The American West

by Robert V Hine

  In 1873, the tenth anniversary of the Homestead Act, the federal government circulated a pamphlet boasting that the law had “prevented large capitalists from absorbing great tracts of the public domain.” That was a barefaced lie. The Republican Congress had refused to enact limitations on the amount of public land individuals could acquire, and thus the Homestead Act failed to realize reformers’ hopes of forestalling land monopoly in the West. Speculators were able to amass large holdings by purchase from railroads or the states, both only too happy to lower prices for big buyers. As a result, speculators grabbed the best farming land in the West before it was available to homesteaders. Almost all the remaining land was far from rail lines.21

  Then there were the notorious strategies of unscrupulous men devised to defraud the government and frustrate the intentions of the legislation. “Dummy” homestead entries became so common that they were standing jokes in late nineteenth-century America. Working at the bidding of speculators, hired men set up tiny prefabricated shacks on 160-acre quarter-sections to satisfy the minimum legal requirements of “improvement,” paid the minimum cash price after the required six months of residence, and then signed the deed over to their employers. Cattlemen and lumbermen were able to acquire tens of thousands of acres by using such methods. In one shocking episode, uncovered by federal investigators at the turn of the century, the California Redwood Company rounded up foreign sailors in San Francisco and marched them, first to the courthouse to file citizenship papers, then to the land office to take out timber claims, then to a notary public to sign blank deeds transferring title to the company, and finally to paymasters who gave them fifty dollars. “Immense tracts of the most valuable timber land,” wrote the commissioner of the General Land Office in 1901, “have become the property of a few individuals and corporations.” The engrossment of land may have been more prevalent after the Homestead Act than before.22

  Homesteader fraud: a house “twelve by fourteen.” From Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi . . . (New York, 1867).

  Meanwhile, nearly half of all genuine homesteaders failed to patent or “prove up” their claims. The land may have been free, but the cost of equipment, seed, and supplies for the first year or two was often more than they could manage. Others found themselves unable to stick it out in isolated locations for the required residency period, while still others failed to make their acres pay commercially because of the poor quality of their land or the distance to the railroad. Despite the Homestead Act, the majority of western farmers became tenants on land owned by someone else. The homestead program, supporter George Washington Julian lamented in 1879, had turned out to be “a cruel mockery.”23

  . . .

  Given all the graft, lies, nostalgia, miscalculations, and delusions that accompanied industrial colonization, it’s a wonder that large-scale corporate capitalism survived in the West at all, much less remade the place like a colossus. Perhaps that’s the key. The scale of change grew with the scope of malfeasance, inefficiency, and errors. For every successful venture, hundreds of businesses collapsed in the nineteenth-century West. The region filled with gleaming monuments and crumbling ruins simultaneously; both accelerated the pace of change and widened industrial capitalism’s footprint. The construction of the transcontinental railroads and the great mines of the West epitomized the epic scale of some industrial undertakings.

  Temporary and permanent bridges at Green River, Wyoming. Photograph by A. J. Russell, c. 1869. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The Union Pacific and Central Pacific began their frantic race to see which could build the fastest, get the largest subsidy, and engross most of the future commerce in 1865. Except for winters, when rough weather forced the suspension of construction, there were at least twenty thousand men working constantly to build what Oakes Ames, without exaggeration, called “the greatest public work of this century.” Supervising the project for the Union Pacific were the Casement brothers, sons of immigrant parents and experienced railroad contractors, though they were only in their thirties. Jack stood five feet, four inches tall, his brother Dan “five feet nothing,” but both were hard bosses who drove their workers demonically. American legend has it that the majority of those workers were Irish, and for the most part they were, although there were also ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, Mexicans, and former African American slaves as well.24

  At first, the Central Pacific of California had a harder time finding workers. The Gold Rush hordes had rushed elsewhere, and labor in California was scarce and expensive. Charles Crocker considered importing Mexicans but instead decided to give the abundant Chinese population a try. “I will not boss Chinese!” announced the company’s superintendent of construction. “Who said laborers had to be white to build railroads?” Crocker shot back. The Chinese soon quelled all such questions with their persistence, diligence, and courage, and they became the workers of choice. “Wherever we put them we found them good,” wrote Crocker, “and they worked themselves into our favor to such an extent that if we found we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to put on the Chinese at once.” Along some of the nearly impassable gorges of the Sierras, Chinese workers chipped away at solid granite walls with claw hammers, carrying off the rock by the basket load—a job so difficult that in spite of their numbers they were able to average only eight inches per day. They became expert in handling the nitroglycerin used to blast through the mountains, although many died in the inevitable accidents. By 1867 Crocker was paying labor contractors for twelve thousand Chinese laborers, 90 percent of his workforce.25

  Chinese worker on the Central Pacific Railroad near Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada. Stereo-graph by Alfred A. Hart, c. 1868. Library of Congress.

  The Casement brothers perfected a highly efficient division of labor with not a single motion wasted. Three strokes to the spike, ten spikes to the rail, four hundred rails to the mile—they pushed the men to quicken the pace, offering time and a half for each mile-and-a-half day, double time for two. At the peak of construction in 1868 and 1869, the workers were whipped into a frenzy of six to seven miles of track daily. The Central Pacific, too, once it had blasted through the Sierras and reached the Nevada deserts, began to calculate its daily distance in multiple miles. Indeed, on one remarkable day in early 1869, the Chinese workers established a world record by laying 26,456 feet of track—more than ten miles—in a single twelve-hour period.

  East and West join at the laying of the last rail. Photograph by A. J. Russell, 1869. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The symbolic joining of the rails was enacted on May 10, 1869. Dignitaries from both coasts joined railroad workers and a few reporters for the ceremony. A gang of Chinese workers laid the last few rails and drove all but the last spike, then were hustled off so as not to appear in the official photographs. As the band played and the crowd cheered, Leland Stanford came forward and set in place an eighteen-ounce golden spike, crowned with a large gold nugget. A telegraph wire was attached to the spike and another to the hammer in Stanford’s hand, so that on impact the news would flash to a waiting world. Stanford and then Durant took a swing—both missed. The telegraph operator tapped out “done.”26

  But the work was not done. The race between the companies had taken precedence over careful construction. “I am very glad to learn that you have made up your mind to go for quantity of road instead of quality,” Huntington had written to Crocker in 1868. The result was shoddy work. Ballasts had been improperly laid and roadbeds collapsed; curves had been engineered too sharply and trains derailed. It would cost nearly ten million dollars to correct construction mistakes. As crews tore up railroad sections to make them right, the transcontinental line became both a ruin and a marvel.27

  . . .

  By the 1870s the mining industry throughout the Far West had reached economies of scale on par with the railroads. The industry was concentrated in the hands of a wealthy elite. Some of t
hese bonanza kings had clawed their way up from the diggings. George Hearst, father of the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, crossed the plains on foot in 1850 and within a few years had made a pile in placer and quartz mining. In 1859 he invested in the Comstock Lode and laid the foundation for an even greater fortune. “If you’re ever inclined to think that there’s no such thing as luck,” Hearst once remarked, “just think of me.” In 1877 Hearst and his partner purchased the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills and, by gradually buying up the claims of competing and adjoining miners, turned their property into the most fabulous of all western gold mines. More frequently capital came from investors who had never lifted a shovel. Eastern and British capitalists loaned huge sums to western bankers who in turn invested in western mining. William Ralston of the Bank of California financed the integration of mines, mills, smelters, railroads, and lumber companies on the Comstock Lode. It was classic American capitalism: aggressive, high-risk, and spectacular.28

  Western miners were laboring for eastern corporations. “The situation is much different from what we in Denmark imagined,” a journalist reported home to a newspaper in Copenhagen. “When we speak of a gold miner, we mean a kind of King Midas who simply has to thrust his spade into the ground to find a nugget. But that is not how it is. A gold miner is a common mine worker who labors for a company.” Within a few decades, the most fabulous profits were in the mining of base metals rather than precious ones. After a brief moment as a gold and silver mining center, the Montana town of Butte became the mother of all western copper mining—“The Richest Hill on Earth,” in the phrase of local promoters. At the turn of the century, there were copper strikes at such places as Globe and Bisbee in southern Arizona and at the Bingham open-pit mine near Salt Lake City—which jokesters lampooned as “The Richest Hole on Earth.” These operations were in the hands of large mining corporations with names like Kennecott, Phelps-Dodge, and Anaconda. By the eve of World War I, the West was producing 90 percent of the nation’s copper as well as most of its lead and other heavy metals. Work in these hard-rock mines was extremely dangerous. One investigation of Butte’s deepest shaft measured the air temperature at 107 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity at 100 percent. The heat and humidity magnified the stench of human sweat, excrement, blasting powder, rotting food, and tobacco. Men sometimes dropped dead from such conditions. The accident rate was incredibly high. Western mining was the most hazardous industry in the nation.29

  Smelter at Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Photograph by W. R. Cross, 1891. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Western farmers breathed fresher air than miners, but they too discovered industrial gigantism. Mechanization accelerated following the Civil War. Steel replaced wood and iron in the manufacture of plows; new riding plows allowed farmers to sit and drive their teams; and soon horses were pulling gang plows, which turned over several rows simultaneously. Horsepower was also put to use with new hay mowing, raking, and loading machines. A ton of hay could be loaded from the field in just minutes. The McCormick automatic self-rake reaper of 1867, called “Old Reliable,” cut wheat and swept it aside for binding. It was not long before an inventive westerner perfected an automatic binder that gathered the shocks, tied them with a length of twine, and kicked them free. Power threshers appeared, the early ones using horsepower, later models driven by coal-fired steam boilers. In 1880 harvesting and threshing were joined in the “combine” machine, and within a few years, giant steam combines were producing up to eighteen hundred sacks of grain each day. By the end of the century, wheat farming was eighteen times more productive than it had been before the Civil War.

  Combined reaper-thresher, pulled by thirty horses, harvesting wheat in eastern Oregon. Photograph by W. A. Raymond, c. 1903. Library of Congress.

  Mechanization made possible the giant bonanza farms of the northern plains and the great Central Valley of California. Many of these farms grew from the corporate design of the railroads. After the Panic of 1873, the Northern Pacific attempted to fend off bankruptcy by offering its far-flung acres in exchange for its own depreciated securities. Within two years, the railroad had sold off 483,000 acres in the Red River valley of Dakota Territory at five dollars an acre, with just twenty-three buyers accounting for two-thirds of the acreage. They divided the land according to the most modern principles of efficient production and hired the best foremen and managers they could find. The most famous of the bonanza farms was the thirty-four thousand acres a few miles west of Fargo managed by Oliver Dalrymple, an experienced grain farmer from Minnesota. One of Dalrymple’s rippling wheat fields stretched for thirteen thousand unbroken acres. Separate gangs working on distant corners of the farm might not see one another for the entire season. In California, where huge estates were carved from the land grants of the Central Pacific, the largest farms extended over more than sixty-six thousand acres and produced more than a million bushels annually. By 1880 California had become the biggest wheat-producing state in the nation. Whether in the Dakotas or in the San Joaquin valley, these farms embodied the vital components of industrial capitalism—the application of machinery to mass production, absentee ownership, professional management specialization, and proletarian labor.

  . . .

  Combines and megafarms signaled the radical newness that accompanied industrial colonization. The onslaught of machines, international workforces, and global capitalism engulfed western environments and people. The new suffocated the old, breaking time into before and after, glowing past and grim future. Still, industrialization did not bring change to the West: the place had been changing all along. Global capitalism arrived centuries before the railroads, so too technological innovation. The bison-hunting nomads and pastoral horse-herders had demonstrated their adaptive genius, spurring new technologies to military and market dominance. Epidemic diseases disrupted and reshuffled human populations, while earlier colonizers melded with natives creating new groups like the métis and mestizos. Industrial colonization amplified and accelerated change, pushing some western species and communities over the brink. The wreckage of modernization was extreme, quick, and stunning, as were the survival maneuvers of the people that rode the avalanche to worlds undreamed of before the tractors and factories crashed down on them.

  The Indians of California had endured Franciscan missionaries, international kingdom-makers, and American interlopers. Though disease had thinned their ranks, they responded to colonization through a mixture of strategies covering the gamut from violent resistance and relocation to Christianization and wage labor. No strangers to abrupt and dramatic change, the Miwoks and Maidus near John Sutter’s fort joined the rush to the goldfields as soon as the news reached them. An abusive employer who paid a pittance, Sutter cursed his former workers who fled his dollars that could no longer “bring them to work.” The Gold Rush ruined Sutter and his enterprise on the Sacramento. His Indian workers were joined by hundreds of other Native Americans in the rush to the mines. When California’s territorial governor toured the diggings in the summer of 1848, he found four thousand miners at work, “of whom more than half were Indians.” Many labored for Anglo and Mexican contractors. “A few men who are working 30 to 40 Indians are laying up to $1000 to $2000 a week,” American consul Thomas O. Larkin wrote in July. Other Indians mined for themselves or for their communities. A Chilean miner came across a group of Miwoks collectively working a stream in the Sierras. “The men dug and gave the mud to the children, who then carried it in baskets to the women.” Panning with “grass baskets of the most perfect construction,” the women carefully separated the gold and then tied up small portions in bits of rag. These they used “to trade with, just as if they were money.”30

  Indian mining came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the forty-niners. Suddenly Indian homelands were overrun by tens of thousands of Americans. Violence broke out immediately. In one typical incident in early 1849, a group of Oregon prospectors on the American River shot up a
Maidu village, raping women and killing several men. The outraged Indians retaliated by ambushing and killing five of the miners, and in return the Oregonians attacked an unconnected village, murdering twelve people, taking others captive, and then executing them. There were dozens of similar incidents. The Indians “could not understand why they should be murdered, robbed, and hunted down in this way, without any other pretense or provocation other than the color of their skin,” traveler J. Ross Browne wrote sympathetically. It “never occurred to them that they were suffering for the great cause of civilization, which, in the natural course of things, must exterminate Indians.”31

  Miners drove the natives into the barren high Sierras, depriving them of their food supplies and forcing them to raid the livestock of valley ranchers to survive. Ranchers retaliated with attacks on Indian retreats in the mountains. Americans, wrote one federal official, “value the life of an Indian just as they do that of a cay-ota or a wolf, and embrace every occasion to shoot [them] down.” Federal Indian agents charged with protecting the Indians found themselves powerless to stop the carnage. When one conscientious agent attempted to file charges against a group of murdering miners, the United States attorney in San Francisco refused to act, saying that “he was not aware of the existence of any law that would apply” and suggested turning the matter over to local authorities. But the mob’s leader had recently been elected county judge, and the agent questioned whether it would be “worth while to prosecute him in his own county.”32