What was closed with the rapid settlement of the west

If the Indians could not be forced through kindness to change their ways, most agreed that it was acceptable to use force, which Native groups resisted. In Texas and the Southern Plains, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and their allies had wielded enormous influence. The Comanche in particular controlled huge swaths of territory and raided vast areas, inspiring terror from the Rocky Mountains to the interior of northern Mexico to the Texas Gulf Coast.

But after the Civil War, the U. The American military first sent messengers to the Plains to find the elusive Comanche bands and ask them to come to peace negotiations at Medicine Lodge Creek in the fall of But terms were muddled: American officials believed that Comanche bands had accepted reservation life, while Comanche leaders believed they were guaranteed vast lands for buffalo hunting.

Comanche bands used designated reservation lands as a base from which to collect supplies and federal annuity goods while continuing to hunt, trade, and raid American settlements in Texas. Confronted with renewed Comanche raiding, particularly by the famed war leader Quanah Parker, the U. Cold and hungry, with their way of life already decimated by soldiers, settlers, cattlemen, and railroads, the last free Comanche bands were moved to the reservation at Fort Sill, in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.

On the northern Plains, the Sioux people had yet to fully surrender. White prospectors flooded the territory. Caring very little about Indian rights and very much about getting rich, they brought the Sioux situation again to its breaking point. Aware that U. Initial clashes between U. In late June , a division of the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was sent up a trail into the Black Hills as an advance guard for a larger force. Cries for a swift American response filled the public sphere, and military expeditions were sent out to crush Native resistance.

The Sioux splintered off into the wilderness and began a campaign of intermittent resistance but, outnumbered and suffering after a long, hungry winter, Crazy Horse led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May Other bands gradually followed until finally, in July , Sitting Bull and his followers at last laid down their weapons and came to the reservation. Indigenous powers had been defeated. The Plains, it seemed, had been pacified. Plains peoples were not the only ones who suffered as a result of American expansion.

Faced with a shrinking territorial base, members of these two groups often joined the U. Conflicts between the U. By , General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and end their threat to U.

Carleton selected a dry, almost treeless site in the Bosque Redondo Valley, three hundred miles from the Navajo homeland. Those who resisted would be shot. Thus began a period of Navajo history called the Long Walk, which remains deeply important to Navajo people today. The Long Walk was not a single event but a series of forced marches to the reservation at Bosque Redondo between August and December Conditions at Bosque Redondo were horrible.

Provisions provided by the U. Army were not only inadequate but often spoiled; disease was rampant, and thousands of Navajos died. By , it had become clear that life at the reservation was unsustainable. General William Tecumseh Sherman visited the reservation and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were essentially kept as prisoners, but lack of cost-effectiveness was the main reason Sherman recommended that the Navajo be returned to their homeland in the West.

The attacks on Native nations in California and the Pacific Northwest received significantly less attention than the dramatic conquest of the Plains, but Native peoples in these regions also experienced violence, population decline, and territorial loss. They fought a guerrilla war for eleven months in which at least two hundred U.

Despite appeals from settlers acquainted with the Modoc, the federal government hanged Kintpuash and three others leaders in a highly choreographed and publicized public execution. Four years later, in the Pacific Northwest, a branch of the Nez Perce who, generations earlier, had aided Lewis and Clark in their famous journey to the Pacific Ocean refused to be moved to a reservation and, under the leadership of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to settlers and American readers as Chief Joseph, attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U.

The outnumbered Nez Perce battled across a thousand miles and were attacked nearly two dozen times before they succumbed to hunger and exhaustion, surrendered, were imprisoned, and removed to a reservation in Indian Territory. Army officer, became a landmark of American rhetoric. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

The treaties that had been signed with numerous Native nations in California in the s were never ratified by the Senate. Over one hundred distinct Native groups had lived in California before the Spanish and American conquests, but by , the Native population of California had collapsed from about , on the eve of the gold rush to a little less than 20, A few reservation areas were eventually set up by the U.

Aside from agriculture and the extraction of natural resources—such as timber and precious metals—two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads. Railroads made the settlement and growth of the West possible. By the late nineteenth century, maps of the Midwest were filled with advertisements touting how quickly a traveler could traverse the country.

No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination—or federal support—as the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States. Constructed from the west by the Central Pacific and from the east by the Union Pacific, the two roads were linked in Utah in to great national fanfare.

But such a herculean task was not easy, and national legislators threw enormous subsidies at railroad companies, a part of the Republican Party platform since Between and alone, railroad companies received more than ,, acres of public land, an area larger than the state of Texas.

Investors reaped enormous profits. If railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, they also created enormous labor demands. By , approximately four hundred thousand men—or nearly 2.

Much of the work was dangerous and low-paying, and companies relied heavily on immigrant labor to build tracks. Companies employed Irish workers in the early nineteenth century and Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century.

By , over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States. Once the rails were laid, companies still needed a large workforce to keep the trains running. Much railroad work was dangerous, but perhaps the most hazardous work was done by brakemen.

Speed was necessary, and any slip could be fatal. Brakemen were also responsible for coupling the cars, attaching them together with a large pin. It was easy to lose a hand or finger and even a slight mistake could cause cars to collide.

The railroads boomed. In , there were 9, miles of railroads in the United States. In there were ,, including several transcontinental lines. Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most spectacular. It grew from two hundred inhabitants in to over a million by By it and the region from which it drew were completely transformed. Chicago became the most important western hub and served as the gateway between the farm and ranch country of the Great Plains and eastern markets.

Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter, where they were then processed into packaged meats and shipped by refrigerated rail to New York City and other eastern cities.

Such hubs became the central nodes in a rapid-transit economy that increasingly spread across the entire continent linking goods and people together in a new national network. This national network created the fabled cattle drives of the s and s.

The first cattle drives across the central Plains began soon after the Civil War. Railroads created the market for ranching, and for the few years after the war that railroads connected eastern markets with important market hubs such as Chicago, but had yet to reach Texas ranchlands, ranchers began driving cattle north, out of the Lone Star state, to major railroad terminuses in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Ranchers used well-worn trails, such as the Chisholm Trail, for drives, but conflicts arose with Native Americans in the Indian Territory and farmers in Kansas who disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their own hunting, ranching, and farming lands.

This photochrom print a new technology in the late nineteenth century that colorized images from a black-and-white negative depicts a cattle round-up in Cimarron, a crossroads of the late nineteenth-century cattle drives. Detroit Photographic Co. Cattle drives were difficult tasks for the crews of men who managed the herds.

Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the late-nineteenth century to be between twelve thousand and forty thousand. Much about the American cowboys evolved from Mexican vaqueros : cowboys adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo , bronco , and lasso. While most cattle drivers were men, there are at least sixteen verifiable accounts of women participating in the drives. Some, like Molly Dyer Goodnight, accompanied their husbands.

Others, like Lizzie Johnson Williams, helped drive their own herds. Williams made at least three known trips with her herds up the Chisholm Trail. Many cowboys hoped one day to become ranch owners themselves, but employment was insecure and wages were low.

And it was tough work. On a cattle drive, cowboys worked long hours and faced extremes of heat and cold and intense blowing dust. They subsisted on limited diets with irregular supplies. Cowboys like the one pictured here worked the drives that supplied Chicago and other mid-western cities with the necessary cattle to supply and help grow the meat-packing industry. Government could file an application and lay claim to acres of surveyed Government land.

For the next 5 years, the General Land Office looked for a good faith effort by the homesteaders. This meant that the homestead was their primary residence and that they made improvements upon the land. After 5 years, the homesteader could file for his patent or deed of title by submitting proof of residency and the required improvements to a local land office.

Local land offices forwarded the paperwork to the General Land Office in Washington, DC, along with a final certificate of eligibility. The case file was examined, and valid claims were granted patent to the land free and clear, except for a small registration fee. After the Civil War, Union soldiers could deduct the time they served from the residency requirements. Some land speculators took advantage of legislative loopholes.

Others hired phony claimants or bought abandoned land. The General Land Office was underfunded and unable to hire a sufficient number investigators for its widely scattered local offices. As a result, overworked and underpaid investigators were often susceptible to bribery. Physical conditions on the frontier presented even greater challenges. Wind, blizzards, and plagues of insects threatened crops.

Open plains meant few trees for building, forcing many to build homes out of sod. Limited fuel and water supplies could turn simple cooking and heating chores into difficult trials.

Ironically, even the smaller size of sections took its own toll. While acres may have been sufficient for an eastern farmer, it was simply not enough to sustain agriculture on the dry plains, and scarce natural vegetation made raising livestock on the prairie difficult. As a result, in many areas, the original homesteader did not stay on the land long enough to fulfill the claim.

Homesteaders who persevered were rewarded with opportunities as rapid changes in transportation eased some of the hardships. Six months after the Homestead Act was passed, the Railroad Act was signed, and by May , a transcontinental railroad stretched across the frontier. The new railroads provided relatively easy transportation for homesteaders, and new immigrants were lured westward by railroad companies eager to sell off excess land at inflated prices.

The new rail lines provided ready access to manufactured goods and catalog houses like Montgomery Ward offered farm tools, barbed wire, linens, weapons, and even houses delivered via the rails. The distribution of western land by the Federal Government cannot be extricated from Federal Indian policy. The period from to marked a departure from earlier policies that were dominated by removal, treaties, reservations, and even war.

New policy in the late s — after the amount of public lands available had rapidly diminished — focused specifically on breaking up reservations by granting land allotments to individual Native Americans. Seeking to satisfy the nation's hunger for land, Congress passed the Dawes Act in , giving individual farms to reservation Indians and opening the remaining Indian lands to settlers.

On January 1, , Daniel Freeman and others had filed claims. However, Oregon proved far more attractive to many settlers. Discovered and explored by the British, Oregon was jointly occupied by the British and Americans, who, though they had not yet settled the territory, had set the stage for settlement by sending white missionaries and drawing maps.

Oregon seemed more likely than California to be annexed by the United States, thus settlers who desired stability and wanted to maintain a close link with their home country chose Oregon over California, leading to its more rapid development. The Willamette Valley offered fertile farmland and the assured company of other American settlers, whereas the Sacramento Valley was less well known and put the white settlers in geographic proximity to the Mexican settlers, who many Americans found distasteful.

It was not purely the uncertain promise of fertile land that provoked Americans to make the long journey from the Midwest across the Rocky Mountains. Constant news sent east fueled the fire of expansion to a great extent. Many of these reports simply stated the facts, that there was a vast amount of unclaimed land in the far west, and that with a lot of hard work and a little luck, an American settler could be successful in farming.

However, the effect on the American psyche of elaborate fictions about the West cannot be underestimated. During the s the legend of the West began to unfold itself in earnest. One story told of a year-old man who lived in California who had to leave the bounteous region when he wanted to die.

Other stories told of feats of great daring and bravery on the part of western settlers, and advanced notions of geographical wonders and trees that grew higher than the eye could see. These stories produced the desired effect of stimulating interest in the West, and on top of the factual promise of open land and a new beginning, convinced many to undertake the perilous journey.

Throughout the long process of settling the American West, the legend of the West would grow and become a symbol of the rugged adventurousness of western settlers. Despite the many reasons to migrate westward, the numbers that amassed in Oregon and California were modest, and migration was concentrated between and Even so, small numbers had a large effect on the Pacific coast. The British were unable to settle Oregon, and thus the concentration of Americans in the Willamette Valley boded well for the prospect of American annexation.

In California, the Mexican population was small and scattered.