Comstock Lode

The West

• 1877: Troops from S. to W.

• 1860: 15 Billion Bison = food, clothing, shelter for 250,000 Native Americans

• 1900: Herds had been wiped out, open land fenced in by homesteads, ranches, RR. The N.A. population suffers huge human and cultural price

• 9 new states by 1896

The West: Mining

• Starts of as cheap activity: panning but then turns into big business with expensive deep shaft mining

• Boomtowns turn into ghost towns

• ½ population of mining towns = foreign born (1/3 Chinese)

• Cali = $20 a month miner tax for foreign born & US Congress passes Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882

The West: Cattle• Texas cut off from Confederacy by Union army: 5

million cattle roam freely feed off grass (Cheap business to get into)

• Long Drives come to an end in 1880’s: Overgrazing, Draught, Blizzard, Homesteads, & barbed wire

• Cattle Ranching turns into big business with huge ranches

• Homestead Act 1862: 160 Acres of Public Freeland for families who settle for 5 yrs.

• 500K families take advantage, 250 Million buy land b/c best lands go to RR & Corporations

The West: Frontier Life• Lack of Water, wood, hard & lonely life, bad

weather, falling crop prices, rising cost of machines

• 2/3 of Homesteads fail by 1900

• “Dry Farming”, Dams , & Irrigation help provide water for Western Agriculture

Fredrick Jackson Turner “ The

Significance of the Frontier in American

History”

• 1890 U.S. Census says frontier had been completely settled (closed)

• Turner argues 300 yrs of frontier experience played fundamental role in shaping the character of the U.S. (Independence & Individualism)

• Breaks down class distinction fosters social & political democracy

• Challenges = inventive, practical, but also wasteful towards natural resources

• The Frontier = a Safety Valve (promise of a fresh start)

• End of frontier = class division & social conflict as in Europe

“The more Indians we can kill this year the

fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the

Indians the more convinced I become

that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a

species of pauper. Their attempts at

civilization is ridiculous...” Gen. William

Tecumseh Sherman

GeneralPhilip Sheridan“Let them kill, skin, and sell until the Buffalo is

exterminated”Comes up with plan to attack

Indian villages during the winter when their supplies and mobility

were severely limited

"If a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers

but with the people whose crimes

necessitated the attack."

The West: Native Americans• Land = home & source of livelihood

• AJ’s Indian Territory of 1830’s comes to an end.

• Reservation Policy: Fort Laramie & Fort Atkinson

• Sand Creek, Colorado: Militia massacres encampment of Cheyenne

• Sioux Wars 1865 -67: army column wiped out by Sioux

• Little Big Horn 1867: George Custer

• Constant War and loss of Buffalo force Indians to comply

George Armstrong

Custer

Sitting Bull stabbing "Custer," with dead Native Americans lying on ground, in scene by Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show performers

The West: Native Americans• Helen Hunt Jackson: A Century of Dishonor (1881)

• Assimilation

• Dawes Security Act (1887): break up tribal organizations, land broken up into 160 plots, citizenship granted to those who live on land for 25 yrs & lived “civilized life”

• Dawes is failure: best land goes to white settlers by 1900 disease & poverty reduce Indian to 200,000

• Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull, Wounded Knee (End of Indian Wars)

Red Cloud, a chief of the Oglala Lakota

and leader of the 1866 attack on Fort

Phil Kearny that ended in the

FettermanMassacre. Red

Cloud's successful campaign against

United States troops in Montana

led to the Fort Laramie Treaty of

1868.

George Armstrong Custer (seated fourth from right in wide-brim hat) poses with his officers in 1868, a few months before the campaign that will lead to

his attack on Black Kettle's camp at the Washita River.

Cheyenne survivors of the Washita attack, mostly women and children, held under guard at Camp Supply in Indian Territory

(present-day Oklahoma) in 1868.

Peace commissioners meet at Fort Laramie in

1868 to negotiate a treaty with the Lakota. Seated in the tent are

General William S. Harney (with white beard) and General William Tecumseh

Sherman (head bowed at Harney's left).

An Oglala chief, smokes a ceremonial pipe at the 1868 treaty negotiations between the United States

and the Lakota

Nation at Fort Laramie,

Wyoming.

George Armstrong

Custer, his wife Libbie and their

cook, Eliza

Custer (left center in light clothing) leads a military expedition into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in 1874. Custer's incursion violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and laid the

groundwork for war between the Lakota and the United States when he announced that gold had been discovered in this most sacred of the Lakota's lands.

George Armstrong Custer poses with his Indian scouts during the Black

Hills expedition of 1874. The man pointing to the

map was named "Bloody Knife," a member of the

Cree tribe

Some of the thousands of gold miners who followed Custer into Black Hills after his 1874 expedition. One member of this group could well be a veteran who learned the trade as a Forty-niner.

"Scene of Gen. Custer's last

stand, looking in the direction of the ford and the Indian village."

The skeletal remains of horses

still litter the battlefield in this

photograph taken one year later, in 1877

Pvt. Comfort, U. S. Army, one of the

men sent onto the frontier to keep

the peace and fight the wars. He poses

here before an artist's rendition of

the wide open spaces of the West.

Wovoka (seated), the Paiute medicine man

and mystic whose visions of a world

without white men, renewed by the spirits of the dead, inspired the late 1880's Ghost

Dance movement among western tribes.

Kicking Bear, the Miniconjou Lakota who brought news of the Ghost Dance

to Sitting Bull at Standing Rock reservation,

setting in motion a chain of tragic

events that would end at Wounded

Knee.

Sitting BullHis name referred to a

buffalo bull sitting intractably on its

haunches and perfectly described his defiant

attitude toward American governmental authority.

Sitting Bull, Lakota warrior, mystic and chief. "If the Great

Spirit has chosen any one to be the chief of this country," he once

told a delegation of U. S. Senators, "it is

myself."

A Lakota Ghost

Dancing shirt,

believed to protect

its wearer

from bullets.

Chief Big Foot, leader of the Lakota band massacred at

Wounded Knee, photographed

several days after his death when troops came to bury the frozen

bodies.

The frozen body of one of the victims at Wounded Knee. The caption written on this photograph identifies him as the medicine man who triggered the conflict with a handful of dust tossed into the air to illustrate how the power of the Ghost Dance

would sweep the whites from the plains.

Soldiers stack frozen bodies into a mass grave several days after the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Soldiers pose with three of the four Hotchkiss Guns used against the Lakota at Wounded Knee. The caption on the photograph reads:

Famous Battery "K" of the 1st ArtilleryThese brave men and the Hotchkiss guns that

Big Foot's Indians thought were toys,Together with the fighting 7th what's

Left of Gen. Custer's boys,Sent 200 Indians to that

Heaven which the ghost dancer enjoys.This checked the Indian noise,

And Gen. Miles with staffReturned to Illinois.

Photo by Grabill, Deadwood, South Dakota.

Three Lakota

boys on their

arrival at the

Carlisle Indian School

The same three Lakota boys begin

the process of deculturization at the Carlisle Indian

School.

Warrior

Medicine Man

Survey teams like this one began

charting potential

routes for a transcontin

ental railroad in the 1850's.

Two Cheyenne women dressing buffalo hides outside their camp in 1878. The buffalo was the basis of life for the

people of the Plains and its destruction by buffalo hunters in the

1870's and 1880's played a fundamental part in their ultimate

subjugation.

George Armstrong Custer and Grand Duke Alexis of Russia pose at the start of an elaborate buffalo hunt arranged for the royal visitor by General Philip Sheridan. "Buffalo Bill" Cody served as scout on this 1870's adventure and

recounts the experience in his autobiography.

"Trail of the Hide Hunters." Buffalo lying dead in the snow in 1872, one with the hunter's rifle

propped against its carcass.

Rath & Wright's buffalo hide yard, showing 40,000 buffalo hides baled for shipment. Dodge

City, Kansas, 1878.

"Where we shine." Cowboys at the end of an 1897 roundup in Ward County, Texas, pose with their herd of almost 2,000 cattle. By this time, barbed wire had

closed down the long cattle trails for nearly two decades.

A winter cattle drive photographed by Charles Belden.

A trail drive on the Matador Range of Texas, around 1910. Even long after the era of the great cattle drives, short drives like this

one to the railhead at Lubbock, Texas, remained a part of cowboy life. Photographed by Irwin E. Smith.

Cowboys branding "mavericks" in the 1880's. This cowboy name for cattle without a brand can be traced to Texas rancher Samuel Maverick, whose

habit of neglecting to brand his herd led his neighbors to call an unbranded steer "one of Maverick's."

A cowboy camp at night in the 1880's, with some cowboys bedding down while others prepare to head out for night duty watching over the herd.

Miners prepare to descend into the Savage Silver Mining Works at Virginia City, Nevada, one of the dozens of mines working the Comstock Lode. This

1868 photograph by Timothy O'Sullivan is one of the first flashlit photos ever made.

The starting line for the first Oklahoma Land Rush, April 22, 1889.

The family of Jerry Shores , a former slave who settled in Custer County, Nebraska.

Homesteader Omer Yern and family, Custer County Nebraska

Homesteaders photographed in the 1880's by Solomon Butcher in Custer County, Nebraska.

Buffalo Bill, Hon. W. F. Cody