captures and lynches a group of cattle rustlers, including his best friend. Once they had ridden together as wild and woolly bunkmates, but the Virginian has the foresight to see that the old days are passing. He confronts the threatening outlaw Trampas—“When you call me that, smile!”—and in the prototype of the western gunfight shoots him dead in the dusty main street of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. By dint of intelligence and industry, he rises from cowboy to foreman, eventually becoming “an important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises.” But the central test is the Virginian’s courtship of Molly Wood, the eastern schoolmarm. In a series of arguments, the cowboy convinces the lady to abandon sentimental attachments and accept his moral code, the rule of honor. “Can’t you see how it is about a man?” he implores as he rejects her pleas to leave town and avoid the final confrontation with Trampas. She cannot see—but in the end she accepts. After all, Molly had come West because she “wanted a man who was a man.” Old South is united with Old East in the New West.11

  Young Frederic Remington also went west for a booster shot of masculinity, leaving behind a domineering mother who ridiculed his ambition to be an artist, insisting that he “take a real man’s job.” Writing that he wished to “cut women out of his life altogether,” Remington used a small inheritance to purchase a Kansas ranch. Although he failed to make the operation pay and eventually lost it to creditors, he considered his three years in the West the happiest of his life. Western men “have all the rude virtues,” he wrote. They were “untainted by the enfeebling influences of luxury and modern life.” His admiration was mixed with a heavy dose of nostalgia. “I saw the living, breathing end of three centuries of smoke and dust and sweat,” he later mused. Following in the footsteps of George Catlin and Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham, Remington thought that he could preserve history through art. Thus, he found an answer to his art problem—he could become an artist with the bark on by capturing the last gasps of an obviously macho epoch in American history.12

  “A Daring Feat of Horsemanship.” Illustration by Frederic Remington, from Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; New York, 1911). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  In 1885 he accompanied troopers through New Mexico during the campaign against Geronimo and placed his sketches in Harper’s Monthly and in Outing, one of the new men’s sporting magazines. Returning east in the wake of this success, Remington struck his friends as a man transformed. “He had turned himself into a cowboy,” wrote a former Yale classmate. Captivated by Remington’s work, Roosevelt asked him to illustrate his ranch and hunting book. And the projects kept coming. Remington became one of America’s most successful commercial illustrators. Soon oils and bronzes were also pouring from his studio, commanding top dollar. “It is a fact that admits of no question,” wrote an art critic in 1892, “that Eastern people have formed their conceptions of what the Far-Western life is like, more from what they have seen in Mr. Remington’s pictures than from any other source.”13

  Remington marinated his western conceptions in manhood, race, and violence. The result could be invigorating and it could be repellant. Remington excised women from his West just as he excised them from his life and art. He claimed to have “never drawn a woman—except once, and then had washed her out.” He exaggerated, but not by much. Amid the thousands of men in his many works, women appear only four times. True manliness, he believed, developed in the struggle with raw nature. His works include dozens of images of men against a barren landscape. In Friends or Foes? (The Scout) (1902–5), a lone rider strains his eyes to identify a barely visible speck on a bleak horizon. Remington placed Indians among the existential hostilities (drought, wind, hunger, rowdy broncos) that threatened and sharpened true white men. Downing the Nigh Leader (1907), one of his most celebrated paintings, features a group of mounted Indians attacking a speeding stagecoach. The lead horse on the left pitches violently to the ground, felled by a spear from a galloping warrior, while the drivers stoically struggle against their impending destruction. In The Last Stand (1890), Remington’s ode to Custer, a group of cavalry troopers converges in heroic formation against an unseen enemy. The missing Indians typified the mindset of Remington and his ilk. They felt besieged in modern America, and they imagined an array of hostiles out there. In a letter to a friend written at about the same time he painted that image, Remington lumped Indians together with immigrants. “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the earth I hate—I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of ’em, and what’s more, I will.” In his art, Remington proclaimed the American male triumphant over nature and the Anglo-Saxon dominant over “the rubbish of the earth.”14

  . . .

  The notion of a closing frontier prompted the searching of souls alongside the beating of chests. Americans mourned the wild things they believed they had lost. Sometimes these feelings coalesced around a mascot, such as a buffalo, a wolf, or perhaps a scrumptious bird. In the nineteenth century billions of passenger pigeons inhabited eastern North America. Their sudden appearance in forests during their migrations triggered celebrations and mass killings. Rural Americans interpreted the flocks that blotted out the sun as symbols of abundance, and they slaughtered railroad cars full of them to fill pigeon pies in urban restaurants. To most, the passing of the pigeons represented the high point of the year, an unexpected reason to rejoice. But others were repelled by the slaughter and waste. James Fenimore Cooper included a scene in his novel The Pioneers (1832) critical of the birds’ destruction, and Americans noted the population’s decline as early as the 1850s. By the end of the century the species had been driven to extinction in the wild. The last known passenger pigeon—an elderly female named Martha—died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

  The extinction of wild animals elicited lament, but these pronouncements of sorrow often came with statements of inevitability in the fine print. Passenger pigeons, bison, and gray wolves, like cowboys and Indians, had to die along with the frontier. There was no place for them in a modern West filled with farms, factories, cities, and (soon) motor cars. History moved forward, never in reverse, and progress came with casualties. Extinction thinking blended facts with feelings. The tragic inevitability of loss motivated artists, historians, and politicians. A prime exam
ple of Americans drawing a stark line in time to organize their country into past and present, antique and modern, wild and tame, violent and subdued, the frontier entered the twentieth century a very active corpse that continued to inspire painters, filmmakers, historians, biologists, and lawmakers long after Turner had buried it.

  “Shooting Wild Pigeons in Iowa.” From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 3, 1871.

  Scientists have compiled a list of approximately seventy known American species that went belly-up over the past two centuries, including the Labrador duck, New England heath hen (a relative of the prairie chicken), and Carolina parakeet (valued for its colorful plumage), the eastern sea mink and eastern elk, and the Wisconsin cougar and Great Plains wolf. By the early twentieth century the only California grizzly left in California prowled on the state flag. The beaver disappeared from most of its habitat by the 1840s, although it managed a revival after beaver hats fell out of fashion. The sea otter and the fur seal of the Northwest coast verged on extinction when saved by an international ban on commercial hunting in the early twentieth century. The bison perished by the tens of millions, of course, and by 1890 just eight hundred remained in several isolated herds. Other game animals in the West also declined in numbers, some drastically like grizzlies and wolves. Americans blasted their way across the continent, says environmental historian Donald Worster, leaving in their wake “a landscape littered with skulls and bones, drenched in blood.”15

  They left stumps and sawdust as well. By the early nineteenth century, the massive trans-Appalachian deciduous and evergreen forests were dwindling. Farmers by the hundreds of thousands girdled, chopped, and burned. The pungent smell of wood smoke filled their nostrils with the sweet perfume of “improvement.” Eventually, they reduced the woodlands east of the Mississippi to only about 2 percent of their former extent. The timber of the great woods also fed hundreds of small sawmills and pulp mills scattered throughout the West. By midcentury the construction of the rail network and the rise of Chicago as a distribution center led to the industrialization of logging. The greatest volume and value came from the forests of the Great Lakes. Some logging companies purchased huge stands of white pine from state and federal governments, but others perpetrated enormous frauds by paying their employees to enter phony homestead claims. “In all the pine region of Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi where vast areas have been settled under the pretense of agriculture,” the commissioner of the General Land Office reported in 1876, “scarcely a vestige of agriculture appears.” In the vicinity of Duluth, Minnesota, for example, more than 4,300 homestead entries had been filed and completed, but an investigation found that only a hundred settlers were actually living and working on farms. The bulk of the land had been logged and abandoned.16