American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  36. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, 384–96.

  37. Black Elk Speaks, 91–92.

  38. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 293.

  39. Ibid., 294; Black Elk Speaks, 92–95.

  40. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, 405; Black Elk Speaks, 93.

  41. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, 405–08; Sajna, Crazy Horse, 282–89. These accounts differ somewhat, as battle accounts generally do. Sajna’s is the more measured, Ambrose’s the more dramatic. John S. Gray, Custer’s Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), painstakingly reconstructs the battle and the larger campaign. Gregory F. Michno, Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat (Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1997), tells the story of the battle from the side of the winners.

  42. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 296. On this same page, Brown includes a comment by Red Horse, a Sioux council chief, that some of the surrounded whites begged to be taken prisoner. This sounds unlikely, given what the whites knew of Indian treatment of prisoners.

  43. Black Elk Speaks, 104–08.

  44. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 27; Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 469–70.

  45. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 27–28; Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 476; Dale F. Lott, American Bison: A Natural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 74–75.

  46. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 103–06.

  47. Ibid., 108.

  48. Ibid., 110; Lott, American Bison, 114–15; Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 481.

  49. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 112.

  50. Tom McHugh, with the assistance of Victoria Hobson, The Time of the Buffalo (New York: Knopf, 1972), 267; Lott, American Bison, 176.

  51. McHugh, Time of the Buffalo, 265–66.

  52. Lott, American Bison, 177–79.

  53. David A. Dary, The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 118–20.

  54. H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 157–58.

  55. Robert G. Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 310–13.

  56. Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse (New York: Lipper/Viking, 1999), 125–31.

  CHAPTER 7: PROFITS ON THE HOOF

  1. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 203. Pork remained Americans’ favorite meat till the early twentieth century, when, as a result of the events described below, it was overtaken by beef. See Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A History (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 192–93.

  2. David Dary, Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1981), 3–104.

  3. Edward Everett Dale, The Range Cattle Industry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930), 21–26.

  4. Ibid., 31.

  5. Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 29.

  6. Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States, Prepared by the Authority of the National Live Stock Association (1904; New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), 433.

  7. Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; Columbus: Long’s College Book Co., 1951), 40–53; Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1931), 223.

  8. Dary, Cowboy Culture, 211–12; McCoy, Historic Sketches, 138.

  9. McCoy, Historic Sketches, 120–21, 134–41, 202–04. Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Knopf, 1968), places Abilene and Joseph McCoy in context.

  10. Dary, Cowboy Culture, 231.

  11. Dale, Range Cattle Industry, 65; Charles Goodnight’s recollection in Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry, 532–33.

  12. Goodnight in Prose and Poetry, 533.

  13. Ibid., 534.

  14. Ibid., 535.

  15. Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days (1903; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 62–64.

  16. H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 151–55.

  17. James S. Brisbin, The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains (1881; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 13.

  18. Osgood, Day of the Cattleman, 85–86.

  19. Ibid., 100; Dale, Range Cattle Industry, 94.

  20. D. Jerome Tweton, The Marquis de Mores: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1972), has the full story of the eccentric count.

  21. Lincoln A. Lang, Ranching with Roosevelt, by a Companion Rancher (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1926), 116; Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 43–45; Brands, TR, 156–57.

  22. Brisbin, Beef Bonanza, 51–55.

  23. Osgood, Day of the Cattleman, 96.

  24. Brands, TR, 158.

  25. Ibid., 172–73.

  26. Ibid., 189.

  27. Ibid., 186.

  28. Ibid., 206–08; Harold E. Briggs, “The Development and Decline of Open Range Ranching in the Northwest,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 20 (March 1934): 533–35.

  29. Brands, TR, 209.

  30. Osgood, Day of the Cattleman, 190–93; Briggs, “Development and Decline of Open Range Ranching,” 535–36.

  31. Osgood, Day of the Cattleman, 229; Dale, Range Cattle Industry, 111–12.

  CHAPTER 8: TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM

  1. John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River (1875; Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), 103–04.

  2. Manly tells his own story in Death Valley in ’49 (1894; Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1927).

  3. The best biography of Powell is Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954).

  4. Powell, Exploration of the Colorado, 18.

  5. Ibid., 19–23, 32–38, 43, 107, 110, 127–32.

  6. William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993), 437–57.

  7. Ibid., 473.

  8. Ibid., 498–501.

  9. Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890: A Social History of the Northern Plains from the Creation of Kansas and Nebraska to the Admission of the Dakotas (1937; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 129.

  10. The most thorough treatment of the various land laws is Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

  11. Howard Ruede, Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas Homesteader, 1877–78, ed. John Ise (1937; Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983), 12–19.

  12. Ibid., 30–41.

  13. Ibid., 21; Dick, Sod-House Frontier, 232.

  14. Dick, Sod-House Frontier, 232.

  15. Ibid., 234–35.

  16. Ruede, Sod-House Days, 43, 76–77, 85, 99–100.

  17. Ibid., 70, 75–76, 91–92, 110–11.

  18. Ibid., 219.

  19. John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, ed. Wallace Stegner (1878; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 11.

  20. Ibid., 13–36; Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 131–43.

  21. William Allen White, “The Business of a Wheat Farm,” Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1897, 531–32.

  22. Hiram M. Drache, The Day of the Bonanza: A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1964), 3–30.

  23. White, “Business of a Wheat Farm,” 532–48.

  CHAPTER 9: THE TEEMING SHORE

  1. Lawrence J. McCaffery, The Irish Diaspora in America (B
loomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 56–58; Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 133–34; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 144.

  2. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, abridg. Thomas J. Pressly (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 52; Takaki, Different Mirror, 153–54; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 744.

  3. John Francis Maguire, The Irish in America (New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1868), 319.

  4. Takaki, Different Mirror, 151, 158.

  5. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 29.

  6. La Vern J. Rippley, The German-Americans (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 62–83.

  7. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (1901; New York: Macmillan, 1937), 7–19; Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938), 1–16.

  8. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 137–41. L. M. Rubinow, Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia (Washington: United States Department of Commerce and Labor, 1908), provides background.

  9. Antin, Promised Land, 148, 162–79.

  10. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951; Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 48–49.

  11. Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53; Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free Press, 1983), 137–40. The statistics on returns are at best guesses, as various discrepancies between Bodnar and Archdeacon demonstrate.

  12. Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 13–29.

  13. Ibid., 33.

  14. Ibid., 18, 41–49.

  15. Rippley, German-Americans, 93–94.

  16. Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 148–54.

  17. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 72–76.

  18. “A Swedish Emigrant’s Story,” in Wayne Moquin, ed., Makers of America: Natives and Aliens, 1891–1903 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971), 264.

  19. Lee Chew, “The Life Story of a Chinaman,” in Hamilton Holt, ed., The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, as Told by Themselves (1906; New York: Routledge, 1990), 178–79.

  20. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1976), 1:105–08; Archdeacon, Becoming American, 37–38, 55, 114–15.

  21. On the “new immigration” and its impact on American thought, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

  22. Historical Statistics, 1:108.

  23. “A Rescued Chinese Slave Girl,” in Moquin, Makers of America, 115–20.

  24. Lisa See, On Gold Mountain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 17.

  25. George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 117.

  26. “A Rescued Chinese Slave Girl,” 115–20.

  CHAPTER 10: CITIES OF THE PLAIN

  1. Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free Press, 1983), 95, 145–46.

  2. This is the theme of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991).

  3. Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration (1871; New York: Viking Press, 1971), 196–205.

  4. Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 43–44.

  5. Reminiscences of Chicago during the Great Fire, introd. Mabel McIlvane (Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1915), 120–24.

  6. Ibid., 92–106.

  7. Ibid., 106–07, 124–25.

  8. Colbert and Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 8–10.

  9. Ibid., 252; Sawislak, Smoldering City, 49–59.

  10. A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 3 vols. (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Company, 1886), 2:61–62.

  11. Sawislak, Smoldering City, 183.

  12. Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 109.

  13. Ibid., 112–14.

  14. Ibid., 123, 128.

  15. Ibid., 119.

  16. Ibid., 133–35.

  17. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Crown, 2003), 18–28; Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 314–19.

  18. James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864–1914 (1918; New York: Arno Press, 1970), 7–8.

  19. Ibid., 88–91; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 932.

  20. Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 99.

  21. Ibid., 70–85; New York Times, Feb. 3, 1872.

  22. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

  23. David McCullough, The Great Bridge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 26–27, 42, 90.

  24. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 935.

  25. McCullough, Great Bridge, 313–17; New York Times, Aug. 26, 1876.

  26. New York Times, May 25, 1883.

  27. Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress (online); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Farming,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04), 7:154; Herman Melville, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852; Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 9; Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869–1930) (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 13.

  28. Hawes, New York, New York, 5–9.

  29. The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Postwar Years, 1865–1875, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 339.

  30. Hawes, New York, New York, 35–36.

  31. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 970.

  32. Hawes, New York, New York, 15.

  33. New York Times, May 27, 1883.

  34. New York Times, Feb. 11, 1897; Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–2.

  CHAPTER 11: BELOW THE EL

  1. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 185–88.

  2. Ibid., 202–05.

  3. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (1901; New York: Macmillan, 1937), 21–23.

  4. Ibid., 24–63.

  5. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 746–47.

  6. Ibid., 789, 1173. Ford Herbert MacGregor, Tenement House Legislation, State and Local (Madison: Wisconsin Library Commission, 1909), describes other tenement laws. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), assesses what the New York legislation led to.

  7. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, ed. David Leviatin (1890; Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 59, 236.

  8. Ibid., 77–91, 96–98.

  9. Lisa See, On Gold Mountai
n (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 45; Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 55.

  10. Lee Chew, “The Life Story of a Chinaman,” in Hamilton Holt, ed., The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, as Told by Themselves (1906; New York: Routledge, 1990), 181–85.

  11. Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 60–61.

  12. Ibid., 73.

  13. Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds., A History of the Chinese in California (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), 64–69.

  14. Ibid.; Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 102–03; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 67–68.

  15. Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 80–82.

  16. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 12–23.

  17. Ibid., 196. An overview of laws regarding homosexual activity in the late nineteenth century can be found in Vern L. Bullough, Homosexuality: A History (New York: New American Library, 1979), 43–45.

  18. Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.: A Documentary (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 38–39.

  19. Chauncey, Gay New York, 181.

  CHAPTER 12: SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

  1. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, in Louis Auchincloss, ed., Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Library of America, 2004), 2:310.

  2. H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 17.

  3. Kenneth D. Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 11–29; Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977), 90–93.

  4. New York Times, Sept. 11, 1863.

  5. Alexander B. Callow Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 209–13.

  6. George William Curtis, Other Essays from the Easy Chair (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), 49.