American Nations

The sheer extremity of the Far Western conditions made it impossible for the other national cultures to take hold here. Greater Appalachia, Yankeedom, and the Midlands each succeeded in adapting to and colonizing the well-watered plains of the Midwest. But as they approached the ninety-eighth meridian, each nation came to a halt, its respective social adaptations no longer able to ensure individual or community survival. There were only two ways for Euro-Americans to expand further into the interior. One was to adopt the nomadic ways of most of the Native American peoples in the region, a practice that worked well for the early fur traders dispatched by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The other was to attach themselves to one of the nation’s new industrial corporations as it lumbered into the vast interior, deploying capital, machines, mercenaries, and laborers with ruthless singlemindedness. Almost everyone coming to the Far West came in service of the latter model, or found themselves beholden to it.

The Far West, uniquely in North America, is a nation defined not by ethnoregional cultural forces but by the demands of external institutions. It is the one place where environment really did trump the cultural heritage of settlers, imposing challenges that Euro-Americans tried to solve through the deployment of capital-intensive technologies: hard rock mines, railroads, telegraphs, Gatling guns, barbed wire, and hydroelectric dams. As a result, the Far West has long been an internal colony of the continent’s older nations and federal government, which possessed the necessary capital. Its people are still often deeply resentful of their dependent status but have generally backed policies guaranteed to preserve the status quo.

The Far West’s first settlers were the exception to the aforementioned pattern. Arriving in two geographically separate waves in 1847–50, the earliest Euro-American colonists arrived just ahead of industrial capital. One group—the Yankee Mormons of Utah—would found a distinct subculture of independent farmers in Utah and southern Idaho. The other—the gold-hungry Forty-niners—were highly individualistic frontiersmen in the Appalachian mold. Neither would achieve cultural dominance over the Western interior.

The Mormons—followers of a Yankee-led utopian movement with its origins in Vermont and New York’s Burnt-over District—began arriving on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake in the late 1840s. Fleeing persecution in the Midwest in 1847, they originally intended to settle outside the United States, but their plans were frustrated by the United States–Mexico War and, shortly thereafter, the U.S. annexation of their promised land in the desert. Their leader, Vermont-born Brigham Young, was made the first governor of the Utah Territory in 1850, and two years later 20,000 Mormons were living there. Almost all were from Yankeedom, which explains why in 2000, Utah had the highest percentage of English Americans of any state in the Union, edging out Vermont and Maine.

With a communal mind-set and intense group cohesion, the Mormons were able to build and maintain irrigation projects that enabled small farmers to survive in Far Western conditions. In the process they created an enclave of independent producers in a region otherwise controlled by absentee owners and other external forces. While at odds with Yankeedom over many issues, the Far West’s Mormon enclave betrays its Yankee origins in its communitarianism, its emphasis on morality and good works, and its desire to assimilate others. Today the area’s influence can be felt across Utah, southern Idaho, and eastern Nevada, and it is the most politically influential homegrown force in the Far West.

The Forty-niners who rushed into California’s central valley and eastern mountains in pursuit of gold, in contrast, were atomized, heterogeneous, and hedonistic. They were drawn from all over the world but particularly from Appalachian sections of the East. Consistent with this demographic, the initial emphasis of the settlers was on individual effort and competition, with small producers working surface deposits and holding on to the proceeds. In those early years the size of a claim was limited to what an individual could work himself, and little capital was required to do so. “The life of a miner is one of labor, peril, and exposure,” one journalist wrote of the era, “but it possesses the fascinating element of liberty and the promise of unlimited reward.”²

Unfortunately those compensations were not to last. Within a few years California’s surface deposits were depleted, and the mining moved underground, where capital and labor requirements could be met only by companies and bankers. Mining quickly became a corporate affair, with the miners reduced to wage labor and the “unlimited reward” accruing to the owners. When, in 1859, the silver Comstock Lode was discovered over the mountains in what is now Nevada, thousands headed east to work in the hills surrounding Virginia City, Nevada’s boomtown, where improvised crushing mills processed what was carted to them. Nevada’s territorial legislature was dominated by these “old Californians” who championed independent prospectors and small businessmen as boisterous crowds rallied outside their meeting hall to make the public will known. But this boom, too, was not to last.

The corporate takeover of Nevada’s mines and political system followed a pattern that would continue in the Far West for nearly a century. By early 1864 the Comstock’s surface deposits had run out. When delegates gathered that summer to write Nevada’s first constitution, mining interests introduced a bill that effectively exempted mines from taxation, even though they represented most of the territory’s economic activity. Delegates linked with the mining industry claimed taxes would prompt the corporations to leave the region, imperiling the jobs of their hired miners and, by extension, demand for farm goods, cattle, lumber, and other supplies and services provided by locals. The frightened delegates passed the bill, effectively transferring the tax burden to everyone else in Nevada. It was a ruse that would be repeated again and again across the Far West.³

Within a few years it was no longer necessary for big firms to use fearmongering to work their will; they simply owned Nevada’s legislators and congressional delegation. By 1870 Nevada politics was no longer a struggle between individual producers and corporate interests but simply a clash between competing cartels. The Bank of California—which had repossessed huge numbers of mining claims during a recession—owned processing facilities, the timber and water supplies, and the key railroad for the Comstock region. Thereafter a rival conglomerate, the Sacramentobased Central Pacific Railroad, bought up most of the bank’s competitors in these sectors while monopolizing transportation between Nevada and the rest of the continent and controlling settlement of the 100-mile-wide strip surrounding most of its rail corridor. Both of these competing cartels spent lavishly to put their own associates in office and to build political machines to cultivate new generations of company men for placement in state and federal positions. From 1865 to 1900 every U.S. senator from Nevada save one was closely associated with one or another of the cartels. Eventually the cartels agreed to divide control of Nevada between them. The Bank of California group focused on paying state legislators to pass industry-friendly laws and regulations, while the Central Pacific Railroad bought the congressional delegations. Local offices were left to the labor unions, which focused not on advocating for their constituents but on keeping nonwhites (especially Chinese) out of the mines and other workplaces, sometimes by use of mob violence. The era of the independent producer was over, and not just in Nevada.⁴

The railroads also served as the Far West’s primary real estate and colonization agents. To encourage the construction of these staggeringly expensive transcontinental projects, the federal government had given these railroads 60- to 100-mile swaths of land around their respective lines. Taken together, the railroads were awarded over 150 million acres of the region in the second half of the nineteenth century, an area the size of Montana and Idaho combined. The companies could sell parcels to settlers who, in turn, became entirely dependent on the railroad for transport of goods and people in or out of the region. First, however, they had to attract the settlers.⁵

Elsewhere on the continent railroads followed in the wake of colonization, extending their lines in response to demand. In much of the Far West, however, the railroads came first and supervised colonization themselves. They invested in huge marketing campaigns, publishing newspapers, maps, and magazines extolling the arid West. Wyoming’s Laramie Plain was comparable to the “fertile prairies of Illinois” even though it was 5,000 feet higher and had a third as much rain and a growing season two months shorter. The Great Salt Lake region was arranged with “striking similarity” to the Holy Land, and the railroads had comparison maps published to prove it. Kansas was “the garden spot of the world.”⁶ The Northern Pacific set up colonization offices in London, Liverpool, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, issuing brochures in local languages and arranging for discounted “emigration tickets” with the steamship companies. The Union Pacific and Burlington railroads spent $1 million in advertising for Nebraska alone at a time when you could build a house for $700. The Northern Pacific advertised its lands in 200 North American newspapers and 100 European ones. The railroad companies built or contributed to the construction of churches and schools to anchor newly founded prairie towns, and encouraged settlement even in lands outside the swath they controlled, confident that the settlers would still depend on the rails.

The fraudulent ad campaigns benefited from a climatological fluke that delivered record rainfalls in the late 1860s, just as the first big wave of colonists were settling the High Plains. Americans, caught up in the notion of Manifest Destiny, thought they saw the hand of God at work as the brown prairies turned green. Leading scientists of the day encouraged such thinking, endorsing the crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.” Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, proclaimed, “As population increases, the moisture will increase.” Rain was said to be triggered by smoke from locomotives, by the planting of trees and the plowing of land, even by the vibrations generated by humans and their livestock. Government bureaucrats incorporated the assumptions of this New Meteorology into the assignment of land grants, which presumed a family could survive on 160 acres of unirrigated Colorado prairie just as well as their counterparts had on 160 acres of lush Illinois or Indiana grassland. Hundreds of thousands of independent yeoman farmers rode the rails to the middle of nowhere and sank their precious capital into a land that older maps had labeled the Great American Desert.⁷

The renowned explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell—a native of Yankee New York—tried to get the truth out in a book-length report to Congress. Much of the Far West could not support farming, he told the nation, and even if all the streams and rivers were diverted into irrigation projects, it would redeem only 1 to 3 percent of the land. The government land grants—based on eastern precedents—were ill conceived, as 160 acres of irrigated land would be too much for one family to farm, and 160 acres of unirrigated land was far too small; the latter could be used only for ranching, and in that case would require 2,500 acres to succeed. The “rain follows the plow” theory was bunk, Powell insisted. The country could “expect a speedy return to extreme aridity,” he warned, “in which case a large portion of the agricultural industries . . . now growing up would be destroyed.” He recommended a series of watershed-based federal irrigation districts and communal pasturelands, and a slow, cautious settling of the Far West by individual producers assisted by prudent public investment. Needless to say, Powell’s suggestions were ignored.⁸

The fantasy ended in the winter of 1886, when much of the Far West endured arctic conditions: weeks of subzero temperatures that killed somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the High Plains’s cattle and not a few of its yeoman farmers. The following year the rains failed to appear, and in the year after that. By 1890, independent farmers were fleeing the drought-stricken region in droves, reducing the populations of Kansas and Nebraska by nearly half. Sixty percent of the million or so farmers on the plains gave up. The winter also put an end to the cattlemen who’d been overgrazing public lands beyond the railway zones, destroying the topsoil, which then eroded away into the tributaries of the Missouri River, changing it from clear to deep brown. The drought drove the cattlemen away, but the damage was permanent. “Since those high and far-off days the range has never been capable of supporting anything like the number of cattle it could have supported if the cattle barons had not maimed it,” Far West native Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1947. “It never will be capable of supporting a proper number again during the geological epoch in which civilization exists.” The Dust Bowl years of the 1930s only made matters worse. As DeVoto would later write, the Far West had “caused the collapse of the frontier culture, thus also set the full stop to the American dream.”⁹

What groups did survive the nineteenth century in the Far West—the Mormon enclave excepted—did so only by associating with massive external corporations or even larger federal infrastructure projects built by massive external corporations. The U.S. government dammed rivers and streams, built aqueducts to move water from one basin to another, and underwrote the construction and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems, all to enable a few farmers to grow crops in the desert. Mining companies expanded to new territories and states, often running them as their own feudal preserves. The railroads, having no competitors, continued to charge whatever they pleased, developing a system by which rail fares into or out of the Far West were many times more expensive per mile than fares in or between the Eastern nations and the Left Coast. As late as the twentieth century one could ship goods from Chicago to Seattle via Helena cheaper than from Chicago to Helena on the very same train. Raw goods could be shipped out of the Far West more cheaply than finished goods, in an intentional scheme concocted by the railroads to prevent manufacturing industries from taking hold in the region and to keep it dependent on the cities of the Left Coast, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland.¹⁰

Internally, corporate control over Far Western politics and society was disturbingly thorough. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anaconda Copper literally ran Montana, buying off judges, local officials, and politicians in both parties and, via the “cemetery vote,” controlling the state’s elections. Its politicians in turn delivered rules, regulations, and tax policies that enriched Anaconda and its executives. Founded by the ruthless Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant and veteran of the Nevada silver boom, and supported by San Francisco mining magnate George Hearst, Anaconda owned the mines, the smelters that processed the ore, the coal mines that fueled the smelters, the forests that supplied the timber needed in the mines, the power plants that powered the facility, the railroad that connected the parts, and even the banks that financed them. On Daly’s death in 1900 his company employed three-fourths of all wage earners in Montana. As late as 1959 it owned five of the state’s six daily newspapers, which repressed news unfavorable to the company (like stories regarding the fines it paid for sending faulty wire to Allied troops in World War II). Until the 1970s it maintained “hospitality rooms” for friendly legislators at the state capitol in Helena, where women and drink were available to the compliant. Notoriously stingy, Anaconda never gave anything to its hometown of Butte save a small workers’ park; this was subsequently destroyed along with much of the town itself to make way for a gigantic Anaconda pit mine and future Superfund site.¹¹

Meanwhile much of the land in the Far West that hadn’t been turned over to the railroad companies, seized by mining interests, or granted to Indians as reservations remained in the hands of the federal government. Even today the federation owns about a third of Montana and Colorado; half of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho; two-thirds of Far Western Oregon; and 85 percent of Nevada. Far Westerners have had little control over this land, which the federal government has often turned over for exploitation by the same corporate interests that have dominated the rest of the region. Lumber giants logged national forests for next to nothing. Ranching companies grazed on public lands. Oil and gas companies prospected on federally administered Indian reservations, with federal agencies often neglecting to require them to pay their royalties. Morris Garnsey of the University of Colorado summarized the other nations’ attitudes toward the Far West in 1945. “Get control of the raw material, get it out as cheaply as possible, and haul it away as fast as possible,” he wrote. “The interests of the local area are a secondary consideration. The region becomes a colonial dependency of an industrial empire.”¹²

Far Westerners have long agitated for greater local control of their economic future. Despite the considerable influence of railroads, banks, and mining companies, they managed to write state constitutions that protected laborers via eight-hour work laws, banned private militias (which were often used to break strikes), and prohibited employers from including clauses in employment contracts that absolved them of responsibility for accidents, even those resulting from gross corporate negligence. The Far West was a hotbed of economic populism, labor unionism, and even socialism right up until World War II. Its people elected progressives like Montana senator Burton Wheeler (a Massachusetts native who sided with workers against Anaconda) or Senator William Borah of Idaho (who sponsored the bill creating the federal Department of Labor). FDR swept the Far West in 1932, propelled by the region’s hostility to the Wall Street financiers they believed had caused the Great Depression. But the cultural revolution of the 1960s drove a wedge between the Far Westerners and left-wing forces in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. “Liberalism was turning away from the popular economic progressivism with which Mountain states support had been forged,” Republican strategist Kevin Phillips would write at the end of the decade, “and was shifting into a welfare establishmentarianism lacking in appeal to the old radical Mountain states (where Northeastern causes are suspect, whether liberal or conservative).”¹³

The cartels have since made a comeback, in large part by backing political candidates who serve their interests while attacking the Far Westerners’ other historic enemy: the federal government. Where the government was concerned, the popular majority long ago developed a concise agenda: get out, leave us alone, and give us more money. They want dams maintained on the upper Columbia but no regulations protecting salmon. They want Washington to keep providing $2 billion in irrigation subsidies but not to try to prevent them being used to exhaust the last of the region’s great ancient aquifers. Many of the Far West’s senators and congressmen receive most of their campaign donations from interests outside the region and have become among the most reliable champions of the external industrial corporations at work there. But they do so through the libertarian rhetoric of individual freedom from governmental tyranny. “We oppose the federal intrusion in the everyday lives of the people of our great country,” Wyoming senator John Barrasso explained in announcing the 2009 creation of a Western Caucus of senators. “The government should get out of the way of prosperity and liberty [and] . . . cannot legislate economic progress by spending billions in taxpayer dollars or imposing strict environmental regulations.” Utah senator Orrin Hatch added that “one of the aims of the Senate Western Caucus is to thwart the antioil agenda of the Washington elite and their extreme environmentalist allies.” Added his Utah colleague Robert Bennett, “It’s time for us to recognize the tremendous treasure trove that the American West represents and move ahead in an intelligent fashion to exploit it,” noting that the energy resources extended “up on into Canada.” The senators did not propose increasing the self-reliance of their corporate donors by raising timber-cutting royalties or grazing fees on public lands to market rates, or making large agrobusinesses compensate taxpayers for the real cost of operating the dams and water projects that allow them to grow cotton in the desert.¹⁴