The myth of the American West brims with adventure, hope, freedom, and wide open spaces. It stands apart from the rest of America, a sort of promised land within the promised land, a place where you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. But the reality of Western history is... far more complex and intimately interwoven with that of the country as a whole.
I think it's really important to talk about the West as an integral part of the American scene. Otherwise, you'd think the West was just out there from 1840 to 1910 and going completely on its own. The West is an essential part of Gilded Age America. I like to argue that the Gilded and the Gilded Age came from the gold fields of California because the speculative mania that really develops around the mining industry in the West is at the heart of what Mark Twain would see and call the Gilded Age. One of the things we forget about this sort of romantic era in the late 19th century West is that it's very much tied in with the growth of the United States as an industrial nation.
Take something like cowboy and cattle ranching. Those only can take place, first of all, because you've got the railroad, which will allow cattle to be taken to market in the East, and refrigerated cars, which will allow the great packers to really begin to take meat apart, and that's literally what they're doing. dismantling cows in Chicago and sending it out in these refrigerated cars all over the nation, putting smaller butchers out of business.
The people investing in these ranches are largely European capitalists. So when you begin to look at ranching, what you're not looking at is so much a hardy individualist, you're looking at a manifestation of what really is this world market and this new industry which is transforming the United States. Unlike the East, where the government largely stayed out of business, the federal government had a central role to play in the development of the West.
Nationally subsidized railroads carried settlers to the Great Plains, where they staked a claim under the Federal Homestead Act, or bought land the government had granted to the railroads. Ten years credit, six percent interest, only the interest payment down. Products will pay for...
Buy train tickets to explore the land. Deductible from the final cost if land is purchased. The movement west of Missouri is very much an artifact of railroad expansion, both because the railroads provide transportation, provide a way for farmers to get goods to market, but also the railroads sell as much land as farmers acquire from the homestead act.
In the initial stages, they're bringing them into some of the best agricultural lands in the world. Later on they're bringing them into very marginal agricultural lands and they're promising them that rain will follow the plow. Great-grandfather Enoch was a farmer in Missouri.
The territory... His brother did his ship of Garber. It's not anything there. Of course, no It is rival hail.
It is. In the winter, there's nothing to stop the wind. They don't have any trees. So the wind comes from the North Pole and just comes right through there.
They had to have been a strength somewhere gave them. They're overwhelmed by the immensity of the place. They're overwhelmed by the distance from neighbors. They're overwhelmed by the lack of rainfall. They're overwhelmed by a whole series of things.
There's nothing worse really than those descriptions of what it was like to be in a grasshopper plague. It's pretty awful, the devastation with which they can land and... take out a crop.
They devoured every green thing but the prairie grass. I was wearing a dress of white with a green stripe. The grasshopper settled on me and ate up every bit of the green stripe in that dress before anything could be done about it. Despite the hardships, the farmers of the Great Plains endured. One pioneer woman remembered the thrill of conquering a new country.
The attraction of the prairie, which simply gets into your blood and makes you dissatisfied away from it. The low-lying hills, the unobstructed view of the horizon. Farmers may have felt alone on the wide prairie, but they were not isolated from the march of progress. Agriculture, like every other business in America, was transformed by industrialization.
Farmers are going into the plains in order to create what's... An icon, a family farm. The problem is they are competing with farmers all over the world and the basic commodities they're producing, wheat, are being produced far more than anybody can consume. So this is one of the things that makes it a very, very hard row to hoe for these farmers in the late 19th century.
What happens to many of them is they leave farming. Omer tried to save it, but he said it was the most godforsaken piece of the world. He could imagine. Has to rival him. So he traded his 160 acres for a mule and a wagon, and he went back to Missouri and drove a trolley car the rest of his life, and I guess was very, very happy.
I always think of Sarah Winnemucca who was a poet who said at the beginning of her autobiography, I was here, I remember when the white people came, they came like a lion. For the hunting peoples, the resources went away, the buffalo and other game. Land was fenced and people were... Restricted from moving in ways that they had never been before. Many of them were separated from their children.
Tremendous health issues, problems of disease and malnutrition. And so their lives changed in almost every respect through that time period. As the trickle of immigrants into the West became a flood, American Indians were left with few alternatives. Indians did have choices to make. Some people tried to resist the Americans and tried to stop the expansion.
And still others allied themselves with the Americans because they found the Americans were the lesser of the evils that they faced. They faced other tribes who they thought were more threatening at that particular moment than whites were. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had designated the Black Hills of South Dakota as part of the Great... Sioux Reservation.
However, as the westward construction of the railroad approached and gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the terms of the treaty gave way under the pressure of white expansion. There were several bands of Sioux, all of whom opposed the invasion of the Black Hills. They all considered the Black Hills a sacred place.
The government announced that all of the Sioux were to report to their agencies and were no longer allowed to hide. hunt as the treaty had guaranteed that they could sitting bull and crazy horse in particular Rejected that. In June of 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 200 men of the 7th Cavalry, along with Crow and Ricker of Scouts, to force the Sioux back to their agency. The Sioux and other tribes, numbering 4,000 strong, were camped along the Little Bighorn River.
The Americans attacked them, rode directly into their village. They were turned back, they retreated up the hillside, they were surrounded by warriors and they were all killed. It's a bittersweet experience, even today, when you go to Little Bitcoin from an Indian perspective, because it represents the last stronghold that we had, even though we won. That particular battle, as they always say, we lost the war.
The Battle of Little Bighorn was a great military victory for the Plains Indians, but it proved to be one of their last. The U.S. Army was relentless in its pursuit of those who tried to remain free. We had two choices. You either go with the government or you became a hostile and be killed. And that seems a little harsh, but that was reality.
We had borders. We had boundaries that we had to remain within. I think the old-timers that first came on the reservation that time period never did adjust.
And that's what killed them, I believe. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward, as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. In 1889, a man named Wovoka, who was a Paiute in Nevada, had a vision which said that if people would dance and follow his teachings, that there would be peace and perhaps there would be some restoration of their earlier life, their pre-reservation life.
It was called the Ghost Dance and it brought people together to dance, to sing, to celebrate. As a source of unity, but also with some hope as well. They would dance, go in his trances.
They would see these things. They would see their loved ones coming back. They would see maybe visions of bison coming back.
That scared the government. That scared white people, actually. They could see them gaining strength, and that's why they stopped it, basically. You had a new religious movement.
That was expanding across the reservation. Unfortunately at Pine Ridge, you had a newly appointed agent who was very fearful of an uprising, who had all sorts of wild ideas about Indians, and who essentially panicked and called for the army to come. Indians are dancing and are wild and crazy.
We need protection and we need it now. Nothing short of a thousand troops were dancing. Within a few days, army unit arrived and of course this just raised the tension level.
The agent at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which was the home of Sitting Bull, was afraid that Sitting Bull might lead some kind of an uprising. And so he dispatched policemen to arrest Sitting Bull. They tried to come and take him before dawn in his cabin.
He stood up, pulled away, and he was killed, shot. This This then set off even more panic among other leaders of other reservation communities in this area. Bigfoot feared that he too would be arrested, and so he led his band from Cheyenne River south to Pine Ridge where he thought he'd be safe.
On the night of December 28, 1890, they met a troop of soldiers who told them that if they would camp at Wounded Knee Creek, they would be safe. In the course of the evening, the U.S. Army troops took up positions on the hills surrounding this depression, this low area along the creek bed, and the next morning announced that they were all would be required to give up their weapons. In the course of disarming this troop, one man resisted, a shot was fired, and before anyone could say anything, pandemonium broke out. Within a few minutes, the battlefield essentially was filled with bodies of Sioux people.
And it was devastating to understand that the women and children were killed, and old people that were sick were killed, with no concern over their humanism. It's a very bitter story. Charles Eastman was an educated Sioux physician, and he said in his autobiography, The events at Wounded Knee were deeply disappointing to someone who had put his trust in civilization. I think Wounded Knee broke his heart, and I think for many Indian people, this was such a crime and such a terrible act of violence that it was something that they really never forgot. The nation's hoop is broken and scattered.
There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. The age-old U.S. campaign of conquest and removal was complete. Now various factions in the United States sought to influence a new American Indian policy of assimilation.
The sooner all tribal relations are broken up, the sooner the Indian loses all his Indian ways, even his language. Better it will be for him and for the government, and greater will be the economy for both. From the Indian perspective, most of this sounded crazy.
Why not live the way you had always lived? But they also understood very clearly that this was a time of intense change. So there was also a Native American interest, not necessarily in assimilation, but in figuring out what they could use from this new culture, new skills. Farming made sense to a lot of people.
We couldn't hunt anymore, why not farm? Having your children learn to speak English. Christianity made some sense to people. My great-grandfather insisted that my grandfather consider Christianity and it was kind of a radical switch because he was one of the primary medicine men. My grandfather, according to the story, kept going to this...
Mission Church to hear the music and that seems to have been the motivation for a lot of Indians to at least consider Christianity if not be converted. They loved the hymns. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was not shy about joining forces with missionaries.
Even though there is this division of church and state in the American tradition, they quite easily and freely use government money to subsidize missionaries. In addition to suppressing Indian religion, abolition policy also sought to re-educate Indian youth. Boarding school policy really can be summarized by the slogan, kill the Indian, save the man.
The idea was that if they would all be forced through a very rigid schedule every day, that they would absorb this schedule and that they would become civilized people. My grandfather lived a pretty free life, and young men used to almost always be bare from the waist up. And when they weren't out doing things, they were walking around barefoot. He goes to Minnesota, and they put him in...
woolen uniform with shoes and the whole thing and he lasted I think close to two years but his health broke down because he wasn't used to that kind of life kids would all be packed off to Carlisle a lot of them would die out of sheer fright and loneliness stone of assimilation policy focused on land ownership The reformers who influenced Indian policy believed that private property and individualism formed the heart of civilization. They argued that reservations should be split up and the tribal lands allotted to individuals. And in 1887, the government moved ahead with the new policy outlined by the Dawes Act. The reservations were systematically surveyed.
People were assigned to individual plots of land. The so-called surplus was... sold or opened to white homesteaders and Indians tried to make a living on this small piece of land.
In the process of this allotment effort, Indians collectively lost about 90 million acres worth of land. Any possibility of them being economically viable went out the window because you couldn't manage this land collectively, you couldn't run it efficiently with these tiny plots of land. Starvation, loss of community, loss of land, loss of religion. It's amazing that as many survived into the 20th century as did. Like American Indians, Mexican Americans also found themselves in the path of the stampede of Anglos intent on settling in the West.
southwestern United States had until recently been part of Mexico. Before that, Mexican citizens are rendered into American citizens. And there are guarantees offered about their retention of their land and their full rights to citizenship. Those guarantees take a beating in the years after that.
Throughout the Southwest, the late 19th century witnessed a huge transfer of land from Mexican-American to Anglo-American ownership. What happens is that many of the... Mexican descent individuals had grants that had been given to them by the Spanish.
And so when the Americans come in, you know, many of them basically said, well, this was Spanish and you know, it doesn't matter to us what the Spanish government did for you. My family's been in New Mexico since 1598. Because our family's been in the state for so long, they were able to acquire quite a bit of land over the centuries. Some of the land grants were recognized by the US government but some of them weren't. But when the American government came in they wanted to see it on paper they said well where are the documents we want to see them.
They didn't have them anymore they had lost them over hundreds of years so the American government said well if you can't prove it on paper that it's no longer yours you're gonna have to leave. Land constituted the basis of wealth and position and the vast losses sustained by the Hispanic population permanently altered the class structure of Southwestern society. In 1850, the rural Mexican population in Texas was roughly equally distributed among ranch or farm owners, skilled laborers, and manual laborers. Fifty years later, the manual laboring class had ballooned to more than two-thirds of the Texas Mexican population. What the resulting decline in land ownership did was it really made people of Mexican origin dependent on wages.
The number of people who go to work for the railroad, for the large farming concerns, for the cattle ranches, for the small businesses in metropolitan areas of the Southwest grows. But we also know that land is critical to a sense of place, and so that when people lose the base they identified, as their home or their place of origin. They become more readily available as a migrating labor force so that people can move to Chicago, to Pennsylvania to work the steel mines, for example. They can follow the routes of the crops.
They're more easily displaced. They're more easily used by the economic system. Within this economic hierarchy, Anglos invoked a mythology similar to that which had been used to justify slavery. The lower class of Mexicans are docile, faithful, good servants, capable of strong attachments when firmly and kindly treated. They've been peons for generations.
They will always remain so, as it is their natural condition. But people of Mexican origin defied these stereotypes of docility and submissiveness. Mine workers, farm workers, and construction workers repeatedly went out on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. Across the Southwest, benevolent societies arose to help one another with community needs.
They served to reinforce cultural ties to the mother country, while at the same time providing support to the poor. and infrastructure for an emerging, uniquely Mexican-American identity. So people began to think of themselves as belonging in two worlds. In their own world, but then either in the world of the U.S. or in the world of Mexico. And people seem actually pretty comfortable in that coexistence.
But they adapted, they had to adapt to survive to the new culture. And they became urbanized. and Americanize like most everybody else just to survive. used to puzzle over why it is that the western myth really came into full being and got glued into the american mind in a period where it seemed so irrelevant to what was going on in most of america this is the era late 19th century of industrialization and urbanization so first you think well why in heaven's name would you then Have a cultural myth involving single white guys on horses in open spaces.
The explanation and the answer, that the imagination wants to go someplace quite different from the factory and the city street. What a great thing to do, to have a place where you can put your imagination, where life would be completely different, and you would not be in a factory, and you would not have a boss, and when someone... made you angry, you would shoot them. The hard part was of course there were other people there before and those are Indian peoples and one of the things that Americans have had a hard time with is seeing themselves as an imperial nation, as a conquering nation. If you ask most Americans to list a battle or conflict they'll tell you um, the Little Bighorn.
They'll tell you the Alamo. These are... astonishing things to remember because there are defeats.
But for the myth, they work wonderfully because they allow you to say, we did nothing. It looks like conquest, but we were just defending ourselves. You have this inversion of actual history where it makes it appear that Americans somehow were attacked the first moment they set foot on the Atlantic coast. When they got finished defending themselves, they somehow spread all the way across into the Pacific. But it serves its purpose because it can showed to Americans, we're not conquerors, we're not imperialists, we're just people who defend ourselves against aggression.