Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (43 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
The religion quickly took hold and was widely adopted by Indians throughout the Plains, the Southwest, and the Far West. But it took on new importance when two Sioux medicine men claimed that “ghost shirts” worn by the dancers could stop white men’s bullets, leading to a new militant fervor among some Indians.
Alarmed by the Ghost Dancers, the army attempted to arrest a number of Indian leaders, including the great chief Sitting Bull, who had not joined the Ghost Dancers but was then living on a reservation after touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Fearful of Sitting Bull’s influence, Indian police in the hire of the government went to arrest Sitting Bull. On December 15, 1890, during a scuffle, he was killed by the Indian police sent to capture him.
Another chief named Big Foot, also sought by the army, was dying from pneumonia and wanted peace. But three days after Christmas Day in 1890, his band of some 350 women, children, and men was intercepted by an army patrol and taken to an encampment at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. There on the morning of December 29, 1890, as the Indians were surrendering their weapons to the soldiers, the gun of a deaf Indian named Black Coyote discharged. Whether it was accidental or deliberate is uncertain. But the soldiers immediately panicked, and turned their guns and artillery pieces on the disarmed Indians. At least 150 Indians, and probably as many as 300, died in the barrage. Wounded Knee was the Indians’ “last stand.”
The following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in more than fifty years.) But nearly facing extinction, the American Indian proved resilient if nothing else. With agonizingly slow progress, Indians gradually gained legal rights. In 1924, all native-born United States Indians were granted American citizenship. The ruling was in large measure a reaction of gratitude to the large number of Indians who fought for America during World War I, yet paternalism, discrimination, and exploitation were still commonplace.
By the time of the Great Depression (see Chapter 6), the plight of the Indians on reservations was, in the words of one government report, “deplorable.” During Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure, a cultural anthropologist named John Collier was appointed commissioner of Indians and proposed sweeping reforms that would recognize the right of Indian tribes to remain distinct and autonomous, with rights beyond those of other Americans. This was the so-called New Deal for Indians but it was a short-lived period of reform, replaced by the subsequent policy of “termination” under which the government sought to end the special status of Indians. As late as 1954, some states still kept Indians from voting. Yet, by the time of the 1980 census, there were some 1.5 million American Indians (including Aleuts and Eskimos), among the fastest-growing minority groups in America. As a group, however, they remain among the poorest and most unemployed Americans.
Must Read:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An American Indian History of the American West
by Dee Brown;
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians
by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
B
LACK
E
LK,
an Oglala holy man who was present at Pine Ridge in 1890 (from
Black Elk Speaks,
as told through John G. Neihart):
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. . . .
The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered, there is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Public school children first recited the pledge as they saluted the flag during the National School Celebration held in 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. The original pledge was probably written by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), a minister and Socialist. Some scholars believe James B. Upham (1845–1905) wrote the pledge. Both men were from Boston and worked for
The Youth’s Companion.
The National Flag Conferences of the American Legion expanded the original wording in 1923 and 1924.
In 1942, Congress made the pledge part of its code for the use of the flag. In 1954, during the anti-Communist fervor of the times, it added the words “under God.” Bellamy, a Socialist, would never have intended those words to be used.
This nation, turning 100 years old, had no
Odyssey
, no St. George slaying the dragon, no Prometheus. The emerging American genius for making a lot of money was a poor substitute for King Arthur and his knights (although the Horatio Alger myth of rags to riches was good for a lot of mileage). Without a mythology and set of ancient heroes to call its own, America had to manufacture its heroes. So the mythmaking machinery of nineteenth-century American media created a suitably heroic archetype in the cowboys of the Wild West. The image was of the undaunted cattle drivers living a life of reckless individualism, braving the elements, staving off brutal Indian attacks. Or of heroic lawmen dueling with six-guns in the streets at high noon. This artificial Wild West became America’s
Iliad
.
It was an image so powerful, appearing first in the newspapers and reinforced in dime novels and later through countless Hollywood movies, television series, and cigarette commercials, that it entered the American political mentality. This code of the cowboy shaped policy and presidents, perhaps most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan.
The heyday of the cowboy lasted approximately twenty years, from 1867 to 1887. The life wasn’t as glamorous or as romantically dangerous as it has been portrayed. The modern politicians’ comparison of drug-ravaged urban streets to the Wild West does a disservice to the West. The famed cow and mining towns of Tombstone, Abilene, Dodge City, and Deadwood had fewer shootouts and killings in their combined history than modern Washington, D.C., has in a few months.
The soul of the cowboy myth was the cattle drive, and it began with the famous trails out of Texas, where Spanish cattle introduced by the conquistadores later mixed with the English cattle of American settlers to produce a genetic marvel, the Texas longhorn steer. Moving north from Texas along trails like the Chisholm, charted out in 1867 by a half-Cherokee named Jesse Chisholm, the drives ended at the newly opened railheads in Kansas City and Sedalia in Missouri, Cheyenne in Wyoming, and Dodge City and Abilene in Kansas. The rowdiest of the Wild West towns, Abilene was founded by an Illinois cattleman as a railhead to meet the cattle drovers from Texas. It soon sported a boisterous barroom and brothel business that grew to meet the demand of the drovers who had just traveled from Texas over rugged terrain for several months, accompanied only by cattle who fattened themselves on the open range. The situation demanded “peacekeepers,” men whose histories were often more violent than those of the people they were supposed to police. The most famous was James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, who shot only two people while presiding over Abilene; one of them was another policeman. But Hickok, and other western legends like Jesse James, were being brought back to easterners in newspaper reports and dime novels that made the West seem romantic and adventurous.
By the 1890s, the Wild West had already begun to fade. Cattlemen learned that the hearty steer could survive on the northern plains, killing off the need for the long drives. The advent of barbed wire in 1874 meant they were able to enclose huge areas of land (which they often didn’t own, or claimed under very questionable authority). The freebooting days of the postwar period were gradually replaced by cattle raising as big business, and the era of the cowboys and Wild West outlaws ended, their place taken by a much more sinister and ornery character, the American businessman.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
M
ATTHEW
J
OSEPHSON,
describing the Gilded Age, in his 1934 book,
The Robber Barons
:
At Delmonico’s the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar bills were passed around after coffee and consumed with an authentic thrill. . . . One man gave dinner to his dog, and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000.
Wall Street’s insider trading scandals and the New York City corruption high jinks of the 1980s are polite misdemeanors when viewed against the wholesale corruption of American business and politics during the late nineteenth century. This was the era when political genius took a backseat to a genius expressed in accumulating and holding more private wealth and power than had been possessed in history. One illustration of this power was the financier John P. Morgan Sr.’s refusal to make loans to the U.S. government because it lacked collateral. In 1895, Morgan bailed out a nearly bankrupt federal government by exchanging gold for U.S. bonds, which he promptly resold at an enormous profit.
The accumulation of American wealth in the hands of a few was nothing new; since colonial times a minority had held the vast majority of the nation’s wealth. But the late nineteenth century brought this concentration of wealth to unprecedented heights.
After the war, the lands of the West were opened up, cleared of Indians, and ready for the great surge. To reach these rich lands—to bring the cattle and wheat to eastern markets to feed the factory workers who made the tools and machinery to mine the gold, silver, and copper—called for cheap, fast transportation. Building more railroads required four basic components: land, labor, steel, and capital. The federal government provided the land; immigrants on both coasts supplied cheap labor; Andrew Carnegie provided the steel. And J. P. Morgan Sr. and Jr., the bankers’ bankers, provided the cash.
With unlimited vistas of western wealth, the plan to link East and West by railroad provided equally unlimited schemes to bilk the Treasury. Corruption came to the fore with the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1872. Massachusetts congressman Oakes Ames was a shovel maker and one of the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad, the company taking the line westward from Nebraska. Ames and the Union Pacific created a company called Crédit Mobilier of America, which was awarded all construction contracts. The company was paid $94 million by Congress for work actually worth $44 million. Ames had smoothed the way for this deal in Washington by spreading around plenty of Crédit Mobilier shares, selling them at half their value on the New York Stock Exchange. Among those enjoying this “insider trading” were congressional leaders, including future president James A. Garfield, and President Grant’s first- and second-term vice presidents, Schuyler Colfax and Henry Wilson, giving the “vice” in the title a whole new dimension.
The Central Pacific, owned by Leland Stanford, built eastward from California and did the same things, winning land grants, contracts, and enormous overpayments to Stanford’s railroad-owned construction company. Stanford got away with it and eventually built a university; Ames and Representative James Brooks of New York were censured by Congress, but neither of them got a university out of the deal. Other legislators were exonerated.
Besides the enormous costs in graft, the linking of East and West by rail, completed on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, cost thousands of workers’ lives as the lines snaked their way over mountains, across deserts, or through Indian territory, decimating the buffalo as they went to feed the workers. Workers’ lives and sound construction principles were cast aside, sublimated to greed and the rush to lay track to win bonuses. Bribes were paid by towns that wanted the railroad lines to run through them, and millions of acres of land were given away to the railroads as plums.
Grant’s two terms were boom times for the corruptible. Besides the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which reached into the White House, there was the Whiskey Ring scandal, which defrauded the government of millions in taxes with the assistance of the Treasury Department and Grant’s personal secretary, Orville Babcock, a man with his proverbial finger in every pie. In the Bureau of Indian Affairs, corruption was equally widespread, with millions in kickbacks paid to administration officials all the way down the line, ending up with Indians on the reservation getting rotten food, when they were fed at all.
The millions made in these scandals were still small change when compared against the fortunes being made by the so-called robber barons, a phrase coined by historian Charles Francis Adams in his 1878 book,
Railroads: Their Origins and Problems.
But they raised their form of thievery to sound business organizations and called them “trusts.”
For many of these men, such as Gould and Vanderbilt, the railroad was the ticket to enormous wealth. “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) started by building a Staten Island ferry business into a steamship empire, expanding into railroads after the war. Through graft and bribery, Vanderbilt built the New York Central into the largest single railroad line in America, passing down a vast amount of wealth to his family, who then gave new definition to “conspicuous consumption” with lavish parties at which guests dug in a trough for jewels.
