IV.

Beyond the Mississippi

As the frontier expanded beyond the Mississippi, it was moved by many of the same patterns and themes that had been important east of the river. Once again pioneers were drawn westward by economic opportunity and the chance to escape or purify an earlier way of life. Again the United States found itself in bloody conflict with rivals, such as Mexico and Native American tribes. The mix of people and exchange of cultures continued, now with an even richer mix of influences. The U.S. government played an even greater role in shaping the course of expansion west of the Mississippi.

Forces other than the search for farmland also propelled the frontier westward. The Far West was a vast storehouse of resources—gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, timber, rich soil, and immense grazing lands. The rise of industry created an almost limitless market for many of the West’s riches. That, and an expanding overseas market, gave immigrants additional reasons to move west. Rapid advances in transportation such as the building of the railroads made it easier for immigrants to move west.

However, the frontier did not uniformly expand westward from the Mississippi River. By the 1840s, the line of settlement had moved only a few hundred miles past the river. By 1850 Arkansas, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin had been admitted as states. Then the frontier jumped across the middle of the country to Oregon and California on the Pacific Coast. California became the first state on the Pacific in 1850.

The frontier then began moving both westward and eastward, as white settlers gradually pushed into the huge interior area of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the far Southwest. Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado were admitted to the Union between 1850 and 1876, but parts of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains were settled slowly. Then in 1889 and 1890, six states were added: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. This left only Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona in the contiguous United States, all of which had joined the Union by 1912.

The order in which states were admitted to the Union reflects the frontier’s movement across the American West. The many resources of the West were taken and developed at different times and for different purposes by pioneers from the East. Land in the Far West was developed for farming; gold and silver were mined from the mountains; and water was diverted to help make the Great Plains more hospitable for agriculture. Instead of a steady advance of new settlement, the frontier moved as a series of explosive changes.

A.

Explorations

The United States began exploration of the Far West much later than some other nations. In 1540 the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an ambitious expedition in search of gold into New Mexico and the southern plains. Later, during the 1770s, Juan Bautista de Anza and Francisco de Escalante explored the southern Rocky Mountains and much of the Southwest, while Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the Pacific coast as far as northern California. French explorers and traders explored the Missouri River valley and the northern plains in the 18th century. The Englishman Alexander Mackenzie, who traveled through western Canada to the Pacific in the 1790s, was the first Euro-American known to have crossed the northern part of the continent by land, while the English navigator George Vancouver explored and mapped the north Pacific coast.

Geographic knowledge had economic and strategic value, and for this reason nations did not share this information. The United States knew little of the Far West at the time of the Louisiana Purchase when the United States acquired what was roughly the western watershed of the Mississippi River from France in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson, who already had a deep curiosity about the West, selected Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northern reaches of the new acquisition and then to proceed to the Pacific Ocean. With the help of a Shoshone woman guide, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri River from Saint Louis, crossed the Rocky Mountains and descended the Columbia River. After a winter on the Pacific, they retraced their route and returned. Besides being one of the great adventures of American history, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) gathered a vast amount of geographic and scientific information, established diplomatic and trade relations with some Native American tribes, and helped establish the claim of the United States to the far Northwest.

Lewis and Clark led only one of several government-sponsored expeditions. Zebulon M. Pike (1805-1806) and Stephen H. Long (1820) explored the central Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. While John C. Frémont covered little new ground during the 1840s, his published accounts (mostly written by his wife Jesse) taught the public about the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and California. Maritime expeditions under Robert Gray mapped more of the Pacific coast. In 1792 Gray explored the mouth of the Columbia River, which strengthened the claim of the United States to the Northwest.

Besides these government agents, thousands of trappers, the mountain men, traveled through the Far West after 1820 in search of furs, especially beaver pelts. During the 1820s and 1830s these men’s travels did at least as much as government expeditions to fill in what were, to the United States, blank spaces on the Western map. One leading trapper, Jedediah Smith, covered more than 16,000 miles in his explorations and provided the government with information and maps of the region.

B.

Overland to Oregon

This geographic knowledge opened the way for ordinary citizens to move across the country to the Far West. The area immediately west of the farming frontier, the Great Plains, offered little to farmers who were used to working on land with plentiful rainfall and having trees to build houses. Settlers traveled across the Great Plains to get to the Pacific Northwest, then called the Oregon country, which by the 1840s had a reputation as an agrarian paradise, where soil and climate would nearly guarantee a settler’s health and prosperity. The central valleys of California were pictured in the same way. Oregon and California, however, were more than 2000 miles from Missouri, on the other side of plains, deserts, and the nation’s two tallest mountain chains.

Nonetheless, beginning in the 1840s some people were willing to make the trek to their imagined promised land. Between 1841 and the late 1860s, more than a third of a million persons moved from the Missouri valley to the Pacific Coast. Most followed overland trails, including the Oregon and California trails. These two routes left Missouri and followed the Platte River through southwestern Wyoming, and then split. The Oregon Trail went northwest over the Blue and Cascade mountains to Oregon, and the California Trail went southwest over the Sierra Nevada to California. At first, most of those who traveled these trails were farming families who settled in what is now central California and along Oregon’s Willamette valley. The former was part of Mexico, and the latter was claimed by both the United States and Britain. This migration extended the influence of the United States, which was soon to wrestle with Mexico and Britain for control of the land all the way to the Pacific.

C.

Addition of Territory

Between 1845 and 1848 the United States rapidly pushed the national border to the Pacific Ocean, increasing its territory by more than 1.2 million square miles, more land than was added by the Louisiana Purchase. It acquired these lands in three great chunks, through annexation, diplomacy, and a war. This acquisition of land was probably the most important step taken by the U.S. government in encouraging westward expansion.

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas, which had been an independent republic since winning its independence from Mexico in 1836 (see Texas Revolution). The next year President James K. Polk negotiated a treaty with Britain that gave the United States land that would become the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Also in 1846 the nation went to war with Mexico. After almost two years of fighting, Mexico surrendered nearly half of its territory. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico relinquished its claims to Texas, and the United States acquired land that would become the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

D.

The Mining Frontier

In January 1848 only a month before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, some employees of John Sutter, an early promoter of California settlement, found traces of gold in the American River, where they were building a mill. Their discovery sparked the gold rush of 1849. Thousands of people flooded along the overland trails, and at least as many came by ship, some from Australia and Asia and others from the eastern United States and Europe. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the continent for the gold fields. Few found the wealth they expected, and most returned home. Enough stayed, however, to establish California as a state just two years after the gold rush began. The rush overwhelmed the Hispanic and Native American peoples already living in California. White settlers took land claims from many Hispanics and killed many Native Americans.

More than $1 billion in gold was mined in California. There and elsewhere in the West two types of mining were practiced. In placer mining, individual prospectors took gold from streams that had eroded the gold from its first home somewhere further upstream. Lode mining took gold from its original source, usually in veins, or areas of mineral deposits, that ran through some Western mountains. To find this gold, prospectors had to dig and blast their way into the rock. Locating and extracting gold through this method was extremely expensive, and working deep in the earth was very dangerous. However, the rewards were usually much greater than those from placer mining. Most lode mining was done by large companies, and mines became an industrial enterprise with wage workers and corporate owners.

Once gold was found in California, prospectors scoured the West in search of other bonanzas. Although none proved as rewarding as California’s, many deposits of minerals were discovered. There were gold rushes in Colorado in 1859, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and Arizona and Nevada in the 1870s. In 1859 silver was discovered in far western Nevada in what became known as the Comstock Lode. Eventually this region produced more than $300 million in silver. Other silver strikes were made in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. The West proved to be one of the world’s great reservoirs of valuable metals.

E.

Railroads

With such an explosive growth in population on the Pacific Coast, there was a need to connect these distant communities with the eastern states. The answer seemed to be a railroad linking the two parts of the continent. Building a transcontinental system, however, was enormously complex and expensive. In 1862 Congress agreed to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to two corporations to construct the railroad. These companies were also given millions of acres of Western land to sell in order to pay back the loan. In effect, Western land was being used to pay for the West’s own expansion. With the help of thousands of Irish immigrant laborers, the Union Pacific Railroad was built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, the Central Pacific was built eastward from northern California, edging over the Sierra Nevada through the efforts of Chinese workers imported for the job. In 1869 the two railroads joined at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Over the next 20 years, other transcontinental railroads were built: the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Southern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. Most were also financed by massive gifts of public land to private corporations. Many other lines appeared, connecting the larger railroads and reaching into remote areas. By the 1890s a web of steel rails covered much of the West.

The growth of railroads encouraged westward expansion more than any other single development. Railroads made it easier for settlers to move west, and railroad corporations vigorously promoted settlement in order to sell the land given them by the government. Railroads also helped industry develop in the West. Many new industries—mining and lumbering, for instance—relied on railroads to carry in equipment and materials that could never have been brought in otherwise. Western companies used the railroads to export the rich resources they found there. The railroads also made it easier to transport troops and war materials, and thereby accelerated the end of Native American independence.

F.

Ranching and Farming Frontiers

Railroads were also responsible for the growth of ranching. After the American Civil War, the Northeast and Ohio Valley had a growing demand for beef. At the same time, southern Texas had a huge supply of cattle, mostly descendants of Spanish stock called longhorns. The railroad provided the means of linking supply with demand—the Texas cattle with the Northern cities. Cattle were herded northward out of Texas along the Chisholm and Great Western trails to towns on the Great Plains. There they were loaded onto specially built rail cars and carried by the newly built railroads to slaughterhouses in Kansas City, Chicago, and other urban centers. Cowtowns like Abilene, Caldwell, and Dodge City in Kansas and Oglalla in Nebraska became famous as playgrounds for cowboys at the end of long, difficult cattle drives.

By the late 1880s cattle drives were no longer necessary. New railroads connected more of the West to eastern markets. In addition, as Native American tribes were defeated and confined to reservations, cattle ranching spread into the Great Plains states of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Montana. Ranching also boomed in the Southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. New breeds of cattle that could withstand the harsh conditions could now be fattened on plains grasses and shipped to eastern dinner tables.

Ranching became a big business. The largest ranches often were corporations funded by millions of dollars in stock sold in the East, Britain, and Europe. As in many expanding industries, however, problems soon developed. Rapid growth led to overstocking and overgrazing of pastures, and providing the cattle with water was difficult because of the arid climate. The grasslands could not support all the cattle, which became weakened from hunger and were unable to survive the severe winters. The brutal winter of 1886 to 1887 killed tens of thousands of cattle on plains ranches. In the aftermath many ranchers switched to sheep, which could survive with less water than cattle.

One of the original forces behind westward expansion—farmers looking for better land—was also important in the development of the plains states. Once again the railroads played a crucial role. Even the richest lands were useless without a way to transport harvested crops to markets. As more of the interior was reached by rail lines, farmers began moving in, often buying the land that the railroad corporations had received from the government.

The government encouraged agricultural expansion more directly with the Homestead Act, passed in 1862. The act offered 65 hectares (160 acres) virtually free to any citizen willing to develop the land. Lawmakers hoped that the Homestead Act would lead to agricultural development in the western states, but this goal was not achieved. Because of the lack of rainfall in much of the West, a successful farmer often needed more land than the Homestead Act offered. Furthermore, much of the best land had already been sold or given to railroads. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of farming families moved west under the law.

These farming families settled on millions of acres that had been shunned by farmers who had crossed over the region earlier to settle in more inviting places on the Pacific Coast. These families farmed the plains with new techniques and equipment developed after the Civil War. The government, in an effort to contribute to the development of these new methods, conducted research in the newly created Department of Agriculture and endowed agricultural colleges under the Morrill Act (1862). To produce crops with less rainfall, farmers on the Great Plains used new methods of dry farming and irrigated land close to streams. They learned to build sod houses cheaply out of bricks made of soil and held together by grassroots, but they also relied on many products from distant factories, such as barbed wire, which made cheap fencing in treeless areas. As in mining and ranching, corporations began buying land for large farms. The modern America of industry and big business was reaching into the farming frontier.

G.

Native Americans

Dozens of Native American tribes lived in the West, supporting themselves with many different economies. Tribes on the Great Plains, like the Arapaho and Sioux, were hunters and gatherers who depended on vast herds of bison. Most tribes in the Southwest, like the Pueblos, Hopis, and Navajos, were hunters and farmers. In the Pacific Northwest, tribes like the Nez Perce were traders and fishermen who relied on rivers rich with salmon. Westward expansion depleted resources and damaged the environment, thus destroying the Native Americans’ ability to support themselves. In addition, the pioneers carried diseases that killed thousands of Native Americans.

Some Native Americans resisted the influx of white settlers militarily. The most famous conflicts took place on the Great Plains, where the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and others fought the U.S. Army in several campaigns between 1855 and 1877. Native Americans won some dramatic victories, including the defeat of George Custer on Montana’s Little Bighorn River in 1876, but they were ultimately defeated and confined to reservations. In 1877 the Nez Perce fought a running campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Canada. Southwestern Apache peoples, with their most famous leader, Geronimo, resisted occupation of their country until 1886. Overall, however, military conflict was not the force that destroyed the Native American culture of independence; it was the volume of white settlers taking over Native American land and the ways in which these settlers transformed the West.

Under scores of treaties Native Americans were assigned to reservations and given government support that was rarely adequate. Government policy tried to assimilate the tribes into white society by suppressing native culture and trying to convert Native Americans to white customs. The Dawes Act of 1887 aimed to end reservations and diminish the importance of the tribe by allotting reservation lands to individual tribal members. Between 1887 and 1934, dozens of reservations were eliminated, and Native American lands were reduced from 150 million acres to 48 million acres. In 1934 the Wheeler-Howard Act preserved the remaining reservations and revived others. Although living conditions remain poor on many reservations, Native Americans have managed in many cases to preserve much of their culture and identity.