The construction of the railroad was a wonder in itself. In the public mind, the Rocky Mountains represented a nearly impenetrable barrier to transcontinental travel. The road’s engineers and surveyors crossed the summit of the mountains at 8,262 feet above sea level without any grade greater than ninety feet to a mile, and that only for a short distance. The construction also put to rest any lingering assumptions that the territory between the Mississippi and the Rockies was a “Great American Desert.” The Plains would soon sprout abundant fields of wheat and corn to be shipped to the great cities of the East and to markets all over the world. The road also employed a workforce that far exceeded the numbers of workers on any other enterprise in American history. More than twenty thousand workers built the railroad, a small army that managers had to house, feed, and (hopefully) pay, accomplishing much of this during a civil war. The “medley of Irishmen and Chinamen” who built the road brought “Europe and Asia face to face, grasping hands across the American Continent.”4
The managers of the Union Pacific finally won their release, and the strikers received their wages. On Monday, May 10, 1869, two days late, workers laid the two last rails simultaneously, one opposite the other. Nevada provided a silver spike for the next-to-last rail, and California donated a golden spike to secure the union of East and West. Even then, the ceremony went awry as the first strikes hit the rail and not the silver spike. Governor Stanford was more accurate with his hammer. A telegraph wire connected to the golden spike told the world that the deed of spanning a continent was done. Bells pealed all over the North, and, in New York a celebratory service was held in Trinity Church near Wall Street. The minister there called the ceremony at Promontory Point “a great event of the world … one of the victories of peace.… It is a triumph of commerce.… It will preserve the union of these States.” The New York Times echoed the theme of Union. The railroad “binds the States of the Atlantic and Pacific into one nation.”5
A few days after the ceremony, a telegram arrived at the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., informing the postmaster general that the new railroad had delivered mail from New York to San Francisco. Transmitting mail across the country by stagecoach or Pony Express cost $1,100 per mile annually. By the railroad, it was only $200 per mile. The same savings would accrue to private passengers, military personnel, and crops, livestock, and precious metals. Harper’s expressed the prevailing opinion in the North: “No work of this century can compare in the grandeur both of the undertaking and of its probable results with the Pacific Railroad.” Soon, middle-class Americans on the East Coast could glide across the continent, sleep in spring beds in a Pullman Palace Car, eat meals with fine cutlery and china, enjoy the stunning landscapes, and arrive refreshed in San Francisco a mere ten days after leaving. Before the railroad, the fastest journey to the West took four weeks.6
Joining the tracks at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, for the first transcontinental railroad. May 1869. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Naysayers predicted the railroad would burden the national treasury and never live up to its expectations. They were wrong. Within a year of its completion, the railroad had $100 million in capital from the sale of stock and government bonds and turned a profit of $4 million that doubled the following year. The savings to the nation in terms of cheaper freight rates and military and private passenger fares were incalculable. The road was both a consumer and a shipper of lumber, steel, coal, and oil, thereby stimulating those industries as well.
By the 1880s, the United States contained nearly one third of the world’s railroad mileage, blotting out distance and even altering the concept of time. On November 18, 1883, the American Railway Association reduced the number of time zones in America from fifty to four. The change helped the trains run on time, or at least according to a schedule that shippers and passengers anywhere in the country could understand. A standard gauge for all railroads followed three years later. Cities constructed “Union” terminals, often their most imposing structures, to consolidate the various rail lines heading into and out of town. The railroad became the symbol for an age enamored of science, technology, and innovation. The golden spike cemented the Union materially as the war had done politically. Like God, the iron rails would bring peace and harmony to all mankind, as Walt Whitman wrote in his tribute to the ceremony at Promontory Point, “Passage to India” (1870):
SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,…
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires;…
The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.…
I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;…
Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
The road between Europe and Asia.7
Not everyone sang along with Whitman. The transcontinental railroad traveled through Indian territory, bringing more settlers who established homesteads, prospected for gold or silver, and threatened the buffalo as well as the Indians themselves. Most white Americans viewed the Indian in the same manner as they saw the Mexican or the slaveholder: an obstacle to progress. Indians were yesterday’s people; primitive, savage, and content to live with rather than over nature.
The transcontinental railroad was viewed as the “final solution” to ending the Native American threat to white settlement in the West. The road would facilitate transforming the region’s environment and rendering it immensely prosperous. Four months before the golden spike joined East and West, the Committee on the Pacific Railroad in the U.S. Senate cited the military application of the new road. “As the thorough and final solution of the Indian question,” the committee’s report stated, “by taking the buffalo range out from under the savage, and putting a vast stock and grain farm in its place, the railroads to the Pacific surely are a military necessity.”8
The construction of the transcontinental railroad heated up the long-standing conflict during the Civil War. Alliances of some Plains tribes with the Confederacy angered the federal government. Other tribes took advantage of the dissension among whites to press for reforms or regain their lands.
The Santee Sioux in Minnesota launched an attack on farmsteads during the late summer of 1862, killing more than 350 white men, women, and children, the largest massacre of whites by Indians in U.S. history. The federal government had forced the tribe onto a reservation in 1858, hoping they would become Christian farmers and provide food for themselves. In the meantime, the government would feed the Indians. Corrupt agents and inadequate training to help the Santee transition from hunting to farming worsened conditions on the reservation. The removal of federal troops from the Upper Midwest to the South led to more civilian abuses and severe food shortages among the Santee. An increase in white settlement reduced game and diminished the Santee’s treaty domain. Their supplier, trader Andrew Jackson Myrick, pocketed government money and shrugged, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.”9
Two hundred starving Santee carried out the Great Sioux Uprising, throwing the state’s white population into a state of panic for six weeks. State militiamen found Myrick’s mutilated body, his mouth stuffed with grass. Jane Grey Swisshelm, a leading abolitionist in Minnesota and editor of the Saint Cloud Democrat, demanded, “Every Sioux found on our soil deserves a permanent homestead six feet by two. Shoot the hyenas. Exterminate the wild beasts.” The federal government dispatched General John Pope, recently humiliated by Robert E. Lee at Second Bull Run, and a detachment of Union troops to quell the uprising. Pope vowed to fulfill Swisshelm’s wish: “It is my purpose
utterly to exterminate the Sioux.… They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” Fortunately for Pope, the Sioux were much fewer in number and arms than the Army of Northern Virginia. Thirty-eight Santee were executed the day after Christmas—the largest mass hanging in U.S. history—and several hundred were placed in an internment camp in Davenport, Iowa, where about half died from exposure, disease, or starvation. The camp commander, responding to pressure from the town, allowed curious residents to view the prisoners two hours every day except Sunday. The Federals buried the executed Indians on a sandbar in the Minnesota River. Physicians dug up the bodies and carried them off for use in medical experiments. Government officials used the uprising as an excuse to remove all Indians from Minnesota and place them on a reservation in South Dakota territory.10
The list of condemned Sioux would have been considerably longer had Lincoln not commuted the death sentences of 260 Indians, a decision that infuriated many whites in Minnesota. Lincoln, despite his perfunctory “service” in the Black Hawk War in 1836, had little knowledge of Indian affairs. Caught up in the midst of a horrible civil war, he could not devote much time to the issue. He welcomed Indian delegations to the White House, addressing them with condescension, noting the “great difference between this pale-faced people and their red brethren,” and lecturing that whites were prosperous because they were farmers rather than hunters. Another reason for white success, Lincoln offered with unintended irony, was that “we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”11
Chauncey Cooke was a white boy of sixteen in 1862. Lying about his age, he joined the 25th Wisconsin Infantry. As a member of an abolitionist family, Cooke was eager to fight the Rebels and liberate the slaves. Instead, his first assignment was to track down fugitive Santee Sioux in Minnesota. In late November, he guarded a contingent of seventeen hundred forlorn Santee at Fort Snelling in Minneapolis waiting to be taken to a reservation in South Dakota. Few if any of these Santee had been involved in the raids of the previous summer. “They are going to be shipped West into the Black Hills Country,” Cooke wrote to his parents. “They were weary and broken hearted and desperate at the broken promises of the government. And when they took up arms in desperation for their homes and the graves of their sires, they are called savages and red devils. When we white people do the same things we are written down in history as heroes and patriots. Why this difference?” Cooke did not receive an answer to his question, and few whites in Minnesota shared his sympathies. Most whites in America, including Lincoln, found it difficult to place themselves in the position of the Indians. Unlike Cooke, most did not recognize a common humanity between white and red, any more than between white and black.12
White settlement often occurred in surges, exacerbating conflicts with the Indians over land and water rights. In the Colorado Territory, for example, the discovery of gold in the Pike’s Peak region in 1858 and again in the following year at Clear Creek sent a hundred thousand whites to the region. In an effort to protect both whites and Indians, a treaty in 1861 confined the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes to the Sand Creek reservation in southeastern Colorado. The government’s failure to provide sufficient resources, particularly food, caused the tribes to forage on their old lands, now under white control, creating the same tensions that provoked the uprising in Minnesota.
In April 1864, a white rancher reported that Cheyennes had stolen livestock from his ranch. The state militia, about to be deployed to the South, seized on the incident as an opportunity to stay home and also to teach the Indians a lesson. Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister and militia commander, launched an attack on the Sand Creek reservation, training artillery on the village at point-blank range. Chivington’s soldiers castrated Indian men, some saving the organs for use as tobacco pouches. They sliced open the stomachs of pregnant women, leaving both mother and baby to die. They dragged children from their hiding places and murdered them. The Rocky Mountain News, based in Denver, proclaimed, “All acquitted themselves well. Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” Chivington defended the killing of children with the simple comment, “Nits make lice.”13
Back east, news of the Sand Creek massacre outraged citizens and officials alike. The congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the [Civil] War recessed from deliberations on Union military strategy to investigate the incident. The committee’s report concluded that Chivington “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty.” Colonel Amos Miksch broke ranks with his commander, testifying that on the morning after the battle, he saw a boy still alive in a ditch filled with dead Indians. A major drew his pistol and shot off the top of the boy’s head. Soldiers cut off fingers and ears to get jewelry and collected scalps as trophies. “Next morning after they were dead and stiff,” Miksch related, “these men pulled out the bodies of the squaws and pulled them open in an indecent manner.” Robert Bent, a half-Indian, half-white guide and interpreter, was at Sand Creek along with his brother, George, and offered this testimony to the investigators:
Some thirty or forty squaws and children were hiding in a hole for protection. [They] sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick. She was shot and killed, all the [others] in the hole were killed.… I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed along with their mothers.14
Black Kettle (center) and other Cheyenne chiefs meeting with Major Edward W. Wynkoop (kneeling with hat) at Fort Weld, Colorado, September 1864. As a result of an agreement reached at this meeting, Black Kettle led his people back to the Sand Creek reservation where, in late November, they were massacred. (National Archives and Record Service Administration)
Coloradoans saw it differently. The transfer of militia to the South would have left whites in the territory without protection. Sand Creek was a preemptive strike. Clearing the Indians from the territory had the added benefit of encouraging further white settlement, enhancing Colorado’s application for statehood.
The government responded to Sand Creek by writing a new treaty offering the Cheyenne and Arapaho other reservations. As with previous treaties, federal officials did not enforce its provisions. None of the tribes ever received the land the government promised. When the Civil War ended, it was clear a new federal Indian policy was in order if the benefits of peace—a stable Union, a transcontinental railroad, and a verdant and productive West—were to be realized. Western settlers were single-minded on the best course. The Topeka Weekly Leader articulated western sentiment, describing the Indians as “a set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks as the Lord ever permitted to inflict the earth,… whose immediate and final extermination all men … should pray for.” Easterners, on the other hand, believed in redemption. Indians must cease their nomadic life for their own survival. The government should provide land and education to transform them into productive Christian farmers.15
The West and the East would engage in this dialogue for another two decades before the nation settled on a coherent policy, and even then the implementation wavered between diligence and criminal neglect. The issue confounded even General William T. Sherman, a man rarely at a loss for a decisive strategy. Sherman, fresh from his Civil War exploits, commanded the Division of the Missouri and was responsible for implementing Indian policy in the trans-Mississippi West. He expressed his perplexity to General John M. Schofield, one of his field commanders who requested advice on the proper course of action. “The whole Indian question is in such a snarl, that I am utterly powerless to help you by order or advice.”16
Western settlers wanted Indians out of the way, permanently. They felt that easterners, far removed from the frontier, had no conception of how daily raids on livestock, attacks on emigrant wagon trains, and the persistent fear for safety of women and children shaped the settlers’ lives
. Easterners sought a more humane accommodation of both parties, which many whites in the East believed the reservation system offered. Harper’s expressed the prevailing sentiment in the East in a March 1867 editorial reminding readers that “whites are equally guilty with the Indians.… Any policy which encourages the whites to regard the Indians as mere vermin to be shot at sight, which is substantially the present policy, will only teach the Indians to retaliate.” The magazine called for “the strictest supervision of the whites with the utmost possible protection of the Indians.” The army, as the referee, was too thin to keep the parties separated. Most of the million-man Union army had been mustered out of the service. By 1867, the army had dwindled to fifty-five thousand men, not enough to carry out congressional policies in both the South and the West.17
Easterners viewed the reservation as a compromise between extinction and continued warfare, even if it meant the end of Indian culture, or perhaps because it meant the end of Indian culture. Adopting the white man’s values would make a productive citizen out of the red man, just as freed blacks would discover the benefits of paid farm labor over political and social equality. These were the best futures for inferior races. More bloodshed in the West and the South would occur before all sections of the country reconciled to a mutually acceptable policy toward Indians and blacks. In both cases, the racial assumptions of white Americans played a significant role in the course of events.
The West continued to yield riches that attracted hordes of prospectors and settlers. Five million dollars in gold out of Colorado in 1860; thirty million in silver in 1864 from the Comstock Lode in Nevada; and prospectors in Montana and Idaho struck gold in 1864. The Nevada Territorial Enterprise joined the familiar western chorus in 1865, blaring, “THE INDIANS MUST BE EXTERMINATED.” Identifying the Indians as a major obstacle to progress, the editor declared, “They have thrown themselves in front of the advancing giant, and must be hurled from his path or crushed.”18
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