<


5. CIVIL WAR ... AND RECOVERY

THE BATTLE FOR THE WEST RESUMES

CONTENTS

The battle continues during the years of the Civil War

Westward Ho!

Cow trails and cattle barons

The end to the era of the great Cattle Kingdoms

The rise of the American farmer

The Indians' "Last Stand"

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 154-158.
THE BATTLE CONTINUES DURING THE YEARS OF THE CIVIL WAR

During the Civil War, the Indian Wars intensified – as Federal troops were pulled from the West to fight the Southern Confederacy.  The Lakota (Sioux) in Minnesota for instance in 1862 attacked German settlements at New Ulm and Hutchinson, killing several hundred settlers, women and children as well as men – forcing Lincoln to send troops to the region to break Sioux power (arresting and hanging the leaders).  Bitterness between Indians and Whites only intensified – leading to an unwarranted attack in late 1864 by Federal troops on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho settlement at Sand Creek (Colorado), with over a hundred Indians killed in the attack.

In the Southwest there was a huge effort to force Navajo and Apache tribes onto reservations in the bleak Pecos River region – bringing to notice and fame Indian-fighter Kit Carson – who finally broke the will of the Navajo to resist the move.  He then in late 1864 turned on the Kiowas and Comanches who had been conducting bloody raids on White settlements in the Texas Panhandle region.  At one point he found himself vastly outnumbered by several thousand warriors at the Battle of Adobe Walls (November) and was forced to retreat, but managed to inflict massive casualties on the Indians nonetheless.  This battle proved to be a turning point in the Indian wars in the region – greatly undermining the power of the Kiowas and Comanches and ultimately bringing both tribes to sue for peace in 1865.

But alongside Kit Carson, the Indians could provide heroics of their own – such as the Apache raider Geronimo, whose small band of warriors seemed to be active everywhere in the West.  Although finally forced onto the Apache reservation by the U.S. military, Geronimo broke out several times between 1876 and 1886.  Ultimately his name became so well known that he finally was featured in a number of Cowboy-and-Indian shows – even riding horseback in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade in 1905!

WESTWARD HO!

On they came – White men, women and children – by steamer or river barge (as far as the rivers would take them westward), then by wagon train, following trails set out by trail blazing frontiersmen – and then by train as the American railroads pushed West and Southwest deep into Indian lands.  They laid claim to railroad land and set up their own farms – and towns to service the fast-growing farming world of the West.

Many came as Mormons, developing communities centered on their City of Zion of Salt Lake City (founded by& Young in 1847), but reaching far and wide from Utah into Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado – and even northern Mexico.

The rumors of gold (but also silver and copper) also brought Americans west – though not usually entire families, but instead merely single male fortune hunters.  States such as California, Nevada (with its fabulous Comstock Lode), Montana, Idaho and Washington were states particularly sought out by these fortune hunters.  Towns would quickly appear wherever mineral sites were discovered, bringing not only the fortune-hunting miners, but also bartenders and prostitutes to keep the miners happy, but also bankers, clergy, and general store operators to bring some degree of American civilization to the towns as well.  Then when the mines yielded up all their bounty, everyone moved on to opportunities elsewhere – and another bustling mining town turned into a deserted ghost town.

COW TRAILS AND CATTLE BARONS

With the advent of the railroad into the West, new opportunities opened up for the lucrative trade in beef cattle.  Thousands of cattle could be herded north out of the grasslands of Texas, through the Indian territory of Oklahoma, to the various railheads of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.  For instance in 1867, when the new Chisholm Trail was first laid out, 35,000 head of cattle were brought up from Texas to the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, in that first year alone.  The cattle were then herded onto box cars and shipped up to Chicago – or west to Denver for shipment to the Pacific coast.  In Chicago the slaughterhouses would be kept busy preparing meat to be shipped up the Great Lakes waterway to the populous Eastern cities.

From the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s the cattle business boomed, making a lot of cattle barons very rich – and creating a fabled American proto type, the American cowboy.

THE END TO THE ERA OF THE GREAT CATTLE KINGDOMS

But three things would bring this era to a close:  the steel plow, the barbed wire fence, and the overgrazing of the cow trails.  The grassy plains through which the cattle trails led were covered by a thick undergrowth of tough grass with deep roots, which made the land prohibitively difficult to plow – that was until the steel plow began to come under wide usage (sometime in the 1870s and 1880s).  With this invention, homesteaders could now begin to settle the plains, with their plowed fields and domestic animals able to support the lives of their families.  To protect their investment, they began to secure their landholdings by the relatively cheap means of the new barbed wire fencing (developed in the mid-1870s).

Now the cattle herds found their paths along their cow trails blocked here and there by these fenced-in homesteads – and trouble began to brew between these two categories of Westerners, the farmer and the cattleman.   For years the cattlemen had been allowed freely to graze their herds on the vast Federal lands of the Great Plains (reaching from Texas to the Dakotas).   But now homesteaders were rapidly filling these open lands.  Little by little the cattle herding business was pushed further westward, increasing the difficulty and costs of the herding itself.  And then a very bad winter hit in 1886-1887, with hundreds of thousands of cattle dying – bringing a number of the former cattle kingdoms to ruin.

THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER

In the meantime, American farming was becoming a very big business – the Western farms fully able to feed the Eastern cities which were also growing rapidly in size.  Indeed, America began to see huge industrial farms grow in number during the latter part of the 1800s.

At the same time, towns located along the growing number of rail lines crisscrossing the American Great Plains or Midwest began to develop quickly as economic and social centers for the agricultural industry of entire counties.  Thus as the farming business boomed, churches, schools, banks, and general stores began to appear in these towns, bringing American civilization to the American West.  In many ways this too, along with the cowboy, was fast becoming a major cultural symbol representing the young and fast-growing America.

THE INDIANS' "LAST STAND"

Things were growing desperate for the declining Indian tribes of the West.  The huge buffalo herds that had sustained the Indians' hunting economy were dwindling rapidly in size – thanks to both the Indians' greater killing ability with the new repeating rifles – and the interest of Whites in killing the buffalo simply for sport (sometimes simply from train windows as they passed the buffalo herds).  Then there was also the interest in Christian missionaries in bringing the Indians to Christian ways – meaning a cultural and economic lifestyle similar to that of the "Christian world."  Reservations were also being chipped away at by land hungry Whites – despite treaties that had guaranteed the land as Indian territory in perpetuity.  But events showed quickly that there was no perpetuity when it came to Indian property rights.

Custer's "Last Stand."  In 1875, Sioux (or Lakota) Chief Sitting Bull and his tactician Crazy Horse decided it was time to leave the Dakota Reservation to take the offensive against settlers invading the Dakota Black Hills – sacred Sioux land.  The next year they were joined by Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors – which in turn brought Civil War Cavalry General Sheridan west to force them back onto their reservations.  But the Indians proved quite resistant.  And worse for the American troops, a detachment of several hundred soldiers led by Colonel George Custer got itself surrounded by Crazy Horse's warriors – and all were either killed or badly wounded at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876).

But instead of breaking the will of the White soldiers, the slaughter of Custer and his men became a rallying cry for the White nation to take revenge.  At this point Sitting Bull decided simply to return his people to their Dakota reservation.

One last effort of Indians to clear the land of Whites occurred in 1890, when, getting caught up in the Ghost Dance craze, they came to believe that the performance of this ritual would finally clear the land of the White man – even believing that the wearing of special shirts would make the Indians invulnerable to White man's bullets if it should come to armed conflict.  And it soon came to such conflict – in which Sitting Bull was killed along with a dozen of his warriors.  Then the 7th cavalry was sent in to impose order, and, at the Wounded Knee Creek, fighting accidentally and tragically broke out – in which possibly 150 to 300 Sioux men, women and children were killed (no one is sure of the count) – along with 25 U.S. soldiers. It would be the last sad such episode in the long-standing feud between the American Indian and the American White.  Indeed, the "Indian Problem" had now been solved, definitively.



Go on to the next section:  America Comes of Age

  Miles H. Hodges