This chapter focuses on the westward movement of Americans, including the settlement of California and the Great Plains, as examples of the interactive relationships between the environment and humanity in the western United States. Core ideas—such as the frontier and Manifest Destiny—helped to shape the ways in which land was acquired and developed. This chapter explores the multicultural relationships, opportunities, and oppression experienced by the many ethnic groups that developed California during the Gold Rush, and examines the environmental effects of gold mining. It looks at the subsequent settlement of the Great Plains and the impact of various technologies on the transformation of the Plains environment. Finally, it offers some theories put forward by environmental historians as to why the West developed as it did.
The western United States was acquired in several stages during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which extended westward from the Mississippi River to the Continental Divide, had inspired President Thomas Jefferson to send Merriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. They crossed the mountains in Idaho and followed the Columbia River to the Pacific. Following their successful return, numerous expeditions were mounted by fur traders and explorers into the Rocky, Sierra Nevada, and Cascade Mountains. By the 1840s, most of the land west of the Mississippi had been explored, and wagon trains of settlers were following the Oregon Trail westward to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, just south of the Columbia River. President James K. Polk envisioned the United States as extending across the entire breadth of the continent, and his election to the presidency in 1844 triggered the acquisition of additional lands west of the Mississippi.
In a controversial move in 1845, Congress annexed Texas, which had been asserting its independence from Mexico for nine years. Following a border skirmish, President Polk declared war on Mexico the next year. Then, in 1846, Oregon territory up to the 49th parallel was acquired by treaty with Great Britain, and, in 1848, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a defeated Mexico ceded to the United States the present states of California, Nevada, Utah, and most of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The Gadsden Purchase, completed in 1853, acquired additional land from Mexico for a level train route to the west through southern New Mexico and Arizona. Gold was discovered in California on January 19, 1848, and in 1849, miners began the rush to occupy California’s gold country, a movement that would irrevocably alter its native peoples and natural environment.
Prior to the Gold Rush, the native peoples of California lived within an organic economy based on relations among Indians and fish, deer, bear, acorns, and other living things. Although California’s Mediterranean climate was highly suited to agriculture, California natives west of the Sierras remained hunters, gatherers, and fishers, many living in the densely settled Central Valley. East of the Sierras, the Paiute practiced irrigated horticulture, but the corn, beans, and squash complex of the American Southwest was not established west of the mountains.
The staple food of the California Indians, especially those in the Central Valley, the Coast ranges, and the Sierra foothills, was the acorn. California contained many species of oak, and Indians ground the acorns into meal to make a variety of breads. They also harvested bulbs and seed-bearing plants that grew in the coastal chaparral, the Central Valley, and the Sierras. They set fire to the hillsides to clear the underbrush for better passage, to create browse areas for deer, to encourage the growth of edible plants, and to force out jackrabbits, a major source of food.
Indian life underwent a major transformation with the advent of European colonizers. Historian George Phillips states, “After 1769 and the establishment of permanent Spanish settlements, Indian culture came under enormous pressure. But the first Californians did not readily submit to foreign domination as is sometimes thought. Rather, they implemented strategies of evasion, selective acculturation, and military resistance.”1
As Spanish, Mexicans, and Russians explored and settled California, ranching, trade, and missionary work ensued. Cattle released into the coastal valleys by the Spanish gave rise to a vigorous hide and tallow trade, colorfully described by Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Workers rounded up cattle, stripped their hides, and waded through water with the heavy layers on their heads to load them on boats waiting offshore. The hides were used for leather goods, while tallow made from cattle fat was needed for candles in an era before electricity. Trade also began with the Russians, in collaboration with fishermen from Boston, for otter pelts and whales.
A number of rationales existed for the settlement of California and the American West. America’s “Manifest Destiny,” proclaimed journalist John L. O’Sullivan, was for Anglo-Saxon America “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence had given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”2 Senator Thomas Hart Benton argued that the white race should expand its civilization to the West Coast and take over land occupied by the red race. Other rationales included the concept of “American Progress,” depicted in an 1872 painting of that name by John Gast. Imbedded within the painting of settlers moving west is the ideal of transforming “wild” nature and “wild” Indians into “civilization.” The painting represented an Enlightenment narrative of progress, the idea of bringing light to a dark land.
Most of the development initially associated with gold mining occurred in various towns in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains during the second half of the nineteenth century. Molten gold, formed in the Sierras, Rockies, and Cascades during the ancient uplifting of the mountains, poured into fissures, designated as veins. This organic term, coming from the idea of veins within the ancient “earth mother,” was rooted in an older concept that both gold and the earth were alive. Veins that were close together formed a lode, or a set of veins that could be worked together. The idea of a mother lode was based on the belief that several veins within the earth rose to the surface, where they could be tapped. Placers were places where gold had eroded into small particles through the action of water. It could be recovered by panning, or washing the heavier gold nuggets out of the gravel by rotating a flat-bottomed pan. The area known as the Mother Lode in the western Sierra foothills was noted not only for the early process of gold panning, in which prospectors employed pans, cradles, and sluice boxes to wash and separate out the heavy gold particles from the sand and gravel, but also for river mining, hydraulic mining, hard rock mining, and dredging. Silver was found in conjunction with gold in areas east of the Sierras, such as Nevada’s Comstock Lode.
During the Gold Rush, people came to California by three major routes. One was around Cape Horn by boat from the East Coast. Another was to sail to Panama and cross the hot humid rain forest, an area that harbored tropical diseases, and then travel by boat up the West Coast to California. Most gold seekers, however, came by overland trail through the west. The main California trail left Council Bluffs on the western edge of Iowa, traversed Nebraska to Fort Laramie in Wyoming, and continued over the Continental Divide at South Pass, whence it followed the Humboldt River across Nevada and the Sierras to the gold fields. Those who started late in the season turned southward to Salt Lake City and crossed the Salt Lake Desert to the Humboldt River Valley, in order to ascend and cross the Sierras before the snow fell.
People of numerous ethnic and racial origins came to the gold country. American miners, along with Chinese and Mexicans, mingled with European and South American immigrants. Walter Pigman, a gold miner in 1859, commented on the ethnic diversity of the gold country: “Had the opportunity of seeing the mixed multitude of human being that are in this country. The Americans take the lead, the Spanish next, then comes the poor degraded native Indian, the Chinese, the Chilean, the Mexican, and, in fact, some from every nation of the earth are to be found here. All in search of gold!”3
Indians initially participated in the process of panning for gold. Samuel Ward, who worked on the Merced River in 1849, wrote: “[T]he members of the wigwam kept together in their own watery pew; the father scooping into his batea the invisible mud and sand of the river bed, and the mother bearing it to the shore to perform those skillful gyratory manipulations by which the water is made to carry away … the earthly matter, until … there remains in the bottom of the pan the yellow spangels” of glittering gold.4 But soon the Indians were pushed out of the gold country, their people massacred, and their ways of life devastated. Miners blasted out rocks, hunted animals for meat, and chopped down oak trees, depriving Indians of their staple foods. Mining debris spoiled the rivers on which they depended for fish, and depleted salmon runs.
In 1849, California declared itself a slavery-free state, and its constitutional convention that year outlawed slavery. In the Compromise of 1850, the United States agreed that California was to be admitted to the Union as a free state. But as part of that compromise, the U.S. also passed the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring people to return slaves determined to be fugitives by federal magistrates. Northerners in the East were mandated to comply by returning slaves to the South; many not only disobeyed the law, but were outraged by its passage.
Many blacks believed that their best chance to secure freedom was to travel west through Canada and then proceed south into California. There they formed mutual aid societies to assist each other economically and socially and to avoid the Fugitive Slave Law. Many found opportunities to work in the gold mines, and those who arrived as slaves were often able to purchase their freedom and that of their families. A white forty-niner from Ohio wrote in his journal: “I saw a colored man going to the land of gold, prompted by the hope of redeeming his wife and seven children.… His name is James Taylor.”5 Reuben Rudy, friend of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, came to California by way of Panama and made $600 after digging for four weeks on the Stanislaus River. Other blacks headed for places such as Auburn Ravine, where an African-American miner working alongside whites was photographed in 1852. By then there were 2,000 blacks in the state of California. In some cases, they returned to the East, were reunited with their families, and remained in the free North.
Chinese immigrants also came to California in great numbers, many from Guangdong Province. They arrived on credit tickets organized by Chinese steamer lines and set out for the gold country on ferries through the San Joaquin Delta to Stockton and Marysville. In Auburn Ravine, white miners worked alongside Chinese as well as black miners. By 1852, there were 5,000 Chinese along the Yuba River, and by 1855 their number had swelled to 20,000. They lived in China camps, where they retained their own customs, foods, and religious practices. But they fell victim to the 1850 Foreign Miner’s Tax, which charged them $20 a month, a hardship for most Chinese. By 1870, their numbers in the mines had dropped by half, and many moved into the Central Valley, where they began to establish agriculture. Those who stayed behind worked the river bottoms abandoned by other miners. Others worked for railroad companies, helping to lay track through the Sierras and across the continent. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and vigilante violence began to discourage many Chinese from further activities. From California, they moved into other western states, where gold and other mining activities were prevalent. Others went north to Oregon and Washington or through the Rockies into Montana, where they established Chinese communities.
Gold panning was the source of most of the gold for the first two or three years of the Gold Rush. Gold nuggets were found in placer deposits in riverbeds. All one needed was a pan or a cradle with riffle bars on the bottom and a box on the top, into which sand, rock, and silt from the riverbeds were scooped. As mining advanced, a chain of sluice boxes with riffle bars was set on an incline so the water would run off, leaving the gold, which was heavier than water or sand, in the bottom of the trough. As the placer mines containing the nuggets were depleted, other forms of mining followed. In river mining, cooperatives built dams to divert the water away so the streambed could be mined. Hard-rock mining used shafts and underground tunnels with rails and ore carts to extract gold-bearing rock, while in the devastations of “hydraulicking,” entire hillsides were washed away.
Hydraulic mining began in 1852 through the efforts of Anthony Chabot, creator of the enormous “monitor” nozzles that blasted water onto hillsides and captured nuggets in chains of sluice boxes. Miners, forced out of panning for gold or victimized by failed river-mining cooperatives, became wage laborers for the owners of the new mines. In 1879, a newspaper reporter described the scene: “We stand at the brink of the mine.… Around us are naked rocks and well-scraped furrows, piles of pine-wood blocks for use in the flume, rusting joints of condemned water pipe, and shops where soot-covered men are lifting joints of new pipe.” One experienced a cacophony of sounds. “As we turn to descend, a measured succession of sounds begins.… [T]he next thing is to get rid of the large boulders often weighing tons. They must be blasted into fragments so small that when the water is turned on here again they will be swept down and out through the tunnel.… [H]ere are thirty or forty men, busy with drills, in a great hammering company. It is at this instant, wild music.”6
Hydraulic mining depended on vast systems of canals and ditches that diverted water from lakes and rivers, which then fell by gravity through pipes and hoses, producing powerful streams of water that could be directed against hillsides. By 1882, there were 6,000 miles of flumes, ditches, and sluices in the Sierras. Reservoirs constructed along the Yuba, Bear, Feather, and American Rivers held 50 to 500 acres of water on their surface. Sluice gates across streams and reservoirs regulated the force and quantity of water sprayed on hillsides, releasing dirt and rock that flowed through sluice boxes to collect the gold.
Photographer Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), who traveled throughout California taking pictures of mining and agricultural activities, took a famous photograph of hydraulic nozzles blasting away entire hillsides. The enormous effect was described by the 1879 newspaper article: “There’s real pleasure … about this gigantic force. [The water] is beaten into foam until … it comes out with … a wicked vicious unutterable indignation.… [I]t requires much experience and judgment to know how to use this stream to best advantage, and with greatest safety.… [R]ocks two feet in diameter fly like chaff when struck by the stream.”7 Anyone on whom the hydraulic blasts might turn did not survive.
“Hydraulicking” came to an abrupt end in 1884 when Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Ninth Circuit Court issued the famous “Sawyer decision,” halting mining using hydraulic nozzles. The golden era of hydraulic mining lasted only thirty-two years, but, during that time, it had major human and environmental consequences.
Hydraulic mining daily displaced 50 to 100 tons of debris, consisting of muddy soil and rock, an enormous amount compared to that from hard-rock mining, which followed the hydraulic era. The force of the water washed out entire hillsides. The debris then washed downhill, carrying the topsoil with it, and creating huge fans of tailings at the base of the mines. Cones of debris dotted the hillsides, and colorful, vertical cliffs were formed from water and wind erosion. Debris filled the mountain streams and rivers, creating sandbars and islands and producing banks of yellow mud.
As the debris flowed down to the valleys below, it covered acres of farmland, filled the beds of streams, created shoals in the rivers and bays, and halted tidal action in the cities of Marysville and Sacramento. Historian Robert Kelley, in Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (1959), described the effects on farmlands: “Farmers talked of how the rivers were filling. How each small rise in the rivers produced floods, how hundreds of acres of fruit orchard along the rivers were dying as debris spread slowly, imperceptibly, out into the valley.”8
The Yuba riverbed rose at an annual rate of a third of a foot per year and the Sacramento at the rate of a quarter of a foot per year. The debris in the Yuba spread out along the shores of the river in a three-mile-long fan, containing 600 million cubic feet of debris from the mines. The streets of Marysville were originally 25 feet above the Yuba River, but, by 1879, so much debris filled the riverbed that the streets had to be protected by levees. Debris began to fill the Suisun Bay and Carquinez Straits below Sacramento, with its effects felt as far west as San Francisco Bay.
In 1917, engineer Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918) made a study for the United States Geological Survey of the amount of debris flowing from the Sierras through the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers and its effect on the Suisun, San Pablo, and San Francisco Bays. His report was replete with photographs showing debris-filled creek beds and buried forests. The debris spread out on either side of streams and rivers, confining the water to a narrow central channel and changing its flow. After the Sawyer decision halted hydraulic mining, tree trunks formerly under water began to reappear as the accumulated debris began to wash downstream.
The effects of the debris-clogged rivers on the tides at Sacramento remained until the early twentieth century. Gilbert’s data showed that, in the 1880s, the Sacramento River was filled with debris from hydraulic mining, but that by 1902, the tides had returned as far upriver as Sacramento itself and, by 1920, had reached 20 inches, just below the 24 inches they had been originally. But at Marysville, upstream from Sacramento, the lack of tides remained. Today, Marysville—originally above water—is below water level and protected by levees. Nevertheless, trees began to regrow along riverbanks, and restoration of the river ecosystem began to take place. As the effects of hydraulic mining diminished, much of the vegetation grew back, and some of the conditions that existed prior to the hydraulic era were reestablished. Nonetheless, permanent effects remained, and hillsides still bear the visual marks.
The period of hydraulic mining that effectively ended with the 1884 Sawyer decision was followed by hard-rock mining. New technologies were developed to remove the gold and silver imbedded in rock, rather than in the more accessible riverbeds and gravel-filled hillsides. The rock had to be pulverized and mercury added to bond with the gold in the form of an amalgam. Mercury was mined in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco and in the Napa Valley to the north, whence it was transported to the Sierras. The gold-mercury amalgam was heated in bullion furnaces at high temperatures to form liquid gold metal and to vaporize the mercury. The gold was then poured into bullion bars and transported to the mining exchange in San Francisco, while globules of mercury washed down the rivers.
Major environmental effects resulted from the discharge of mercury. The waste mercury washed down the streams, poisoning the rivers for fish and creating unhealthy water for human use. Today that mercury is still embedded in mountain streams and in tributaries of the Sacramento River. Although covered by deep silt, it nevertheless represents a hazard for humans and fish, especially when the rivers are dredged or the silt is disturbed.
Environmental changes from hydraulic and hard-rock mining occurred in the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills. The original cover of oaks in the foothills was extensive. Miners cut the woodlands for fuel, for building materials for cabins and sluice boxes, and for range and pasture lands. After cutting and grazing, oak seedlings were eaten by cattle and deer, hence the trees did not reestablish themselves, and chaparral—which is fire adaptive—moved higher into the foothills than in the pre–Gold Rush era.
Poet and commentator Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) described the changes in the Sierra that resulted from mining activities: “I stood in … the placer mines. Smoke from the low chimneys and log cabins began to rise and curled through the cool, clear air on every hand, and the miners began to come out.”9 He sketched a scene of gloom and darkness in the valleys where the miners were working as they toiled to enrich themselves for private profit. The land around them became pockmarked with holes dug for mining shafts, and entire rivers were diverted out of their streambeds.
Sierra wildlife was also transformed as a result of Gold Rush activities. The grizzly bear, which had been native to the western slope, became extinct from the area in 1924. Mountain sheep, which had been common in the high Sierras, were reduced by hunting and human presence. The wolverine, fisher, and marten were trapped out, while coyotes and wildcats were killed to protect sheep. Mule deer occurred throughout the Sierra, migrating to the high meadows in the summer and returning to the foothills in autumn, creating trails that humans also used for traveling. Cougar, the major predator on mule deer, was drastically reduced, hence deer populations increased, causing ecological damage by browsing on shrubs.
The populations of small mammals and birds were affected by mining and logging, as well as by fire and grazing. Logging reduced the number of tree squirrels and native birds, which lost ground to other species that tolerated the changed conditions. The tree squirrels were replaced by ground squirrels and chipmunks; Sierra birds, such as woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, creepers, and Steller’s jays, by fox sparrows and green-tailed towhees, which adapted to the chaparral that took over the habitat.
Many fish, including most of the salmon runs, were sharply reduced by mining debris, streamside tree removal, and habitat destruction by cattle grazing. They were replaced by native trout, propagated by the Fish and Game Department, and by brown and eastern brook trout introduced to supplement native species.
After the Gold Rush, the Sierra foothills and mountain valleys were further transformed by grazing. By the turn of the century, Swiss dairy farmers were taking their cows into the mountain valleys in the spring and bringing them back to the lowlands in the fall. Large herds of beef cattle and sheep overgrazed the meadows after the snow melted. Cattle numbers are now regulated by the U.S. Forest Service.
Although restoration of landforms, trees, and wildlife is possible to a certain extent, the area will never revert to the pre-mining era or to the ecosystem known by native Americans. Population effects on the Sierras further decrease that possibility. Mining thus left an indelible impact on both the landscape and on the multiethnic populations of California, only partially mitigated by ecological restoration and the enforcement of civil rights for minorities.
The main settlement of the Great Plains occurred after the 1840 migrations to Oregon and the 1849 Gold Rush to California. Environmental historian William Cronon has interpreted the history of the Great Plains in terms of narrative. The grand narrative of America, Cronon argues, is a story of progress. The frontier narrative depicts that formative story and, as such, is the master narrative of American culture. A hostile environment, initially conceptualized as a Great American desert, was gradually brought under control and transformed into a garden, making the Great Plains a Garden of the World. That transition in perception occurred as people increasingly settled the Plains and gained control over nature. Two formative accounts reveal the environmental history of the Great Plains as a progressive narrative: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893); and Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931).
The opposite, or declensionist narrative, according to Cronon, relates history as environmental decline. A pristine grassland, at first uninhabited, was then occupied by nomadic bands of Indians. White settlers who came into this natural Garden of Eden, or nearly pristine nature, transformed it over a period of 150 years into a desert, exemplified by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Donald Worster’s The Dust Bowl (1979) illustrates the ecological decline of the Plains that came about through capitalist agriculture and ranching and resulted in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl.
These two story lines, however, are both linear—the first uphill, the second downhill, masking nuances and irregularities. “When we choose a plot to order our environmental histories,” Cronon notes, “we give them a unity that neither nature nor the past possesses so clearly. In so doing, we move well beyond nature into the intensely human realm of value.”10 Stories that focus on white settlers often leave out other people’s perspectives—for example, those of black cowboys and homesteaders and women settlers, as well as the stories of native Americans and the bison (told in chapter 1). How are these stories illustrated in the environmental history of the Great Plains?
Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 account of “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” depicts the progressive story as a traditional hero narrative. European immigrants are the heroes who settled the land, crossing the Atlantic and the eastern United States in successive frontier lines. According to Turner, the frontier transforms the settler. The encounter with wilderness “strips off the garments of civilization.” It puts the colonist “in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois.” But as the victor gains control, “little by little he transforms the wilderness.” The outcome, however, is not the old European émigré, but a new American, formed by the frontier. Democracy and American civilization, in a perennial rebirth, fill the land. Democracy, according to Turner, is “born of free land.”
The fur traders, who constituted Turner’s first frontier, explored the West during the 1820s through the 1840s, employed by trading companies such as John Jacob Astor’s (1763–1848) American Fur Company. The competing company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, employed some of the world’s most famous traders, such as William Ashley, Jim Bridger, Milton Sublette, and Kit Carson. Competing with these companies from the north was the Hudson’s Bay Company, which merged with the Northwest Fur Company and held a monopoly in Canada. Traders scoured the West, capturing and shipping eastward the pelts of fur-bearing animals, in particular the beaver. Mountain men fanned out over the Rockies along Indian trails, coming together at a given time and place each year—a “rendezvous”—to which they brought the year’s collection of pelts. Held between 1825 and 1840, rendezvous sites included camps along the tributaries of the Green and Snake Rivers. French, Scottish, and German traders, along with Native Americans and African Americans participated in the trade as hunters, trappers, voyageurs, and entrepreneurs. African Americans were often used as go-betweens in negotiations with Indians, to reduce friction between the parties.
In Turner’s progressive narrative, the rancher’s, miner’s, and farmer’s frontiers followed that of the fur traders. Turner writes: “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier or the miner’s frontier, and then finally the farmer’s frontier.”11
South Pass, on a gradual rise at 7,375 feet at the Continental Divide in Wyoming, was on the trail most settlers followed west. Here they could take the Sublette Cutoff (named after the fur trader, Milton Sublette) across Colorado and north to Fort Hall in Idaho, where they followed the Oregon Trail along the Snake River, crossed into the Columbia watershed, and traveled south to Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley. Alternatively, they could take the California trail westward along the Humboldt River, crossing the Sierras and heading down to California’s Gold Country and Central Valley. Some dipped south into Salt Lake City, Utah, settling in the region developed by Mormons. On arriving at their destinations, the emigrants pursued mining, ranching, and farming, settling the far West and the Great Plains.
Historian Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931) builds on Turner’s progressive narrative, describing the rancher’s and farmer’s frontiers on the Plains in terms of two formative factors—environment and technology. Webb states: “New inventions and discoveries had to be made before the pioneer farmer could go into the Great Plains and establish himself.”12 Technologies allowed settlers to subdue a forbidding environment that had three main characteristics not found in the eastern United States. First, as pioneers moved west of the 100th meridian, the environment of the Plains became increasingly arid, lacking the minimum twenty inches of rainfall per year that would support agriculture reliably. Second, the Plains were treeless, and therefore did not provide the timber for fuel and building materials readily available in the East. Third, the Trans-Mississippi Plains were level, rising only gradually westward, which meant that rivers were shallow and lacked the power to operate mills or float ships.
The rancher’s frontier, according to Webb, was initiated by longhorn cattle drives north from Texas. “The Cattle Kingdom,” he wrote, “was a world within itself, with a culture all its own, which though of brief duration, was complete and self-satisfying.”13 Between 1866 and 1886 an open range, characterized by cattle drives and nomadic cowboys, prevailed from north to south on the short grass Plains. Longhorn cattle, released into Mexico with the conquistadors, were raised in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and herded north to markets in the Midwest. Abilene, Kansas, in 1867, was the first depot on the east-west Kansas Pacific Railroad to which cattle were driven. Soon cattle towns, such as Sedalia, Missouri and Wichita, Ellsworth, Dodge City, and Ellis, Kansas sprang up across the Plains as additional east-west railroads were constructed. The open range created cattle barons and itinerant cowhands during a two-decade expansion. In addition to whites, black and Mexican cowboys rode the Chisholm and other trails as highly skilled cowboys.
The drought of 1883 put the first crimp into the open range. Then, the nationwide panic of 1884, part of America’s continuing cycle of boom and bust capitalist expansion, wreaked havoc in the cattle industry. The blizzards of 1885 dealt the final blow, ending the heyday of the open range. During the next decade, tensions and competition ensued as ranchers, sheepherders, and homesteaders all vied for access to the range. The overgrazed Plains were depleted of the perennial grasses that had supported one steer on every two acres and were seeded with less nutritious annuals that supported one steer per 5 to 10 acres. As perennials declined, wind and water erosion increased and topsoils were lost. Donald Worster calls the results an ecological disaster. “The ‘tragedy of the laissez-faire commons’” he notes, “was one of the greatest in the entire history of pastoralism.”14
The farmer’s frontier that followed the rancher’s frontier was enhanced by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed people to claim title to 160 acres of land. For Webb, six technologies made it possible for farmers to control and manage the Plains environment. Following the Colt six-shooter (1835), which had subdued the Plains Indians, the second piece of technology that, from Webb’s perspective, transformed the Plains was barbed wire. Invented in 1874 by Joseph Glidden on an old homestead in DeKalb, Illinois, double-stranded barbed wire was significant because it made the homestead possible. Fields could be fenced in and purebred stock could be kept isolated. The homestead and the vegetable garden could be fenced to keep out cattle, sheep, or deer. Barbed wire made homesteading possible, but spelled the end of the open range. The farmer’s frontier of sedentary life and power, however, could now replace the nomadic pastoral frontier of the Indian and rancher.
A third piece of technology that subdued the Plains environment, according to Webb, was the windmill. Developed in Europe in the Middle Ages, the windmill was a part of the technological complex associated with the domestication of animals and crops. It accompanied the European advance onto the Plains, giving settled agriculture a stationary power-base compared to the shifting campsites of nomadic Indians. The windmill kept its vanes pointed into the wind, and the gear changed the rotary motion of the vanes into a vertical motion to pump subsurface water, which could then be stored in a watering trough or pond. Wherever a well could be dug and a windmill situated, water for cattle and crops could be controlled, steers could be fattened, and wheat harvested. The windmill, like barbed wire, made the homestead possible because water for vegetables and other crops could be stored and channeled to gardens and fields.
The fourth technology that subdued the Plains was the John Deere plow. Like the mill, the plow was one of the important pieces of technology that changed Western history. The earliest plows of southern Europe, pulled by oxen, successfully scratched the dry shallow soils of the Mediterranean region. But in northern Europe, the heavy, wet soils required wrought iron plows hitched to several horses, shared communally. Those plows were increasingly refined and brought to Puritan New England and the East Coast. Iron plowshares worked well in the East because the iron could scour the gritty, wet soil. But on the Great Plains, prairie grasses with matted roots and deep growing points resulted in very thick sod, with no grit to scour the moldboard. In 1846, John Deere took a piece of steel off a broken mill saw and attached it to a plow. It worked so well that he ordered high-grade steel from the Pittsburgh steel mills and began manufacturing the John Deere plow. By 1858 his factory was producing 13,000 steel plows.
The fifth technology that changed the Great West was the railroad. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in Utah in 1869 when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were joined. Windmills along the tracks drew up water for the steam engines. Railroads not only provided a means for immigrants to reach the Plains, but transported cattle and crops such as wheat and corn to eastern markets.
The sixth technology was the harvester. Mechanized harvesters, cultivators, threshers, and tractors became increasingly sophisticated, allowing the production of monocultures of wheat and corn. In Webb’s narrative, technologies—such as barbed wire, windmills, plows, harvesters, and irrigation systems—enabled people to gain some measure of control over the arid, treeless, level environment on the Plains.
The progressive story of the Great Plains reveals that, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, many cowboys and settlers successfully ranched, homesteaded, and gradually urbanized the Plains. Human production began to move away from subsistence-oriented homesteading and towards capitalist ranching and large-scale agribusiness. As corporate ranching replaced the free range and absentee landowners bought out small farmers, attitudes toward nature became increasingly profit-oriented, managerial, and scientific. Nature was subdued by technology; an ethic of human domination controlled development.
The progressive story of the Great Plains often ignores the roles and contributions of minorities and women. African Americans and women contributed both ingenuity and skilled labor to transforming the Plains environment, but they were also victims of discrimination or were left out altogether in progressive histories, such as those by Turner and Webb. Including their stories adds complexity to the ways in which the Great Plains environment presented both challenges and opportunities to those disadvantaged by existing attitudes toward race and gender in American society.
African-American homesteaders were among those who moved to the Great Plains, escaping post–Civil War discrimination in the South. In 1877, a committee of five hundred black men documented beatings, violence, and continuing oppression, but were unable to achieve redress in the U.S. Senate. Former Georgia slave and Civil War veteran Henry Adams and others organized the “Exodus of 1879” to Kansas. During that year, some 20,000 to 40,000 poor blacks migrated into Kansas along the Chisholm Trail, seeking land and work on the western prairies. More than 5,000 African Americans worked the Chisholm Trail as skilled riders and cowhands, while other blacks became homesteaders. Some towns became primarily black, while in others, blacks mingled with whites at work, in schools, and in sports. In the early 1880s, a period of heavy rainfall induced large influxes of people, including many families of black homesteaders, westward to the High Plains of Nebraska and Kansas and then into eastern Colorado. But the drought of the mid-1880s forced large numbers to give up and leave. By 1910, however, approximately one million blacks lived in the western states.
Women were also important actors in Great Plains history. They were portrayed as reluctant pioneers in literature such as Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1929), but as self-reliant homesteaders in other narratives, such as Willa Cather’s O Pioneers (1913) and My Antonia (1918). The 1862 Homestead Act did not disqualify women and was not a gender-biased or discriminatory act. Women, like men, qualified for homestead entry if they were single and over 21 years of age, or as heads of households if they were widowed or divorced and had a family.
Homesteaders included single, divorced, married, and widowed women. Sheryll Patterson-Black described the experiences of women in each these categories in Western Women in History and Literature (1978). Single women, such as the five Chrisman sisters, sometimes homesteaded together on the plains. The life of divorcée and homesteader Mary O’Kieffe, mother of nine children, was described by her son Charley: “Mother herded cattle all day long in the broiling hot sun, so the children could attend a fourth of July celebration in a nearby community. The next morning around two A.M. I was born. No doctor, no nurse, no midwife, just Mother and God.”15 In 1884, Mary O’Kieffe left her lazy husband, packed up the wagon, hitched up the work horses, and, with milk cows and children in tow, headed out to western Nebraska to homestead the Plains. Wives were often homesteading partners, rather than reluctant pioneers. In some cases, a woman pretended to be single, but was actually married, placing her own sod house next to that of her husband, each filing claims for their respective 160 acres.
Widows were also successful homesteaders. One widowed woman living with her four children went to Nebraska and filed a claim. She supported herself, went to school with her children, learned to read and write, and began teaching school herself. She remarried, lost her second husband to a blizzard, and made final proof on both her and her husband’s claims. When the Kincaid Act was passed in 1904, allowing larger claims, she filed for an additional 320 acres. A final example is that of Laura Cruz, who was part of the Oklahoma rush for Cherokee lands in 1893. She reconnoitered for a year to find the site she wanted. When the shot was fired and the race began, 100,000 participants mounted horses and charged across the land. Laura rode seventeen miles in fifty-nine minutes astride her horse, and staked out a piece of bottom land near a creek. She worked her claim for years, built a dugout house, dug a well by hand, lived on corn bread and rabbit stew, and made a living from selling eggs. Later, oil was discovered on her land. She was still living there at the age of 105.
Not only did women help to settle the Plains, often succeeding where men had failed, their technologies transformed the Plains environment. Women were skilled at building sod houses, digging wells, planting and harvesting crops, collecting dried buffalo dung for fuel, preserving fruit and vegetables in Mason jars, and herding cattle and sheep. Like men, they appreciated “nature” on the Plains, while also harnessing its unique features to make life both possible and comfortable.
Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979) analyzes the factors that led from the Euro-American settlement of the Plains to the disastrous Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Worster’s story, unlike the triumphal stories of Turner and Webb, begins with the ecologically evolved buffalo-grass biome, details capitalist expansion on the Plains, and ends with the defeat of the exodusters—refugees from the Plains, many of whom migrated west to California in the 1930s. How did the yeoman farmer become a Dust Bowl refugee?
The ecological cycles of wet and dry years west of the 100th meridian were alternately favorable and disastrous for ranchers and homesteaders. People settled and then retreated from the Plains, fooled by the abundance of crop growth during rainy years. The move to monocultures of wheat and corn, mechanized farming equipment, and land tenancy created a situation that was increasingly untenable from an ecological point of view. A disastrous drought in the 1890s devastated ranchers and farmers on the Plains. In the 1900s, however, when the rains returned, another major planting boom ensued.
By the early 1900s, most of Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, and eastern Colorado were settled. Wheat yields took off. In the eight Great Plains states, in 1899, 54 million acres of crops were harvested; in 1919, 88 million acres; and in 1929, on the eve of the depression, 103 million acres were harvested. Then the stock market fell, initiating the Great Depression. Wheat prices dropped to a dollar a bushel. Crops were left standing in the fields. The Depression was followed by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, another major disaster for Great Plains’ inhabitants.
According to Worster, the Dust Bowl derived from a 30-year history of monocultures that depleted the prairie grasslands of fertility, eroded the topsoil, and evaded the rainfall limits imposed by nature on the region. Its effects on both the land and its settlers were devastating. Families went on welfare and tried to survive by any means possible. Husbands and older children left home to search for work. Women took in washing, but tubs hung empty because no one had money to pay for laundry. Desperate for jobs, Dust Bowl refugees migrated to California in old Ford trucks with a trailer on the back and mattresses on the roofs. They came in battered-up cars, with chicken coops tied on the trunk and goats on the running board, camping with infants and young children beside the road. Many settled in the Bakersfield and Fresno areas of California’s Central Valley, where they could work as migrants in the fields. Some 6,000 poverty-stricken people poured into California every month. Between 1935 and 1939 there were 300,000 Dust Bowl refugees, poignantly described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The result was a human and ecological disaster of the highest magnitude. The economic yardstick of growth at all costs began to be questioned, and the idea was promoted that human agriculture had upset the natural balance of the evolved grasslands.
The declensionist story of the Great Plains, in contrast to the progressive story, begins with a pristine grassland and ends in economic and ecological disaster. It organizes its data according to a different beginning, middle, and end than does the progressive story. Like the progressive story, it captures a real picture of society and nature, but its plot is downward rather than upward. As such, it exemplifies a different way to write history, one that is compelling from an environmental point of view.
Narratives of the settlement of Western frontiers, focusing on the Gold Rush and the Great Plains, can be told from several different perspectives. Stories of progress relate the triumph of humanity over a recalcitrant nature, ending with the extraction of wealth in the form of gold, cattle, and wheat from the land. Stories of decline emphasize the ecological impacts of goldmining, ranching, and large-scale agriculture. Alternative stories challenge these two linear plots, inserting the complexities of the lives of Indians, women, blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, and buffalo into a larger picture of both failure and triumph, revealing the many dimensions of ecological transformation and potentials for resource use.
Notes
1. George H. Phillips, The Enduring Struggle: Indians in California History (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1981), 13.
2. John L. O’Sullivan, “Manifest Destiny,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July–August 1945): 215–20.
3. Walter Pigman, quoted in “Gold Diggers: Indian Miners in the California Gold Rush,” by James J. Rawls, California Historical Quarterly 55 (Spring 1976): 28–45, at 41.
4. Samuel Ward, quoted in Rawls, “Gold Diggers,” 33.
5. Quoted in Rudolph Lapp, Blacks in the Gold Rush (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 21.
6. “A Great Gravel Mine,” The Nevada City (Calif.) Daily Transcript, 30 July 1879, as excerpted in Green Versus Gold: Sources in California’s Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1998), 110–11.
7. “A Great Gravel Mine,” 111.
8. Robert Kelley, Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1959), 57–58.
9. Joaquin Miller, My Life Amongst the Indians (Chicago: Morril, Higgins, 1892 [1890]), 55.
10. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1349.
11. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in American Historical Association, Annual Report for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 199–227.
12. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931), 205.
14. Donald Worster, “Cowboy Ecology,” in Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 41.
15. Charley O’Kieffe, Western Story: The Recollections of Charley O’Kieffe, 1884–1898 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 3–4, quoted in Western Women in History and Literature, by Sheryll Patterson-Black and Gene Patterson-Black (Crawford, Nebr.: Cottonwood, 1978), 20.