Westward Expansion: Crash Course US History #24

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. History and today we leave behind the world of industry and corporations to talk about the Wild West. Spoiler alert: You died of dysentery. And in the process, we'll explore how all of us, even those of us who are vegan or eat sustainably produced foods, benefit from the massive agribusiness that has its roots in the Wild West. The West still looms large in American mythology as the home of cowboys and gunslingers and houses of ill repute and free from pesky government interference. But in fact, it probably wasn't as wild as we've been told.

Ugh, Mr. Green, why can't America live up to its myths at least once? Because this is America, Past Me, home of Hollywood, Gatsby and Honey Boo Boo. We are literally in the myth-making business. Thus, before the Hollywood Western, the frontier myth probably found its best expression in Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 lecture, “The Importance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the West was responsible for key features of American culture: beliefs in individualism, political democracy, and economic mobility. For Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, the western frontier represented a chance to start over and possibly get rich through individual effort, even when the West was Ohio.

In this mythology, the West was a magnet for restless young people who set out for uncorrupted, unoccupied and untamed territories in search of fortune. But in reality, most Western settlers did not go as individuals but as members of a family or as part of an immigrant group. And they weren't filling the vacant space either because most of that territory was home to American Indians. Furthermore, in addition to Easterners and immigrants from Europe, the West was colonized by Chinese and by Mexican immigrant workers and former slaves. Additionally, there were already many Mexicans living there who became Americans with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

And the whole West as “a place of strong individualism and independence” turns out to be an oversimplification. I mean, after all, the federal government had to pass the law that spurred colonization, then it had to expel the American Indians already living there, and it had to sponsor the railroads that allowed the West to grow in the first place. As individualistic as the government purchasing Walden Pond for Henry David Thoreau. What's that? Is it a state park now? Is the government the owner? Well, there you go. Now, railroads did not create the desire to settle the West, but they did make it possible for people who wanted to live in the West to do so, for two reasons.

First, without railroads there would be no way to get crops or other goods to market. I mean, I suppose you could dig a canal through Kansas, but, if you've ever been to Kansas, that's not a tempting proposition. Second, railroads made life in the West profitable and livable because they brought the goods people needed, such as tools for planting and sowing, shoes for wearing, books for placing on shelves and pretending to have read. Railroads allowed settlers to stay connected to the modernity that was becoming a hallmark of the industrialized world in the 19th century. Now, last week we saw that the federal government played a key role in funding the transcontinental railroad, but state governments also stepped in, often to their financial detriment.

In fact, so many states nearly went bankrupt funding railroads that most states now have constitutional requirements to balance their budgets. But perhaps the main way the federal government supported railroads and Western settlement and investment in general was by leading military expeditions against the American Indians, corralling them into smaller and smaller reservations and destroying their culture. Let's go to the thought bubble. There was an economic and racial imperative to remove Native Americans from their lands: whites wanted it that way. At first it was necessary for the construction of railways and later for agriculture. But eventually it was also exploited to extract minerals like gold and iron and other things that make the industry work.

I mean, would you really want a territory called the Badlands unless it had valuable minerals? Early western settlements, of the Oregon Trail type, did not result in major conflicts with Native Americans, but by the 1850s, a steady stream of settlers began increasingly bloody conflicts that lasted until almost 1890. Although the Fighting began before the Civil War The war, the end of the “war between the states,” meant a new, more violent phase in the war between the American Indians and the whites. General Philip H. “Little Phil” Sheridan set out to destroy the Indian way of life, burning villages and killing their horses and especially the buffaloes that were the basis of the Plains tribes' existence.

In 1800 there were about 30 million buffalo in the United States; In 1886, the Smithsonian Institution had difficulty finding 25 “good specimens.” In addition to violent resistance, some Indians turned to a spiritual movement to try to preserve their traditional way of life. Around 1890 the Ghost Dance movement emerged in and around South Dakota. The Ghost Dancers believed that if they gathered to dance and participate in religious rituals, eventually the white man would disappear and the buffalo would return, and with them the traditional customs of the Indians. But even though a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors completely destroyed George Custer's force of 250 cavalrymen at Little Bighorn in 1876, and it took Geronimo years to subdue them in the Southwest, the western Native Americans were all defeated by 1890. , and most were transferred to reserves.

Thanks, thought bubble. Wow, this Wild West episode sure is turning out to be a lot of fun! It's like a Will Smith movie! Alright, Stan, this is about to get even more depressing, so let's look at some nice mountains and western landscapes and stuff, while I tell the next part. So in 1871 the United States government ended the treaty system that since the American Revolution had treated Native American lands as if they were nations. And then, with the Dawes Act of 1887, lands reserved for Indians were allocated to individual families rather than tribes. Indians who “adopted the habits of civilized life,” which in this case meant becoming individualistic Jeffersonian small farmers, would be granted citizenship and there were supposed to be some protections to prevent their land from losing possession to the natives.

American people. But these protections were not particularly protective, and much of the Indian land was purchased by white settlers or speculators. After the passage of the Dawes Act, “the Indians lost 86 million of the 138 million acres of land they owned.” Wow, it's time for the Mystery Document. The rules here are simple. I assume the author of the Mysterious Document. And then you can see me surprise myself when I'm wrong. Alright. I have seen the Grandfather Chief, the Next Grand Chief, the Chief Commissioner; the Chief Justice; and many other chiefs of law and they all say that they are my friends, and that I will have justice, but while all their mouths speak well, I do not understand why nothing is done for my people.

I have heard talk and talk but nothing is done. Words do not pay for my dead. They don't pay for my country now invaded by white men. They don't protect my father's grave. Good words will not give my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I'm tired of talking that doesn't amount to anything. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. I mean it could be almost any American Indian leader. This is totally unfair, Stan. All I really know about this is that the Big Boss Dad is the President.

I mean he could be anyone of a dozen people. How about I say the name in 10 seconds and don't get punished? Aaaand start. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Chief Big Foot, um, Keokuk, Chief Oshkosh, Chief Joseph Ch-OH YES, YES! And now let's move from tragedy to tragedy. So if you're thinking things couldn't be worse for Native Americans: they were. After killing the buffalo, taking their land, and forcing the Indians onto reservations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted a policy that amounted to cultural genocide. He established boarding schools, the most famous of which was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Indian children were forcibly separated from their families to be civilized.

This meant teaching them English, taking away their clothes, their names and their family connections. The idea, succinctly expressed, was "kill the Indian, save the man." Now, the United States was not the only nation busy subjugating its indigenous inhabitants and putting them on reservations in the late 19th century. Something similar was happening in South Africa, in Chile and even among the first peoples of Canada. And you're usually very good, Canada. Although the slower pace of Western settlement meant there was much less bloodshed, another point for Canada. And as bad as American boarding school policy was, it was at least short-lived compared to the Australian policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families and placing them with white foster families, which lasted until the 1970s.

Alright, Stan, we have to liven up this episode. Let's talk about jeans! The Marlboro Man riding through the countryside, herding cows and smoking, alone in the saddle, alone in his emphysema. Surely that's the real West, the men and women, but mostly men, who stayed away from the industrialized country like the last of Jefferson's tough guys. But not. Once again, we have the railroad to thank for our cowboy image. Like those massive cattle drives of millions of cows into the open fields of Texas? Yes, they ended in cities like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City, because that's where the railroad heads were.

Without railroads, cowboys would have been limited to driving their cattle in endless circles. And without industrial meat processing, there would have been no market for all that meat. And it was a lot of meat. You know what I'm talking about. In fact, I'm talking about beef. By the mid-1880s, the days of free-range ranching were coming to an end, as ranchers began to enclose more and more land and set up their businesses closer to, you guessed it, railroad stations. . There are also quite a few things about Western agriculture that run counter to the mythical ideal of the Jeffersonian farmer.

First of all, this type of farm work was a family affair; Many women carried enormous burdens on Western farms, as can be seen in this excerpt from an Arizona farmer: “Get up, put out my chickens, get a bucket of water… make a fire, boil the potatoes, brush and sweep.” Shovel half an inch of dust off the ground, feed three litters of chickens, then make cookies, eat breakfast, milk, plus work around the house and this morning I had to walk half a mile behind the calves.” These family farms were increasingly geared toward producing wheat and corn for domestic and even international markets rather than trying to eke out a living.

Kansas farmers found themselves competing with farmers in Australia and Argentina, and this international competition drove prices lower and lower. Second, the Great Plains, while remarkably productive agriculturally, would not be as good at growing crops without massive irrigation projects. Much of the water needed for Plains agriculture comes from a huge underground lake, the Oglala Aquifer. Don't worry, by the way, the aquifer is fed by a magical, permanent H20 factory at the center of the earth, which you can learn about on Hank's show, Crash Course Chemis: What's That? It's drying up. OMG THIS IS A DEPRESSING EPISODE. In any case, large-scale irrigation projects require large capital investments and, therefore, large, established agricultural companies that are beginning to look more like agribusinesses than family farms.

I mean, in 1900, California was home to giant commercial farms that relied on irrigation and chemical fertilizers. Some of them were not owned by families, but by large corporations like the Southern Pacific Railroad. And they were worked by migrant farm workers from China, the Philippines, Japan and Mexico. As Henry George, a late 19th-century critic of corporate capitalism, wrote, “California is not a country of farms, but…of plantations and estates.” When studying American

history

, it is very easy to get caught up in the excitement of industrial capitalism with its robber barons, new technologies, and luxurious cities because that worldIt looks very familiar, probably because it's the one we live in.

After all, if I were running a farm like that Arizona woman I talked about earlier, there's no way I could make these videos because I'd be chasing my calves. I don't even know what a litter of chickens is. Is it 4 chickens? 12? 6? It's probably 12 because eggs come in dozens. The enormous agricultural surplus that contemporary farms create, and the efficient transportation network that gets that surplus to me quickly, makes everything else possible, from YouTube to Chevy Volts. And no matter who you are, you will benefit from the products resulting from that enormous surplus. That's why we're watching YouTube right now.

So farming and ranching changed a lot in the late 19th century in the United States, when we came to embrace the market-driven ethos we celebrate or condemn these days. And in the end, the Wild West ends up looking more like industrial capitalism than a Larry McMurtry novel. The Wild West, like the rest of the industrialized world, received incentives to increase productivity and was shaped by an increasingly international economic system. And it's worth remembering even if we think that the Oregon Trail and the Wild West are part of the same thing. In fact, they were separated by the most important event in American

history

: the Civil War.

I know that's not the mythologizing you'll find in Tombstone, but it's true. Thanks for watching. I will see you next week. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. The show's associate producer is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Halse Rojas and me. And our graphic team is Thought Café. Every week, there is a new title for libertage. If you want to suggest one, you can do so in the comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians.

Thanks for watching Crash Course. If you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. OH, ahh I didn't get a good push.