As with the disputed election of 2000, there was controversy over whether to accept the official returns certified by the governor and the state secretary of state or to accept other unsanctioned returns. The Democrats claimed Florida had been stolen through Republican fraud, but historian James MacPherson challenges such a contention. Voting on party lines, the commission accepted the official certified returns, and Florida went to Hayes. Similar 8-to-7 votes soon yielded to Hayes the Louisiana and South Carolina electors.
While these maneuvers were occurring, representatives from Hayes and Tilden met at Washington’s Wormley Hotel to settle the election. This backstage bargain, which many historians view as having produced the Compromise of 1877, was overblown. Hayes had already made it clear he would ensure the retention of the Democratic governor of Louisiana in return for a pledge on freedmen’s rights; withdraw the remaining federal troops from Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina; and put Southerners in the cabinet. Even without a bargain, the deal was sealed, and Hayes mollified Democrats and Southerners enough to avert violence. Nevertheless, historians tout the agreement at the Wormley Hotel on February 26, 1877, as the last great sectional compromise.
On March 4, 1877—four months after the election—the nation had its new president. Hayes upheld his promise, naming a Democrat, David Key of Tennessee, as postmaster general (which remained, it should be noted, a prize political plum). The circumstances of his victory dictated that Hayes faced almost insurmountable odds against achieving much. He had not only a divided country, but also a divided party and a divided Congress. Although the Senate remained in Republican hands, the House had gone back to the Democrats in 1874 as a response to the Panic of 1873. His administration had a late start, thanks to the Tilden challenge, making it midsummer before the government even began to fill its primary positions. But most damaging, Hayes had stated that he would not run for a second term. Only through his insistence on a unified cabinet and an unwillingness to be bullied by the House did Hayes achieve as much as he did.
Protection of blacks by the bayonet in the South had run its course, and with Indian troubles on the frontier, the army was stretched too thin to keep large numbers of troops in the South as civil-rights enforcers. Withdrawal of federal troops commenced within a month, driven in part by pragmatism and in part by hope—hope that the Southerners would understand that they had entered a new era. Instead, the close election and the subsequent compromise meant that the South now acted as if it had defeated the North’s legislation, if not her armies.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lighting Out for the Territories, 1861–90
Civilizing a Wilderness
Young Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain) gave up his brief career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot in 1861, setting out for the Nevada Territory aboard a stagecoach. Having tried his hand at gold and silver mining, he turned to newspaper work and a promising career as a writer. Clemens, in fact, moved west to escape the Civil War, a conflict in which he had served briefly and without distinction as a Confederate militiaman. He had no appetite for the kind of violence and devastation that consumed his fellow Missourians. Like his later literary character, Huckleberry Finn, Sam Clemens “lit out for the Territories.”1
Many had gone before him, and many more followed. The period of manifest destiny, followed quickly by the Mormon exodus and the California Gold Rush of 1849, set the stage for a half century of migration by eastern Americans onto and across the Great Plains. Clemens was preceded by tens of thousands of anonymous fur trappers, cowboys, prostitutes, loggers, fishermen, farmers, miners, teachers, entertainers, soldiers, government officials, and business entrepreneurs, in addition to Mormons, Jesuits, Methodists, and other missionaries. In the 1860s, while the Civil War raged “back east,” Clemens and a new generation headed west.2
In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that this generation had succeeded so well that the American frontier had at last come to an end. In his brilliant essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner traced the course of the westward movement from Revolutionary times across the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. He pointed to the 1890 census report stating matter-of-factly that western America had achieved a density of population that rendered the term “frontier” inapplicable.3 Turner undoubtedly portrayed America’s western experience as unique—but how? Was Turner’s thesis right?
Turner used the 1890 census report as a watershed to assess the impact of the frontier experience on the American people. He rejected the idea that Europeans had molded American culture and argued that it was the American frontier experience that had created a unique American civilization, providing a safety valve for the release of societal pressures. He ascribed to the West and westerners specific character traits, most of them positive, but some unsavory. Arguing that the West made Americans democratic, egalitarian, nationalistic, pragmatic, and adaptive, Turner also contended that frontier life made them coarse, violent, anti-intellectual, and wasteful of natural resources. Yet even as he wrote, lumbermen like Frederick Weyerhaeuser, railroaders like James J. Hill, and meat packers like Gustavus Swift had begun taking extraordinary measures to preserve the environment. And where Turner saw a violent, often barbaric West, the so-called Wild West may have been less violent in many respects than modern society.
Most western men were neither John Wayne types looking for a fight nor helpless citizens waiting for a frontier hero to rescue them. In regions where judges rode a circuit and came to town, with any luck, once a month, there naturally existed a tendency to take law into one’s own hands. Where every animal had its claw, horn, tooth, or sting—many of them potentially fatal—and where every human had an incentive to jump a claim, steal livestock, or become offended at the slightest insult, a necessary violence literally went with the territory. Nor was the West a Marxist model of class struggle: for every saloon brawl that started over “class interests,” fifty began over simple insults or alcohol.
On the other hand, frontier individualism was not ubiquitous, and westerners could cooperate when necessary. Towns first united to bring the cattlemen in, then passed laws to keep them out; then cattlemen joined the townspeople to keep the sheepmen out; then ranchers and farmers of all types sought to keep heavy industry out. Nor were these patterns unique: a century later it was the same story: heavy industry sought to keep computers and electronics out. Those who settled the West for better and, occasionally, for worse, tamed a wild frontier. They left a legacy of romantic accomplishment that even to the present contains important messages and images for Americans.
Time Line
1843:
First large Oregon Trail wagon train
1846–47:
Mormon exodus to Utah
1848:
Mexican War ends; New Mexico Territory, California ceded to United States
1849:
Gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California Gold Rush begins
1850:
Compromise of 1850 admits California as a state
1853:
Gadsden Purchase completes map of lower continental United States
1857:
Butterfield Overland Stage provides passenger and mail route to California
1859:
Comstock Lode discovered
1860:
Pony Express begins operations
1861:
Civil War begins
1862:
Homestead Act; Morrill Act; Plains Indian wars begin
1864:
Sand Creek massacre
1865–85:
Cattle Kingdom reaches its apex
1866:
Fetterman massacre
1867:
Grange movement begins
1869:
Transcontinental railroads join at Promontory, Utah
1876:
Custer massacre
1882:
Edmunds Act
1885:
Chief Joseph
and Nez Percé surrender
1887:
Dawes Severalty Act
1890:
Wounded Knee massacre
1893:
Frederick Jackson Turner declares frontier closed
1896:
Alaskan gold rush
Wagon Trains, Stagecoaches, and Steamboats
Before the completion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad in 1869, westbound pioneers continued to use varied means of transport.4 Thousands drove wagons over well-worn, often muddy trails and helped break in some new ones. An era of private road building in the early eastern frontier areas gave way to a willingness to use the state and national government to improve transportation.5 Pony Express riders and horsemen traversed these trails, and travelers booked passage on stagecoaches. Members of the famed Mormon handcart brigades literally walked the trail west, pushing their belongings in front of them. Meanwhile, sailboats and steam-powered ocean vessels brought immigrants to the West via the coast of South America and hard-working steamboats navigated rivers. Decades after the coming of the railroad, nearly all of the above routes and means of transport endured in one form or another.
Although the settlers of the 1830s still used muskets, increasingly the Kentucky long rifle had come into use, extending range and accuracy. After the Civil War, breech-loading Sharps, Spencer, Winchester, and Remington rifles (with repeating action) were available. The first repeaters had appeared in the Civil War, and with minimal practice a man or woman could squeeze off a dozen shots in less than thirty seconds. Many men carried sidearms—usually a Colt revolver—and knives, or tomahawks, or other weapons were always handy in case of snakes or predators.6 When combined with circled wagons for defense, settlers had a good chance of warding off Indian attacks with such weapons.7
The route north of the North Platte River became the Mormon Trail, blazed by the Mormon exodus to Utah (1846–47). Army engineers built or improved upon additional trails throughout the West, such as the Bozeman Trail, a supply route stretching north from Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming to the Montana country. In Washington Territory the army built the 624-mile Mullan Road (named for its surveyor, Lieutenant John Mullan) between 1859 and 1862. Connecting Fort Benton, the head of Missouri River steamboat navigation, to Fort Walla Walla, near the navigable lower Columbia River, the Mullan Road was cut by the army in order to transport troops and supplies. Soon, however, hundreds of miners, missionaries, entrepreneurs, and farmer immigrants cluttered the trail, turning it into a vital route for 1860s gold seekers bound for mines in the present-day states of Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
Stagecoaches were vital common carriers—commercial transporters of mail, freight, and passengers. Like many western businesses, stagecoach companies began small and then earned enough capital to become larger firms. Eastern coach companies begun by Henry Wells (who ran a string of speech therapy schools in New York), John Butterfield, and William Fargo became the basis of the famous modern firms American Express and Wells Fargo. The Butterfield line opened its southern route running through Texas to California in 1857.8 In 1860 the California Stage Company ran the seven-hundred-mile route between Portland, Oregon, and Sacramento, California, in an impressive six days. Beginning in 1852, Wells, Fargo & Company, California Stage’s famed competitor, offered service out of San Francisco to most of the West’s mining districts. In 1862, Ben Holladay, the “Stagecoach King,” briefly challenged Wells and Fargo before selling out to them in 1866, and then founded the Oregon Central Railroad. For a brief moment, between the stagecoaches and the telegraph, the Pony Express filled the gap for rapid delivery of mail.
Steamboats ran the upper Missouri, Sacramento, lower Columbia, and other western rivers throughout the years before the Civil War. From 1850 to 1860 a dozen small competitors vied to haul miners and supplies along the Columbia and Snake rivers to Lewiston, in present-day Idaho. Their tough low-draft steamers symbolized a rough and ready era of independent rivermen who navigated around rocks, shoals, and numerous dangerous drift logs in swift currents, rapids, and falls. In 1860 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company bought them all out, controlling the trade (with twenty-six steamers) until 1880.9 During this time the company built the Northwest’s first railroad track, a mere six miles, to facilitate transshipment of steamboat cargoes around the Celilo Falls of the Columbia River. This little stretch of track marked the tender beginning of the western stretch of what would become the Northern Pacific Railroad.
The Iron Horse Races West
American railroads had already started to undercut prices in river traffic by the Civil War. Railroads stretched into Missouri and Wisconsin, and construction continued westward after the war. Most students of history are familiar with the subsidized transcontinental railroads that received millions of acres of federal land to support their construction. The other side of the story, however, is that hundreds of local train lines and two transcontinentals—the Great Northern and the Milwaukee Railroad—were funded and built purely with private capital. So, when the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads lobbied Congress after the Civil War, contending that only government could help them complete their transcontinentals, they were wrong. James J. Hill soon built a more efficient competing line without government aid, and so too did the owners of the Milwaukee Railroad. Private roads not only survived panics when subsidized roads failed, but the owners of unsubsidized lines also spent their own funds to relocate farmers (future customers) along their routes, to invest in agricultural research and livestock breeding, and to ensure that the lines, once completed, would remain healthy. And, it is worth noting, the private companies—on their own—arrived at a national railroad track width standard without any involvement of government, universally agreeing to the 4-foot-8.5-inch standard by 1886.10
Transcontinentals provided countless benefits, ending the isolation of many westerners and providing them with “metropolitan corridors.” Life was better with easier travel for visiting friends and relatives, and leisure destinations as well as for conducting business. In thousands of western towns, the railroad station became the hub of community life, where locals eagerly awaited the daily arrival of freight and passengers, and the railroad’s telegraph office became a vital link to the outside. Before radio, westerners gathered around railroad telegraphers to learn presidential election results, international news, and even the scores of football and World Series games. Railroads also contributed to the rise of America’s national parks as America’s first generation of ecotourists booked passage aboard special spur lines created by the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Southern Pacific railroads to tour Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon National Parks. Railroad entrepreneurs like Henry Villard, in fact, plotted the routes of their lines to showcase the West’s majesty, and when buffalo became a major attraction at Yellowstone Park, park officials attempted to ensure that passengers could see the buffalo herds from the train.11
The Natural Resources Frontier
Trends seen in the evolution of natural resource extraction industries—fur, fish, ore, timber, ranching, and agriculture—actually parallel several of the patterns of the stagecoach, steamboat, and transcontinental railroad industries. Entrepreneurs tended to start out small, but larger concerns soon came to dominate, largely because technology and capital were necessary to efficiently harvest natural resources. An important result of this efficiency, however, was a tendency to overharvest in the short term—a failure to conserve natural resources—which quickly produced higher prices and efforts to moderate extraction in the longer term.
Although historians have been quick to blame this environmental waste and destruction on the forces of free-market capitalism, once again the picture is not so clear.12 In opposition to laissez-faire principles, the federal government often played a major role in leasing or giving federal land to miners, loggers, farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, distorting incentives by making resources cheap that, had the market had its way, would have come
at a much higher cost.13 Then, as today, federal and state governments, not market forces, regulated many natural resource extraction industries and often did so poorly, actually undercutting market forces that would have adjusted prices and, therefore, supply. Contrary to the “capitalist menace” view of the environment and extraction-related industries, it was the existence of so much public land—the absence of private property—that was the main detriment to responsible stewardship of western natural resources.14
As we have seen, fur trappers were the first to overharvest public lands. The American Fur Company, which flourished under the often heavy-handed direction of John Jacob Astor, began diversifying into emerging industries.15 Before the British retreated to the forty-ninth parallel in 1846, the Hudson’s Bay Company was harvesting, drying, and pickling western salmon for export to Europe. Following the Civil War, American entrepreneurs cashed in on the revolutionary changes brought by the invention of the canning process. Canned fish, especially salmon, reaped spectacular profits for large concerns like Hapgood, Hume and Company, which employed thousands of Scandinavian immigrant fishermen and Chinese cannery workers. Like the fur trappers, fishermen overharvested the public waterways; as early as 1877, trap and net fishing had interrupted and stifled salmon spawning. At the mouth of some western rivers, the armada of fishing boats was so thick during the salmon spawning season that fishermen could literally walk from deck to deck over the hundreds of fishing boats; industry technology was so efficient that it threatened its own long-term survival.
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