The American West

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The American West

• Unit 4
• APUSH

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The Last Frontier

• Land between Mississippi River Pacific Coast
  know as American Desert
• In 35 years virtually no more frontier left
• Fenced in homesteads
• Crisscrossed railroads
• New modern towns
• Near extermination of buffalo
• Damage to environment
• 3 types of settlers miners, cattlemen cowboys,
  farmers

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Mining Frontier

• Gold in Ca 1848 started settlement of West
• Gold silver strikes in
• Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona,
  South Dakota
• Comstock Lode in Nevada
• 340 million in gold and silver from 1859 to 1890
• Mining boom allowed for early statehood
• California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana

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Mining Frontier

• Boomtowns to Ghost towns

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Mining Frontier

• Mining towns that survived mimicked industrial
  cities
• Employed experienced miners from around the world
• Chinese competition
• Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
• Renewed 10 years later

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Mining Frontier

• Increased supply of silver helped to create the
  bimetallism crisis
• Major political issue in the 1880s 1890s
• Environmental scars still seen today
• Native American removal

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Cattle Frontier

• Traditions techniques of cattle businessmen
  borrowed from Mexico
• Texas longhorn originally came from Mexico
• After Civil War 5 million head of cattle
  grassland available for free
• Eastern market for Texas cattle
• Overgrazing
• 1885-1886 blizzard drought

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Cattle Frontier

• Hurt by the arrival of homesteaders who put up
  barbed wire
• Oklahoma The Farmer the Cowman
• Wealthy cattlemen survive by using scientific
  management techniques feeding them hay grain

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Farming Frontier

• Homestead Act of 1862
• 160 acres free to any family
• Settled on it for 5 years improved on it
• Sodbusters Dugouts

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Farming Frontier

• Problems
• Weather extremes
• Plagues
• Water scarce
• Wood scarce
• 160 acres
• Dry farming
• Dams irrigation

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Turners Frontier Thesis

• Historian Frederick Jackson Turner
• The Significance of the Frontier in American
  History (1893)
• Response to the US Census Bureaus report that
  the frontier was closed (settled)
• His belief promotion of individualistic
  democracy was the most important effect of the
  frontier

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Turners Frontier Thesis

• Promoted a habit of independence individualism
• Broken down social barriers, fostering social
  political democracy
• Forced Americans to be inventive, practical
  wasteful toward natural resources
• Closing of frontier meant an end to starting over
• Many historians debate the truth of Turners
  thesis

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Removing Native Americans
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Native American Policy

• US systematically took over Native lands
• Tribes lost their land freedom to live
  according to traditions
• Dozens of cultural tribal groups lived in the
  West
• 2/3 of western tribes lived on Great Plains
• Given up farming in colonial times
• Society dependent on buffalo

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Reservation Policy

• 1830s removing eastern Native Americans to the
  West to Indian country
• Oregon trail transcontinental railroad
• 1851- Federal government began to assign plains
  tribes large tracks of land
• Most tribes refused to restrict themselves
  continued following buffalo

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Indian Wars

• Sporadic fighting brutal massacres
• 1864 Sand Creek, Colorado
• Sioux War 1865-1867
• Smaller Reservations
• Red River War
• Second Sioux War (Sitting Bull Crazy Horse)
• Little Big Horn
• Chief Joseph
• Winning the West

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Assimilationists

• Helen Hunt Jackson
• A Century of Dishonor (1881)
• Created sympathy for Native Americans especially
  in the East

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Assimilationists

• Most supported assimilation as answer
• Emphasized formal education training
• Conversion to Christianity
• Boarding schools set up to segregate Native
  American children from their people

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Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

• Abandon practice of dealing w/ tribes as separate
  nations
• Dawes Act designed to break up tribal
  organizations
• Divided the tribal lands into ploys of 160 acres
  or less depending on family size
• US citizenship granted to those who stayed on the
  land 25 years adopted the habits of civilized
  life.

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Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

• 47 million acres of land distributed to Natives
• 90 million acres of former reservation land
  (often best land) would be sold to white settlers
  by the government, speculators, or Native
  Americans themselves
• By 1900 disease poverty had reduced Native
  American population to 200,000

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Ghost Dance

• Last effort to resist US domination
• Religious movement

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Wounded Knee
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150 Sioux in mass grave
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New South
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New South

• New South more like the North
• Henry Grady
• Local governments
• Spur growth with tax exemptions to attract new
  industries
• Cheap labor was incentive for businesses to move
  there

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Southern Poverty

• Poorest region in country- largely stayed
  agricultural
• Northern investors largely controlled South
• Poverty of majority of Southerners due to
• Souths late start _at_ industrialization
• Poorly educated workforce

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Agriculture

• Postwar economy remained tied to growing cotton
• 1870-1900 acres planted in cotton more than
  doubled
• Increased productivity- glut of cotton caused
  prices to decline more than 50 by 1890s
• Sharecropping crop lien cycle

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George Washington Carver

• African American scientist at Tuskegee Institute
  in Alabama
• Promoted growing of peanuts, sweet potatoes,
  soybeans
• Helped to diversify the Souths agriculture

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Segregation

• End of Reconstruction North withdrew protection-
  left former slaves to South
• Redeemers
• Civil Rights Cases of 1883
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• separate but equal accommodations
• Jim Crow laws

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Voting Discrimination

• Literacy tests
• Poll taxes
• Political party primaries
• Grandfather clauses
• 1898 Supreme Court sanctions
• Southern courts

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Responses to segregation

• Advocated leaving by migrating
• Campaigned for anti-lynching laws against Jim
  Crow laws
• Booker T. Washington
• Preached racial harmony economic cooperation

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Railroads
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Railroad Age

• Post-War expansion of railroads
• Government aid
• Importance of railroads in the West

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Constructing the Transcontinental Railroad

• The Union Pacific
• The Central Pacific
• Completion of the line in Ogden, Utah

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Impact of the RR on the Nation

• New Trancontinental Lines emerge
• Railroads as business
• Impact on
• National unity economics
• Industrialization
• Mining agriculture
• Grown of cities urban areas
• Immigration
• Environment
• Time
• Wealth

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Corruption in the Railroad Industry

• Scams in the RR industry
• Stock watering
• Bribery
• The pool
• Rebates kickbacks
• Price gouging
• Government regulation of RRs
• State regulations
• Federal regulations

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Inventors Tycoons

• Post-war industrial expansion
• Factors contributing to rise of American industry
• liquid capitol
• Abundant natural resources
• Cheap plentiful labor
• American ingenuity invention
• American inventors

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Efforts to curb competition

• Vertical integration
• Controls up down the hierarchy
• Andrew Carnegie in steel industry
• Example oil company
• Own oil wells
• Refinery facilities
• Retail outlets (gas stations)

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Efforts to curb competition

• Horizontal integration
• John D. Rockefeller in oil industry
• Control more more of a given niche of an
  industry
• Shoe manufacturing went from 3,500 firms in 1900
  to less than 1,000 today but output has expanded

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Steel Industry

• Development of steel
• Factors contributing to growth of steel
• Bessemer Process
• Access to coal iron ore
• Ready labor
• Andrew Carnegie

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Rockefeller the Standard Oil Company

• Development of the American Oil Industry
• 1st well
• Kerosene
• Gasoline
• John D. Rockefeller

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Divisions between Rich Poor

• Rising upper class
• Defending class distinctions
• Gospel of Wealth
• Social Darwinism
• Rugged individualism contempt for poor

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Government Industry

• Constitutional safeguards for industry
• Interstate commerce clause
• 14th Amendment
• Government attempts to control business
• Sherman Anti-Trust Act
• Enforcing the Sherman Anti0Trust Act
• Significance of Act

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Impact of New Industrial Revolution

• On federal government
• On Lifestyles
• On women
• On class divisions
• On workers
• On foreign trade

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The Labor Movement

• Life of Workers
• Corporate resistance to unions
• Use wealth to undermine
• Appeal to federal courts
• Used troops to break strikes
• lockouts
• yellow dog contracts ironclad oaths
• blacklists
• Company towns

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Rise of Unions

• Early unions
• National Labor Union (1866)
• The Knights of Labor (1869)
• The American Federation of Labor (1886)
• Strikes
• Popularity
• Grow in strength but 3 of workforce in 1900
• Many suspicious of collective labor

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Plight of the farmers
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Farm problems

• Becoming a minority
• of US farms more than doubled between 1865-1900
• People working farms declined from 60 to 37
• Farming increasingly commercialized specialized
• Northern Western farmers concentrated on single
  cash crops
• As consumers began to get food from local stores
  goods from catalogs

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Farm problems

• Dependent on large expensive machines
• Increase yield but required loans to purchase
• Steam engines, seeders, reaper-thresher combines
• Small farmers cant compete
• Large farms ran like corporations

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Falling Prices

• Increased production combines w/ global
  competition to drive down wheat, cotton other
  crop prices
• Static money supply deflation
• Prices fell, farmers faced high interest rates
  need to grow 2 to 3 times as much to pay off
  debts
• Overproduction further lowered prices
• More debts, foreclosures, sharecroppers

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Farmers fight back

• National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry
• 1870s organized economic ventures took
  political action
• Greatest support in today's Midwest
• Established cooperatives- businesses owned run
  by the farmers to save the costs charged by
  middlemen.
• Lobbied state legislatures to pass laws
  regulating rates charged by railroads
• Munn v. Illinois

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Farmers Fight Back

• Farmers Alliances
• Joined for same reasons as Grange
• Late 1880s prices for crops fell to all time low
• Separate alliances formed in different states
  regions to serve farmers needs for education in
  latest methods organized economic political
  action
• Potential for national level political party
• Ocala Platform