apush chapter 26 notes

7/27/2019 APUSH Chapter 26 Notes

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Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

• The Clash of

Cultures on the

Plains

• Receding Native

Population

• Immediately after the Civil War, the Great West was a wild expanse mostly uninhabited by

whites

• By 1890, it had been divided into Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and pioneer

were streaming in

• Change preceded American settlement:

◦ Tribes sometimes abandoned their lands and displaced other tribes

◦ Some tribes, ex. the Cheyenne and the Sioux, went from being settled farmers to being

nomadic traders and hunters atop Spanish-brought horses

• Effects of Antebellum Era white settlers:

◦ Spread cholera, typhoid, and smallpox

◦ Reduced the bison population through grazing their own livestock and hunting, so increa

tensions between tribes competing for hunting grounds

• The US government's reaction:

◦ 1851 and 1853 signed treaties at Fort Laramie and Fort Atkinson that establishedboundaries for each tribes' territory and tried to make a corridor for white settlement; wer

the beginnings of the reservation system

◦ But the treaties were not effective because the Plains Indians usually had no “tribes” or

“chiefs” and lived in isolated, wandering groups

◦ 1860s the government put the Plains Indians into even smaller confines, ex. present-day

Oklahoma and the Great Sioux Reservation, and promised to provide them with supplies

but otherwise leave them alone; but many federal Indian agents corruptly provided faulty

supplies

• For over a decade after the Civil War, US troops, 1/5 black, fought with the Plains Indians

• The Indian wars on the Plains were often extremely savage:

◦ 1864 massacre of Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado under Colonel J. M. Chivington

◦ 1866 Sioux ambush of Captain William J. Fetterman's troops that successfully stopped th

construction of the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields with another Treaty of Fort

Laramie

• 1874 Colonel Custer attracted pioneers to Sioux territory when announced the discovery o

gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, so the Sioux (influenced by Sitting Bull) went on

offensive, so Custer's Seventh Cavalry was sent in, but was decimated at the Little Bighorn

River

• 1877 the Nez Perce Indians in northeastern Oregon joined the fight when they, under Chief

Joseph, resisted the government's attempts to put them on a reservation; were eventually

tricked into being sent to a reservation in Kansas were 40% of them died

• The fierce Apache of Arizona and New Mexico, under Geronimo, finally surrendered after

their women were exiled to Florida, and would become successful farmers in Oklahoma

• The Native Americans ended up getting herded into reservations, where they had to live as

oft-ignored wards of the government; it was cheaper to feed them than to fight them

• Causes of the US government's victory:

◦ Railroads bring great numbers of troops, farmers, ranchers, and settlers into the heart of t



• Bellowing Herds

of Bison

• The End of the

Trail (or, Indian

Reform

Movements)

• Mining: From

Dishpan to Ore

Breaker

West

◦ The Indians succumbed to the white man's diseases and alcohol

◦ The extermination of the buffalo made nomadic life impossible

• Plains Indians were extremely dependent on buffalo for food, fuel, clothing, and more

• Before white settlement, tens of millions of buffalo lived on the Plain; by the end of the Civ

War, 15 million remained

• With railroad construction came the slaughter of the buffalo herds for hides, food, or fun

• By 1885, less than a thousand buffalo remained

• Children's author Helen Hunt Jackson wrote 1881 A Century of Dishonor that chronicled t

government's ruthless dealings with the Indians and 1884 Ramona that depicted the injusti

done to the California Indians; inspired sympathy towards the Indians

• Humanitarians wanted to be kind to the Indians in order to persuade them to become more

civilized, while hard-liners wanted the current policy of punishment and forced containmen

• Christian reformers often administered education to Indians, and 1884-1890 outlawed the

sacred Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance cult with the Battle of Wounded Knee• 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act:

◦ Tribes were no longer legal entities, no more tribal ownership of land, and each Indian

family head received 160 acres of land

◦ After 25 years of good behavior, the Indians would get citizenship and full title of their la

(1924 citizenship was granted to all Indians)

◦ Reservation land not given to the Indians was sold to railroads and settlers to put money

towards educating Indians with white values and customs, ex. Carlisle Indian School in P

and field matrons who taught Indian women sewing and the virtues of chastity and hygien

◦ Ignored Indian culture's reliance on tribally held land; by 1900, Indians had lost half of

what land they had in 1880◦ Would remain the government's Indian policy until the 1934 Indian Reoganization Act

• From 1887 to 2000, the Indian population increased from 243,000 to 1.5 million

• The mining frontier was strengthened by the defeat of the Indians and the building of therailroads

• 1858 gold was discovered in Colorado, causing a wave of “fifty-niners” to go there; manyfailed and returned to civilization, some stayed to mine silver, and others stayed as farmers

• 1859 gold and silver were discovered in the Comstock Lode in Nebraska, and 1864 Nebraswas admitted as a free state

•

Boomtowns arose rapidly, in which order was kept though lynching and vigilantism andevery third cabin was a saloon, and petered out once the gold ran out, leaving behind ghosttowns

• After the loose surface gold was mined up, expensive ore-breaking machinery had to bebrought in and run by corporations, so independent gold-miners were replaced by trainedengineers and day laborers

• Effects of the mining frontier:

◦ Attracted settlers to the Wild West

◦ Gave women opportunities (ex. Running boardinghouses or being prostitutes), and startin1869 with Wyoming several Plains states granted them the franchise



• Beef Bonanzas andthe Long Drive

• The Farmers'

Frontier

◦ The amassing of precious metals helped finance the Civil War and the railroads andintensified conflict with the Indians

◦ 1879 the Treasury resumed specie payments

◦ “Silver Senators” represented the sparsely populated Western states and promoted the silvminer’s interests

◦ Added to American folklore and literature, ex. The writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twa

•

Immediately after the Civil War, the long-horn cattle of Texas were killed mostly for theirhides, because it was unprofitable to transport their meat to market

• The railroads allowed cattle to be transported to the stockyards; meatpacking became a maindustry, ex. Beef barons Swift and Armour, with the perfection of the refrigerator car

• In the Long Drive, Cowboys drove herds of cattle over the unfenced and unpopulated plainuntil they reached a railroad terminal, ex. Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, and Cheyenne, wthe cattle grazing on the way

• In Abilene, Marshal James “Wild Bill” Hickok maintained order with his famed gunmansh

• The Long Drive was threatened by:

◦ Indians, stampedes, and cattle fever

◦ Homesteaders and sheepherders who built fences

◦ Harsh winter of 1886-1887◦ Overexpansion and overgrazing

• So cattle-raising was turned into a big business; breeders fenced ranches, laid winter feed,imported bulls, produced fewer but larger animals, and organized into ex. The WyomingStock-Growers’ Association

• Was the heyday of the cowboy

• Around 5,000 cowboys were black

• Effects of the 1862 Homestead Act:

◦ Allowed families to acquire up to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on it for

five years, and improving it◦ Before, public land had been sold mostly for revenue

◦ Half a million families who could not afford land took advantage of it, but five times as

many families bought their land

◦ 160 acres was enough to live on in the Mississippi basin, but not on the more dry Great

Plains, so 2/3rds of Plains homesteaders had to give up and return home

◦ Land promoters gained ten times more land than actual farmers by employing “dummy”

homesteaders to seize the properties with the most natural resources

• The railroads helped open the West by marketing crops and encouraging Americans and

European immigrants to settle there

• Before, most believed that the prairie sod was poor, but realized it was quite rich once brokby heavy iron plows pulled by four yokes of oxen, so “sodbusters” streamed in to farm

• The settlement of the semiarid area west of the 100 th meridian:

◦ 1870s settlers went farther west because of high wheat prices from wheat failures elsewh

◦ But 1880s, many went broke because of a six-year drought

◦ So developed the technique of “dry farming” with frequent shallow cultivation, but it onl

served to worsened the situation by creating a layer of fine, dusty surface soil

◦ Also imported cold- and drought-resistant strains of wheat, abandoned drought-sensitive

corn, and built barbed-wire fences instead of wooden ones



• The Far West

Comes of Age

• The Fading

Frontier

• The Farm

Becomes a Factory

• Deflation Dooms

the Debtor

◦ Massive-scale federal irrigation projects, ex. dams, would have the most impact on

agriculture and the environment out west

• 1870s to 1890s many western states admitted to the Union:

◦ 1876 Colorado (“the Centennial State”)

◦ 1889 to 1890 the Republican Congress admitted North and South Dakota, Montana,

Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming because wanted their votes

◦ 1890 the Mormon Church banned polygamy, but Utah was not admitted until 1896

• Before April 1889, “sooners” had illegally entered the Indian land of Oklahoma Territory;

April 1889, half of Oklahoma was opened to settlers, and the “boomers” poured in

• The 1890 census revealed that there was no longer a frontier line

• 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner wrote “The Significance of the Frontier in American Histor

• The government set aside land for national parks, ex. 1872 Yellowstone and 1890 Sequoia,

because realized that western land was not inexhaustible

• The frontier greatly affected America's economy and psychology:

◦

Farmers, unlike European peasants, were extremely mobile◦ Acted like a “safety valve” to lure immigrant farmers away from the cities and induced

urban employers to maintain high enough wages to keep workers from moving out West

◦ Western cities grew from the influx of failed pioneers

• The trans-Mississippi west was one of the many American “wests”, from the West Indies to

the Chesapeake to the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers to the Tenessee and Ohio Rivers

• The frontier was the subject of authors, ex. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, a

Francis Parkman, and painters, ex. George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Albert Bierstad

• Before, farmers were jacks of all trades; now, because of high prices, concentrated on

growing single cash crops and had to buy other provisions and manufactured goods• Wheat harvesting was sped up by the 1870s invention of the twine binder and the 1880s

invention of the combine (combined reaper-thresher)

• So farms grew into huge “outdoor grain factories”

• Effects of the mechanization of agriculture:

◦ Large-scale farmers became business-people as well as farmers and were closely tied to

banking, railroading, and manufacturing because they now had to buy expensive machine

though often suffered losses because were unskilled at managing such costly equipment

◦ Marginal farmers were driven off the plain and into the industrial work force

◦ America became the world's leading producer of wheat and meat

• From their start, farms in Central Valley, California were massive affairs; with the 1880s

perfection of the refrigerator car, became a major producer of fruits and vegetables

• The new one-crop economy was dangerous for farmers because they depended on the price

their product, and the price of their product was determined by world markets and output

• Low prices and deflation were detrimental to farmers because meant that they had to pay

back “more” on their loans

• 1880s and 1890s, there was deflation, because of the static money supply, and a drop in gra

prices:



• Unhappy Farmers

• The Farmers TakeTheir Stand

• Prelude to

Populism

◦ So farmers were caught in a vicious cycle of overproduction, so drove down prices, so

deeper in debt

◦ Hundreds of thousands of farms had mortgages on them, often with huge interest rates

◦ So by 1880, 1/4 of all American farms were worked by tenants, rather than owners

• Natural problems included swarms of grasshoppers, the cotton-boll weevil, floods thatexacerbated the erosion problem and made necessary the use of expensive fertilizers, and a

series of droughts• Farmers also faced trouble from the government in the forms of overassessed land, local

taxes, and high protective tariffs that forced them to buy expensive manufactured goods wselling their crops at low prices in the competitive world market

• Corporations and processors controlled the cost and availability of harvesters, barbed-wireand fertilizer, middlemen took cuts, and operators kept high grain storage rates

• The railroads had high freight rates and refused to serve farmers who protested them

• 1890, ½ the population were farmers, but they did not organize because of their independennature

• 1868 the Greenback Movement wanted inflation through the printing of paper money becaof a drop in prices

• The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry:

◦ Organized 1867 by Freemason Oliver H. Kelley

◦ Goals:

▪ At first, to enhance the lives of isolated farmers with social, educational, and fraternalactivities

▪ To be independent of the trusts through ex. Cooperatively owned stores, grain elevatorsand warehouses and a failed attempt at manufacturing their own machinery

▪ To regulate rates for railways and storage through the Granger Laws, but the laws werefought by well-paid lawyers of the railways and operators, ex. the 1886 Wabash Suprem

Court case◦ By 1875, had 800,000 members, mostly in the upper Mississippi Valley, because appeale

to many lonely farming families

◦ Decreased in influence after the Wabash case

• The Greenback Labor Party wanted inflation and improvement of laborer’s lives; 1878elected 14 members to Congress, and 1880 presidential candidate James B. Weaver polled3% of the popular vote

• Late 1870s in Texas Farmer’s Alliance was founded in order to socialize and escape thecontrol of railroads and manufacturers through cooperative trading, but excluded landlesstenant farmers and blacks; by 1890 had more than a million members

• 1880s the Colored Famers' National Alliance was formed that had 250,000 members by 18• Emerging from the Farmers' Alliance, the People’s party, or the Populists, wanted to

nationalize the railroads, telephones, and telegraph, institute a graduated income tax, andcreate a federal “subtreasury” to give loans to farmers for crops stored ing governmentwarehouses, and the unlimited coinage of silver

◦ 1894 pamphlet Coin’s Financial School by William Hope Harvey argued for free silver

◦ Ignatious Donnelly was a popular Populist Congressman

◦ Mary Elizabeth Lease encouraged farmers to protest

◦ In the 1892 elections, the Populists alarmed the main parties with successes at the polls(presidential candidate was James B. Weaver)



• Coxey's Army and

the Pullman Strike

• Golden McKinley

and Silver Bryan

(or, the Election of

1896)

• Class Conflict:

Plowholders

VersusBondholders (or,

the presidential

campaigns and

election of 1896)

• Because of the Panic of 1893 and the Populist idea that farmers and laborers were victims othe economic and political system, armies of unemployed began protesting, ex. 1894 an arunder wealthy quarry owner General Jacob S. Coxey unsuccessfully tried to march onWashington, D.C.

• 1894 the Pullman Strike in Chicago:

◦ Eugene V. Debs organized the American Railway Union with 150,000 members

◦ Striked because the Pull Palace Car Company had cut wages while keeping rent the same

◦

American Federation of Labor did not support◦ Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld did not feel that intervention was needed, but Preside

Cleveland and U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney decided to sent in federal troops on legal basis that the strikers were blocking the transport of the mail

◦ So federal troops crushed the strike, and Debs was sentenced to six months in prison

◦ Was the first time that the government used a legal method to break a strike, and strikerscould be imprisoned without a jury trial, so organized labor was incensed

• The Republican party:

◦ Iron baron Marcus Alonzo Hanna backed McKinley for presidential candidate with $3

million; believed that the main purpose of government was to aid business, and that weal

trickled down to the laborers

◦ William McKinley of Ohio won the candidential election; was an experienced

Congressman and Civil War officer

◦ Platform called for the gold standard (though McKinley leaned towards silver), supported

the protective tariff, and opposed hard times

• The Democratic party:

◦ Was no longer led by Cleveland because of he was disliked for his ultraconservative, nea

Republican stance on economics

◦ Was extremely divided until William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska appeared and delivered

his Cross of Gold speech; Bryan was nominated for presidential candidate the next day◦ Platform wanted inflation through the unlimited coinage of silver at 16 ounces of silver t

one ounce of gold (the ratio at the time was 32 to 1)

◦ “Gold Bug” Democrats, including Cleveland, who disliked the party's support silver form

their own party but mostly hoped that McKinley would win

• Most of the Populist party joined with the Democratic party, since the Dems had taken thei

main plank of the 16 to 1 silver to gold ratio

• Bryan's campaign:

◦ Turned silver into an almost religious issue, traveled widely giving speeches all over

◦ Sparked fear in eastern conservatives because threatened to devalue their holdings• Hanna and McKinley's campaign:

◦ Had the largest campaign chest in American history ($16 million)

◦ Made contracts with manufacturers contingent on McKinley's election

◦ Some factory owners threatened and bribed their workers to get them to vote Republican

• McKinley won the election with the support of the West coast and the East, while Bryan ha

the support of the South and the trans-Mississippi West

• Significance of the election:

◦ Showed how Bryan's platform lacked appeal to Eastern urban laborers with fixed wages



• Republican Stand-

pattism Enthroned

(or, Effects of

McKinley's

Presidency)

and unmortgaged farmers

◦ Showed that not enough of the underprivileged banded together to win the election

◦ Bryan's campaign was the last major one to seek farmers' support

◦ Republicans would hold the Presidency for 28 of the next 36 years, so a new political era

falling voter turnout, weakening of party organizations, and the replacement of such issue

as the money question and civil service reform with the issues of industrial regulation an

labor welfare (the “fourth party system”)

• McKinley listened closely to public opinion, so stayed away from reform issues

• Businesses and trusts were given more freedom

• The Wilson Gorman law was not raising enough revenue to cover the Treasury deficit, and

the Republican trusts felt entitled to a protective tariff because of their contributions to the

Republicans' campaign chest, so 1897 the Dingley Tariff Bill was pushed through the Hou

and amended 850 times in the Senate so that the average tariff rate was raised to 46.5%

• By 1897, prosperity returned after the panic of 1893, and the Republicans claimed credit

• The money issue and support for silver faded with the 1900 Gold Standard Act that allowe

paper currency to be freely redeemed in gold, plus the discoveries of new gold deposits in

the Klondike in Canada and the perfection of the inexpensive cyanide process for extractin

gold from low-grade ore

apush chapter 26 notes

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