The West

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The West

• Intro
• The Natural Environment of the Western Interior
• Peoples of the West
• Reading Turner Backwards
• Homesteading
• The Fate of the Native Peoples
• The Last, Best West

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Natural Environments of the West

• Mountains
• Canadian shield
• Central interior
• Canadian Prairies
• Shield
• Parkland
• Plains
• American Plains
• Arid, short grass prairie beyond about 100th
  meridian

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Peoples of the West

• Eastern margins, Missouri River -- Mandan,
  Arikaras, Pawnees
• Plains peoples, Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos
  Cheyennes in central plains -- Cheyenne, Crow,
  Blackfoot, Assiniboine, and Sioux farther north
• Shield and parkland -- Ojibwe, Cree, Chipewyan

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The Way to the West

• Oregon Trail, 1840s
• Kansas Nebraska as staging grounds
• over 28,000 settlers by 1860

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Reading Turner Backwards

• Turner -- a slow moving frontier -- but central
  role for
• Cities
• State
• industrial capitalism
• Railroads
• Union Pacific Central Pacific meet at
  Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869

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From Buffalo to Cattle

• Early 1870s -- eastern tanneries figured out how
  to cure buffalo hides
• Disease
• shrunken pasturage
• gunned down from trains
• The Long Drive
• Cowboys
• Ranching industry collapses, 1885

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Homesteaders

• Homestead Act, 1862 -- 160 acres free
• Railways
• Boosters

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Kansas

• Why emigrate to Kansas? Because it is the
  garden spot of the world. Because it will grow
  anything that any other country will grow, and
  with less work. Because it rains here more than
  any other place, and at just the right time.

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John Wesley Powell

• American geologist, civil servant, and explorer
• 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition down the Green
  Colorado Rivers, through Grand Canyon
• 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of
  the United States

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John Wesley Powell

• About two-fifths of the entire area of the
  United States has a climate so arid that
  agriculture cannot be pursued there without
  irrigation.
• natural districts based on watersheds

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John Palliser

• British North American Exploring Expedition,
  1857-61
• Pallisers Triangle

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Homesteaders

• The Lord just knowed that we needed more land
  an Hes gone and changed the climate.
• rainfall follows the plow
• Origins of settlers
• Midwest
• Ontario
• Germany
• Russia
• Norway
• Sweden
• 1/3 foreign born in northern plains

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Homesteaders

• soddies
• barbed wire
• steel plows
• hard-kernel wheat
• End of 1880s -- wet cycle breaks -- Dakotas lose
  50,000 settlers between 1885-1890

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A Mechanized Frontier

• Dry farming
• Newlands Act, 1902 -- Bureau of Reclamation
• Roosevelt Dam, Salt River -- 1911, 280 feet
• By 1920, they had irrigated 2,205,420 acres
• Not a frontier for the small farmer

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Roosevelt Dam, Salt River, 1915
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Native Americans

• Peace Commission, 1867
• 2 large areas
• Great Sioux Reservation
• Oklahoma
• Little Big Horn -- Sitting Bull Custer
• Black Hills Mining
• Dawes Act, 1887
• Oklahoma Land Rush, 1889

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Wounded Knee

• Wovoka
• Ghost Dance
• 25 US troops die
• 146 Native men, women and children, many shot as
  they ran away
• End of Native resistance

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The Last, Best West

• Canada acquires Ruperts Land, 1871
• Dominion Lands Act, 1872
• NWMP, 1873
• Numbered Treaties, 1871-77
• Canadian Pacific Railway, 1886
• Laurier Boom
• Ethnic diversity
• The myth of the pioneer

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The Dust Bowl
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The Dust Bowl