THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAN WEST
1
HST 106 – Spring 2021
The “Old West”
THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAN WEST
AND THE CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER
We’re going to leave the American South behind and head west across the Mississippi Rive
--and look at the myth of the “Old West”
We’ll look at how Anglo settlers from the east conquered and settled the region
--and we’ll look at the so-called “closing” of the United States’ western frontie
--and its importance to the way Americans think of themselves to this day
Now, the “Old West”, as it’s come to be known, is largely a post-Civil war phenomenon
--and lasted, roughly, from XXXXXXXXXX
It included the large-scale settlement of about 430 million acres of land
--More land was settled in the Old West than in the first 250 years of American
history
--In effect, the land area occupied by Anglo-Americans doubled
During this time, three empires rose and fell:
--Mining, especially gold and silve
--Farming
--and Cattle
Ten new states entered the Union
--and by 1912, the “lower forty-eight” were complete
It was also during this time that the Anglo-Americans defeated the Native American tribes in the so-called “Indian Wars”
The Old West is so much a part of our culture that we sell cigarettes by showing the “Marlboro Man” riding across the Montana ranges
We think of gunslingers and their battles in the dusty streets of cattle towns
--and across the lawless prairie
In fact, the truth behind the myth of the gunslingers is somewhat less romantic
--For example, one of the great figures of Western lore and legend was John
Wesley Hardin
--Hardin supposedly killed between 35 and 40 men
--But the best historians can only confirm that he shot and killed on man
--possibly by accident
--Hardin was in his hotel room cleaning his six-gun
--He didn’t realize there was a bullet in the chamber and it went off,
killing the poor guy in the room next doo
Or take “Wild Bill” Hickock, who looms so large in movie and TV accounts of the West
--Hickock may have shot two men in his life
--and one of those was a special deputy whom Hickock shot by mistake
Or Marshal Wyatt Earpe
--The legendary lawman from the Gunfight at the OK Co
al
--In fact, Earpe was never really a federal marshal
-and he may have only shot one man in his caree
So we have a lot of myths and legends that su
ound the Old West
The questions I want to answer today are these:
--Which “Old West” are we talking about when we talk about the West?
--And whose “Old West” was it?
--and how old, in fact, was the “Old West”?
Well, I think there are three significant ways of answering these questions:
--In terms of space
--Just where was the Old West?
--In terms of time
--When was the Old West?
--When did it come to an end?
--and in terms of the images that crowd our minds when we hear the phrase “The
Old West”
Let’s turn to the first of these issues – space
--and here we have to make our initial distinctions when talking about the Old
West
The Old West actually consisted of three distinct regions:
The first region ran from about 98 degrees longitude
--from the Canadian border down to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico through East
Texas
--So, basically, it covered the area of the Great Plains
--from Mississippi Rive
--to the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains
--and included the te
itories of the modern day states of Minnesota, Iowa,
Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, Kansas, Ne
aska, and the two
Dakotas
--It also included the eastern parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado
--This area covers about one-fifth of the land area of the continental United States
The second main region of the Old West we can call the Far West
--This is the area west of the pacific mountain ranges
--the Sie
a Nevadas up through the Cascade Range in Washington
Te
itory
--The Far West included most of the te
itory of present day California, as well as
Oregon and Washington state
The third principle region was the area that lay between the Pacific Mountain ranges and the western foothills of the Rockies
--This included a portion of Montana
--a good amount of Idaho
--most of Eastern Oregon
--portions of Utah, Nevada, and down into Arizona
Now, these three regions were quite different and distinct
--They had different climates and physical geographies
--but they have been lumped together, both in the 19th century and in our own
time, as the present “space” of the Old West
And concerning a good portion of this space, there grew up a legend that took on the proportion of a myth
--This was the myth of the “Great American Desert”
The concept of the Great American Desert had long been familiar to Americans
--and it controlled much of the direction and character of the United States’
te
itorial growth during the 19th century
So, we need to take a little step back here, to the period before the Civil War, to see how this geographical myth took shape
--and to see how it shaped the thoughts and the attitudes of the American people
as they moved West
In 1819, the federal government in Washington, and the Monroe administration decided that it needed substantial information about the te
itory that lay west of the Mississippi River as far west as the Rocky Mountains
So, they hired an explorer and surveyor named Stephen H. Long to make an expedition to:
--map this te
itory
--to keep a journal
--and to inform the federal government about a vast area of land that was
unknown to most Americans
Long was really following in the footsteps of the Lewis and Clark expedition that Thomas Jefferson had sent to establish the quickest route from the United States, through the lands of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, to the Pacific
--But Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery had not taken the time to explore the
great hinterlands south of their route
Long’s expedition took him and his men westward, through what is now Iowa and Ne
aska to the front of the Rocky Mountain ranges
--He then traveled south and back through parts of modern Oklahoma and
Arkansas
Long drew a very detailed master map as well as a series of more detailed smaller maps
--and drafted a mammoth report to Washington on all that he had seen and done
Over the area of his map that we know today as the Great Plains, Long simply printed in giant letters: “Great American Desert”
--and in his journals and in his report that accompanied his maps, Long conveyed
his opinion that, “I do not hesitate in saying that the entire area is almost
wholly unfit for cultivation. And of course it’s uninhabitable by a people
depending upon agriculture for their existence.”
--Buffalo, wild goats, game might live there, but not people
And, so, on the map that reached the American people in 1823, the Great American Desert made its way into lexicon and the psyche of a country hungering for westward expansion
As a result, there was very sparse settlement in the area beyond the Mississippi River in the 1840s and 1850s
--There were isolated pioneer homesteads here and there
--but not settlers pouring in vast numbers until the late 1850s and early 1860s
In the years immediately following the end of the Civil War, pioneer traffic into the trans-Mississippi West picked up dramatically
--by the hundreds, and then the thousands, and then the tens of thousands
Settlers poured into the Great Plains moving Westward toward new homes in Oregon and California
--and as they crossed the Plains, it became clear to them that the stories they had
heard about the ba
enness of the Great American Desert were simply myths
And to combat and replace the myths, a new myth took root
A new group of entrepreneurs and land speculators emerged on the Great Plains who were:
--eager to boost settlement
--and to attract business
--and obtain railroad concessions
These people wanted the folks back East to know that the Great American Desert was not a desert at all
--So, in the late 1860s and 1870s, they began to call the Great Plains “The
Garden” or the “Garden of the West”
--And they portrayed it as an agricultural paradise
--in which there was space enough and time enough for anyone to achieve their
wildest dreams and ambitions
A new kind of booster literature appeared that portrayed the Great American Desert area, the Great Plains, as an agrarian heaven, an idyllic spot
Now, one of the characteristics of the region we’re refe
ing to here is a lack of abundant rainfall
--But men eager to lure new settlers and to convince themselves, began to play up
the region as a place of abundant rain
--To sell the myth of “The Garden”, people began selling the myth exemplified in
the phrase popular in the 1870s that “rain follows the plow.”
--Wherever the yeoman farmer
oke the land and planted his crops, heaven was
bound to yield the appropriate rainfall to make those crops grow
What made people believe this kind of nonsense?
--Well, the myth seemed to have the backing of modern science
Charles Dana Wilbur was one of the most important boosters of Western settlement in the 1870s
--and he was also something of an amateur scientist
Wilbur claimed that he could prove scientifically that rainfall was bound to increase as the farming frontier moved steadily westward
--In 1881, Wilbur published a book called The Great Prairies and Valleys of
Ne
aska and the Northwest
--and in it he argued that the age-old symbol of the simple yeoman farmer, the
plow, was the instrument of cooperation between God, Nature, and Man
--He wrote, “In this miracle of progress, the plow was the une
ing prophet, the
procuring cause, not by any magic or enchantment, not by incantations or
offerings, but instead of the sweat of his face and toiling with his hands, man can
persuade the heavens to yield their treasures of dew and rain upon the land he
has chosen for his dwelling.”
--And Wilbur concluded, “The raindrop never fails to fall and answer to the
imploring power of prayer of labor.”
And, indeed, the 1870s proved to be an era of unusually heavy rainfall on the Great Plains
--But many farmers were discouraged when the region returned to its normal,
more arid climate in the 1880s
And so, much of the te
itory that we refer to as the “Old West” was new and unfamiliar to prospective settlers in