A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (83 page)

For a brief time it seemed as if the cattle frontier and the ubiquitous cowboys would never disappear. During the 1880s the price of beef skyrocketed, and large European investment firms entered the market; in 1883, for example, Wyoming alone hosted twelve cattle firms with $12 million in assets. But because none of these cattlemen owned the land on which their cattle grazed—the public domain—none had much interest in taking care of it. By 1885 there were far too many cattle overharvesting the grass of the public lands of the Great Plains. Tragically, the weather turned at the same time the cattle were short of feed. In the winter of 1886–87, temperatures plummeted to lows of minus 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Hundreds of thousands of cattle died of starvation, unable to graze the barren Plains.

The cowboy was usually the last in a line of characters to reach a town before civilization set in. Following the trappers, miners, soldiers, and missionaries, the cowboys inevitably gave way to the next wave of settlers, the farmers. The Homestead Act made available land in the form of 160-acre grants to 400,000 individuals and families from 1862 to 1890.
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Total improved acreage in the United States rose from 189 million to 414 million acres, and although the Homestead grants were marked by fraud, the westward migration of legitimate farm families, and the economic and environmental impact of that migration, brought a staggering change to the demography and environment of the American West.

In true frontier fashion, new western farmers adapted to the semiarid conditions that awaited most of them. New steel-bladed John Deere plows sliced through prairie soil that had lain dormant for centuries; and barbed wire, developed by John Warne Gates, became a standard fencing material on the treeless Plains.
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Windmills pumped ground water, and pioneers learned Mormon techniques for dryland farming and irrigation. Corn, wheat, and oat crops were complemented by alfalfa for winter feed for cattle and sheep herds; then, later, fruit, vegetables, potatoes, and sugar beets emerged as important crops in California, the Great Basin of Utah, and on the Columbia Plain.
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Yet frontier farmers found themselves pushed out by an emergent, highly industrialized agribusiness sector. For example, the typical farm size of 160 acres, a figure determined by unrealistic politicians in the lush eastern United States, was woefully inadequate to support Plains agriculture. Drought, harsh winters, and competition from agribusiness combined to hurt small producers. Only capitalized firms could afford the equipment—steam-powered tractors, combines, harvesters, and irrigation technology—that characterized successful farming west of the Mississippi. The small farm in America truly died more than a hundred years ago of its own inefficiency, when two thirds of all homesteaders failed. Even when farming proved profitable, life on the frontier beat down the sodbusters (who got their name from breaking ground with their plows) and their families with periods of mind-numbing boredom mixed with near-death situations. Wild animals, poisonous reptiles, deadly diseases, drought, subzero cold, and blazing heat all combined to make prairie living exceedingly hard. Sodbusters had to ward off clouds of locusts, track down stray horses, keep their wells safe, and watch out for strangers or Indians. Their nearest neighbor might be miles away, and the closest town often a day or two’s ride. Generally, a prairie family would purchase supplies for a month and might not see other humans for weeks.
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No one in a farm family had much leisure time: farm life involved backbreaking work from well before sunrise until after sunset. Farmers often ate five hearty meals a day. They rose before sunup, ate an early dawn breakfast, took a mid-morning break for another small meal, returned at lunch, had a late afternoon snack, and then ate a full-scale dinner after sundown. That meant that wives spent virtually their entire lives cooking, cleaning up from one meal, then starting another. And cleaning in a house made of sod—dirt!—itself constituted a monumental task. Despite low pay, sodbusters tried to hang on because of the independence farm life offered and the opportunity they had to own land. Nevertheless, most went broke, and those fortunate farmers who eventually did acquire their property after paying off the mortgage still faced problems: seldom did crop prices increase enough for them to expand operations.

But there had to be something to it: from 1860 to 1910, the number of farms in America tripled. This dynamic placed some 50 million people in an agricultural setting, cultivating “500 million acres, an area as large as western Europe.”
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Such farm-sector expansion was accelerated by something as small as a sharp piece of wire sticking out from a twisted wire at regular intervals—barbed wire. Joseph F. Glidden and Jacob Haish, two Illinois farmers, patented barbed wire in the mid-1870s, and by decade’s end production had soared to more than 80 million pounds, costing less than $2 per 100 pounds. The appearance of barbed wire carried profound significance for the Plains, where little wood existed, and it benefited from the sales pitch of John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who trained a herd of docile steers and used them in his demonstrations. In fact, the wire worked as advertised.
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Wire did what innumerable judges, sheriffs, and even vigilantes could not: it secured the property rights of the small farmer against the cattle barons. And it took little to lay new wire if a farmer was fortunate enough to expand his holdings. In the short run, this forced the constant westward migration of the cattle drovers; in the long run it probably secured the viability of large agricultural operations.

Farming, milling, lumbering, mining, ranching, and harvesting of natural resources in the American West thus exhibited striking consistency. Small producers and entrepreneurs began the process, only to be superseded by large capitalized firms that could afford the technology necessary to efficiently harvest fur, fish, timber, ore, cattle, and foodstuffs. In so doing, they produced riches that benefited millions of Americans. The evidence shows that those who enjoyed government favors and subsidies abused the resources the most; whereas those who had to pay their own way proved the best conservators of our natural heritage.

Ultimately, the story of the harvesting of natural resources in the West is far from a tragic one. Rather, it is a story of transition and adjustment. The settlement and expansion of the trans-Mississippi West exactly paralleled the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent decline of small producers and farmsteads in America toward the end of the nineteenth century and reflected a growth in manufacturing.

Without question, some of the generation that migrated west following the Civil War paid a hard price for modernity. Most never found their dream of a western Eden. Yet in the long run, a great many of them found a level of independence and prosperity unheard of in Europe. Those who did adjust, and their children after them, reaped the many benefits the Industrial Revolution and modernity brought in increased standards of living and life expectancy. Only one group was largely left out of either the rising prosperity or the expanding political freedom in the West—the original inhabitants.

The Indians’ Next-to-the-Last Stand

Since colonial times, interactions between whites and Indians had followed a remarkably similar pattern, regardless of the region in which those interactions took place. Upon first contact Indians and non-Indians were often peaceful toward one another and made many important cross-cultural exchanges—food, language, religion, medicine, military techniques, and material culture (tools, weapons, clothing, and so forth). However, this initial peace was always followed by conflict over land, which would lead to a land treaty and then more misunderstanding and anger, and eventually a war, which always ended in Indian defeat. This, in turn, resulted in either the extermination or expulsion (farther West) of native Indian peoples. By the time of the Civil War, nearly all Indians east of the Mississippi were either dead, buttoned up on small reservations, or pushed westward, where this same cycle of relations had started anew.

Indians of the trans-Mississippi West were diverse regional groups inhabiting the Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific coast. Relocated tribes—eastern Indians such as the Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami—occupied tracts of land directly west of the Mississippi or in the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Along the Pacific shore, from Alaska to northern California, coastal Indians (Puyallup, Makah, Tlingit, Nisqualli, Chinook, and so on) lived in abundance and created sophisticated art, architecture, religion, and material culture. In the southwestern mountains, Hopi and Navajo herded livestock and farmed corn; neighboring Apache hunted and gathered on horseback like the vast majority of Columbia Plateau (Yakama, Spokane, and Nez Percé) and Great Plains Indians. The Great Plains Indians—located in between the relocated Indians and West Coast, Plateau, and mountain tribes—constituted the most formidable barrier to white settlement.

At one time, Plains Indians had been farmers. Introduction of the horse by Europeans literally transformed the world of the Plains tribes. Once they had the horse, hunting buffalo became much easier, turning the Indians into nomads who roamed the prairie in search of the herds.
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These herds, by any assessment, were vast at the time the first whites encountered them. Colonel Richard Dodge wrote in 1871 that “the whole country appeared one mass of buffalo,” an observation similar to that by Thomas Farnham in 1839 on the Santa Fe Trail, when he watched a single herd cross his line of sight for three days.
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To say that the animals covered the interior of America is not much of an exaggeration. They did not last long, however.

Even before the introduction of the horse, Indians had hunted bison, though not nearly as effectively. They tracked herds on foot, often setting fire to the grasslands in a massive box, surrounding a herd, except for a small opening through which the panicked animals ran—and were slaughtered by the hundreds.

Frequently, though not universally, Indians destroyed entire herds, using fire or running them off cliffs. One Indian spiritual belief held that if a single animal escaped, it would warn all other animals in the region; and other Indian concepts of animals viewed the animal population as essentially infinite, supplied by the gods.
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Ecohistorians agree that although hunting by the Plains Indians alone did not threaten the bison with extinction, when combined with other natural factors, including fire and predators, Indian hunting may have put the buffalo on the road to extinction over time, regardless of the subsequent devastating impact of white hunters.
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The fatal weakness of the Plains nomads regarding the buffalo was expressed by traveler John McDougall when he wrote of the Blackfeet in 1865, “Without the buffalo they would be helpless, and yet the whole nation did not own one.”
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The crucial point is that the Indians did not herd and breed the very animal they depended on. No system of surplus accumulation existed. Since the entire source of wealth could rot and degrade, none could exist for long. Moreover, the nomadic life made it impossible to haul much baggage, and therefore personal property could not be accumulated. This led fur trader Edwin Denig to conclude that this deficiency prevented the Plains nomads from storing provisions and made them utterly dependent on European trade goods.
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A great ecomyth has appeared, however, about the Indians and their relationship with the buffalo, wherein Indians were portrayed as the first true ecologists and environmentalists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Traveler after traveler reported seeing herds of rotting carcasses in the sun, often with only a hump or tongue gone. While the bison was, as Tom McHugh claimed, “a tribal department store,” with horns used for arrows, intestines for containers, skins and hides for teepee coverings and shields, and muscle for ropes, it is misleading to suggest that Indians did not wantonly slaughter buffalo at times.
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Father Pierre De Smet observed an Assiniboin hunt in which two thousand to three thousand Indians surrounded an entire herd of six hundred bison and killed every one. Aside from their own deprivation—which they could only notice when it was too late to prevent—the Indians had no way of estimating or tracking the size and health of the herds, and even if they could, nomadic lifestyle “made it difficult to enforce the mandates against waste.”
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It is also meaningless to employ terms like ecological imperialism to describe the interaction of the Europeans and the Indians. People of different races and ethnic backgrounds had come into contact with each other globally for centuries, from the Chinese in Southeast Asia to the Mongols in Europe to the Arabs in Africa. Seeds, germs, animals, viruses—all have interacted incessantly around the world for eons. (Even the European honeybee had settled as far west as St. Louis by the early 1700s.) To invoke such language is an attempt to reattach blame to Columbus and capitalism after anthropologists and historians have discovered that North American Indians had choices in how their world was shaped, and made no greater share of right—or wrong—choices than the new arrivals from Europe.
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Still, it is unarguable that once a market for buffalo hides, bones, and other parts developed, it paid white hunters to shoot every buffalo in sight, which they tended to do. By 1900 fewer than a couple of thousand buffalo remained, at which point the government sought to protect them on federal lands, such as Yellowstone National Park, one of the first main refuges.

Whatever the numbers, the elimination of the buffalo not only nearly exterminated a species, but it also further diminished the Plains Indians’ ability to sustain themselves and pushed them into a lifestyle that made them much more likely to come into conflict with whites. Having become nomads following the herds—as opposed to landowners working farms—whatever concepts of property rights they had held vanished. So too disappeared any need for them to respect white property rights, no matter how questionably gained. After the nomadic culture overtook Plains Indian life, a new culture of hunting with an emphasis on weapons naturally infused their society.