History 7 – Survey of U.S. History

1. History 7 – Survey of U.S. History “The Land” in the History and Mythology of the American West Professor Daniel Borses

2. “The Significance of the American Frontier in American History” by Frederick Jackson Turner(The Turner Thesis in 2 slides!) • Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. • But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. • The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.

3. Turner Thesis • For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. [The] frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. • And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

4. Quick Discussion • What metanarrative did Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” create to explain the course of American history? • What are the strengths and weaknesses of such an argument?

5. Rural America

6. The Agrarian Ideal • Thomas Jefferson envisioned the country as a nation of farmers, an “agrarian republic.”

7. Carving farms from the “wilderness”… • Homestead Act of 1862 • Farmers own land after working it for 5 years • Attracted large number of European immigrants, Germans, Czechs, Scandinavians, Ukrainians, etc… • Settlers attracted by Currier & Ives prints, which gave Americans a view of life on the plains.

8. “Myth of the Yeoman Farmer” • Based on these representations, what would you say were dominant ideas about life as a farmer?

9. Facing West • Changes affecting rural America in the 1890s • Farming • Ranching • Mining • In all three occupations, individualism gives way to capitalized industries.

10. Farming the Great Plains • Farmers faced unexpected hardships, including loneliness, and deprivation blizzards, tornadoes, grasshoppers, hailstorms, drought, prairie fires, accidental death, and disease. • Much of the back-breaking labor setting up a homestead fell to women.

11. Lack of Timber • Joseph Little soddy on the prairie Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire

12. Agribusiness / “Bonanza Farms” • Agribusinesses deployed Northeast capital to fund large farms, worked largely by immigrant (Chinese and Mexican) laborers. • What effect did farms like these have on yeoman farmers? Reproduction of a late-19th century tractor

13. Ranchers • 1865-1885 was the golden age of the cowboy. • Northeastern capital and overpopulation turned cowboys into wage laborers. • Grazing cattle turned grasslands into deserts.

14. Cowboys of Color • Before the rise of the “cattle kings” the open range was a place to escape to restrictions of race. • To the left, a Black cowboy. Many vaqueros of Mexican heritage also operated on the open range.

15. Western Mining • Independent miners come for gold in California in 1849 • Comstock lode (silver) in Nevada in 1853 • Deeper veins of silver in Nevada, particularly Virginia City, in the 1870s

16. 1857 – Mining Life in California • How much capital investment is apparent here? • What do you make of the miners’ hair?

17. The Mining Industry • Like farmers and ranchers, miners became wage laborers working for corporation based in San Francisco or New York. Mining infrastructure in Virginia City, NV

18. Railroads – the Great Enemy?

19. Union & Pacific RR • What do you think was the symbolic effect of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad? • What did the completion of the Railroad mean to the old West? The “golden spike” united the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869.

20. The Central Importance of Railroads

21. The Loss of Indian Lands

22. The Fall of Comanchería The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon in 1874 marked the end of the Comanche empire on the Western plains.

23. Plains Indians • Plains Indians adapt to horses after the Spanish brought them to the New World. They became dependent on Buffalo for food.

24. 40,000 Buffalo hides in Dodge City, KS

25. Sioux Indians • Granted territory Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. • Land guarantees broken after the discovery of gold. Prospectors flood in. • U.S. military efforts lead to “Custer’s Last Stand” at Little Big Horn.

26. Custer’s Last Stand, 1876 • November 1875: Colonel George Armstrong Custer sought to drive the Indians out of the Black Hills after treaty negotiations broke down • January the government announced they would hunt down Indians outside reservations • Little Big Horn, or “Greasy Grass” present day Montana, June 1876 • Custer walked into the hub of Indian Resistance, 12,000 warriors of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne led by Sitting Bull • Wiped out Custer and his unit

27. The Nez Percé of modern-day Idaho refused to be confined to reservations. • Hunted down and surrendered after a 5-day siege in 1877 only 50 miles from Canada. • “Hear me, my chiefs.  I am tired.  My heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. “

28. Helen Hunt Jackson • Massachusetts-born writer, critic of U.S. Indian policy. • A Century of Dishonor (1881) • “Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations.” • Term: assimilation.

29. Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Founded 1879

30. Dawes Severalty Act 1887 • Goal: transform the Indian into individual property owner (assimilationist) • Assumed that tribal ties caused savagery. • Allotted 160 acres to each family head • Sold surplus lands: Over the 47 years of the Act's life, 90 million acres of treaty land was taken from Native Americans, and about 90,000 Indians were made landless • In the end, used to remove 60% of land reserved for Native Americans, providing the backdrop for the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee.

31. The Ghost Dance Wovoka (Pauite tribe), creator of the Ghost Dance. Big Foot, chief of the Lakota Sioux

32. Wounded Knee Massacre Hotchkiss cannon Zintakla Nuni (the Lost Bird)

33. Next Time: • Topics: • Life in the Jim Crow South • Readings: • Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors” • https://archive.org/stream/southernhorrors14975gut/14975.txt