The American West

by Robert V Hine

  “Many of our neighbors are true backwoodsmen, always fond of moving,” John Woods of southern Illinois noted in 1820. Among these “extensive travelers, to have resided in three or four states, and several places in each state, it is not uncommon.” His observation is borne out by the migration histories of the residents of Sugar Creek, a pioneer community in central Illinois founded in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Eighty percent of arriving families had made at least one previous move across state lines, 35 percent two or more. Similarly, eight in ten of the families who traveled the Overland Trail to Oregon and California had already made at least one interstate move, many had made several, and a substantial minority had been almost continuously in motion.1

  “New Country Pioneers.” Lithograph by Augustus Kollner, 1858. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  “Everything shifts under your eye,” declared frontier minister Timothy Flint. People came and went, blurring the line between neighbor and stranger. Movement led to an “instability of connexions.” But Americans connected nonetheless. Considerably more social continuity existed than the raw statistics of mobility suggested. In the Sugar Creek community, for example, a quarter of the early settlers were what western writer Wallace Stegner calls “stickers,” laying down roots and living out the rest of their lives in the area. Three-quarters of their children and grandchildren also made permanent homes in the community, most marrying the descendants of other sticker families. Quietly, people wove kinship connections and consolidated their lands. By 1860, four decades after its founding, community life in Sugar Creek was dominated by interlinked lineages of homebodies.2

  The riddle of community in the American West is solved by recognizing the coexistence of both the movers, a transient majority of settlers who farmed, herded, and mined before pushing on, and the minority of men and women who persisted in the area, intermarried, and passed inheritances of stories, property, and affiliations—to homes, towns, and regions—to their children. Diverse communities formed in the modern American West, and groups counteracted the shattering effects of industrial colonization by making friends, families, and homes.

  . . .

  The big open of the trans-Mississippi West could leave transplants feeling empty, especially rural women. Hamlin Garland, raised on an Iowa homestead, looked upon his graying, wrinkled mother, old long before her time, and thought back over her frontier life. “My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which scattered our family, and rebellion toward my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a slave.”3

  It was social isolation, however, not movement per se, that took the greatest toll on settler women. On earlier frontiers the distance between farms had been an obstacle to community, but in the trans-Mississippi West it was often an overwhelming problem. “There were few settlers in the valley at that time,” one woman recalled of her early years in west Texas, “and it would be two or three months at a time that Mother and I would not see another white woman.” The quotation suggests how race also kept women apart. Indian, Hispanic, and black women didn’t belong in this daughter’s social circle. “I feel quite lonesome and solitary,” one woman confided to her diary. “My spirits are depressed. I have very little female society.” Journalist Eugene Virgil Smalley was appalled by the isolation of homesteaders on the northern plains in the 1890s: “Each family must live mainly to itself, and life, shut up in the little wooden farmhouses, cannot well be very cheerful.” The loneliness affected the children, too. “Mamma, will we always have to live here?” asked a young boy of southwestern Kansas. Yes, replied the mother, sending the boy over the edge of despair. “And will we have to die here, too?”4

  Communities didn’t form spontaneously. Like everything else on a settlement frontier, they required strenuous labor. Communities drew energy from connections forged through work, play, education, and religion. Neighbors exchanged work and participated in barn raisings and harvests, women sewed and quilted together, and men worked on road crews, played on local baseball teams, or joined voluntary organizations. One of the community tasks, strikingly consistent across frontier America, was organizing a school. Teachers were most frequently young women, one of the few occupations open to them. Doris Elder Butler of Oregon remembered that “when a girl finished high school, if she had no other definite plans”—getting married, she meant—“it was expected that she would go out into the country to teach school, and it seemed that everyone even remotely concerned took it for granted that I would follow that custom.” She did. Schoolmarms not only instructed the children but played a role as community organizers. The one-room schoolhouse often did joint duty as a community center.5

  Western farm woman. Photograph by Hugh M. Neighbour, c. 1910. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Groups of like-minded families might use the schoolhouse as a meeting place for religious services. Little ecumenical congregations formed, bringing together people of various Protestant views, and sometimes they even included Catholics. Eventually the most popular denominations founded churches of their own. Building and running churches brought experience in getting things done, and common beliefs and rituals helped to build sustaining bonds of affections. Religion was the first and most effective tool available to rural community builders.

  Getting ministers out to these small and distant congregations was a constant struggle. In 1801 the two largest religious organizations in the country, the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, joined forces in a “Plan of Union” to coordinate the western expansion of their churches. But their seminaries were never able to supply the demand for ministers in the rapidly growing West, and their missionaries were easily scandalized by the hard-drinking, polyamorous, and cross-cultural fur-trading communities. They damned more than they converted. Other sects were more adaptable, in their tactics if not their moral preferences. Although the Baptists believed in an educated ministry, they hardly considered a college degree a prerequisite to godliness, and the church authorized the use of untrained and unsalaried lay preachers. This army of organizers founded hundreds of Baptist congregations throughout the West. The Methodists were also particularly effective. Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in the United States, invented the institution of the circuit rider, a preacher who sallied forth with his Bible to do battle with frontier irreligion and isolation. As a result, the Methodists became the fastest-growing denomination of the early Republic, expanding from fewer than a thousand members at the time of the Revolution to more than a quarter-million by the Civil War.

  Teacher and students pose in front of their sod schoolhouse, Woods County, Oklahoma, c. 1895. National Archives.

  The conversion of the West depended on the work of such mobile preachers, itinerants who understood and sympathized with frontier conditions. The archetype of the western circuit rider was Peter Cartwright. Converted to Methodism as a teenager in the opening of the nineteenth century, Cartwright rode the circuits throughout the Old Northwest until his death in 1872. The established eastern denominations, Cartwright believed, “had no adaptation to the country or people” of the West. “The great mass of our Western people wanted a preacher who could mount a stump, a block, or old log, or stand in the bed of a wagon, and without note or manuscript, quote, expound, and apply the word of God to the hearts and consciences of the people.” Western religion melded with the democratic spirit of the times.6

  Elders of the Church of God, Broken Bow, Nebraska. Photograph by Solomon D. Butcher, 1892. Library of Congress.

  The fire of religious enthusiasm in men like Cartwright was first sparked in 1801 at a place called Cane Ridge in central Kentucky. At this “Great Revival” a crowd of some twenty thousand came together to pray, sing, and get saved in the open air. Cane Ridge was the prototype for thousands of camp meetings, ubiquitous in the nineteenth-century West. In late summer—after the crops had been “laid by” and before
the intense activity of the harvest—dozens of families converged on some shady grove, many prepared to stay for several days or even weeks. “A camp meeting,” wrote one observer, “is the most mammoth picnic possible. As at a barbecue, the very best heart and soul of hospitality and kindness is wide open and poured freely forth.” But more was going on in these glades than hearty meals and warm conversations. As one frontier preacher wrote, the occasion offered an opportunity “for the mind to disentangle itself from worldly care, and rise to an undistracted contemplation of spiritual realities.” The milling crowds, the campfires casting an eerie light though the trees at evening, the preaching, the singing, the enthusiasm of those being saved—all heightened the sense of the extraordinary that suffused a successful camp meeting. It was an occasion for uniting groups of people, a sacred version of community building.7

  As churches formed, the founding members often signed covenants that formally bound them together. The covenant of the Buck Run Church in Kentucky, for example, spoke the language of communitas: the members solemnly agreed to “watch over each other in brotherly tenderness,” to edify one another, to succor the weak, to bear each other’s burdens, and to hold in common all “hands and hearts.” These were the strongest bonds a community could claim. The ideal of a small, close-knit community was carried deep in the minds of most colonists, and covenanted community was a sacred enterprise, reaching down to the smallest detail of helping one’s own neighbor when in trouble or gone astray.

  . . .

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints built a covenanted community in the trans-Mississippi West on steroids. The Mormons’ epic exodus of the late 1840s took them from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake, where they planted several dozen communities. A theological principle they knew as “the gathering,” the imperative to build a Zion, a communal utopia, fortified their group cohesiveness. In order to gather as many believers as possible in the desert, Mormon leader Brigham Young and his advisers dispatched missionaries to the East and across the Atlantic to the industrial towns of England and farms of Scandinavia. Their preaching succeeded spectacularly, pulling thousands of converts looking for salvation, solidarity, and rural simplicity to Salt Lake. The supply was so heavy, and the supply of mules and wagons so short, that Young even organized a series of “handcart brigades.” Immigrants pulled inexpensive carts loaded with their possessions across the continent’s interior. In 1859 early snows caught two of these brigades and at least two hundred people froze to death in the single worst disaster in the history of the Overland Trail. Young discontinued the handcart experiment, but still the immigrants kept coming. By 1880 some one hundred thousand Latter-Day Saints were living in more than 350 communities scattered across the inland desert. Brigham Young envisioned the creation of a Mormon empire called De-seret, stretching from Idaho to Arizona, from Utah to the California coast.

  One of those communities was the little town of Alpine, founded in 1860 in the western foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, south of Salt Lake City. Most of its residents came from England, urban workers sick of the turmoil caused by industrialization. In Alpine, they created a close and supportive rural community, huddling their homes beside a common field where the people labored in concert. The community of Alpine, writes historian Dean May, “drew nearly all adults into some type of voluntary activity that caused them almost daily to talk to, work with, contend with, and in time form enduring ties to others in the settlement.” Whereas other western places had difficulty holding on to their residents for more than a few years, Alpine proved stickier than fly paper. At the turn of the century, forty years after its founding, representatives of every one of its founding families still lived in the village.8

  Mormon family, Great Salt Lake Valley, Utah Territory. Photograph by A. J. Russell, c. 1869. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The Mormons were practical utopians. Most of Brigham Young’s divine revelations, and certainly his leadership, concerned economic matters. Joseph Smith’s early doctrines of stewardship and consecration were coupled with a Horatio Alger ideal: every herdboy expected to become a prosperous patriarch. The Mormons’ economic system was in fact a bootstrap operation. Foreign and eastern capitalists weren’t interested in financing odd fellowships in barren wastes, so the church financed its own ventures, such as sugar beet factories and mining smelters, assigning new recruits to work in those industries. The church became the owner of mercantile outlets, sugar and woolen factories, and a bank and life insurance company, as well as a major stockholder in railroads. The Latter-Day Saints demonstrated a flair for communal capitalism. They prospered materially and took this as a sign of God’s favor. However, they struggled with the low opinions of many Americans. The Mormons built communities based on sentiments of fellowship, but these oases of affinity were surrounded by huge swaths of hard feelings.

  The federal government created the territory of Utah and appointed Brigham Young governor. But federal officials sent to administer the territory found to their chagrin that the LDS Church retained the real power and that nonbelievers (“gentiles” in Mormon parlance) were excluded. They accused the Mormons of running a “theocracy,” and they were partly right. Before his murder, Joseph Smith himself had termed the Mormon system a “theo-democracy,” in which voters were asked to confirm God’s will as revealed to the church hierarchy.

  The conflict between Mormons and gentiles increased greatly in 1852 when the church announced that one of its fundamental tenets was “plural marriage.” Rumors of this practice had been one of the causes for the Mormon troubles in Illinois, and this acknowledgment that the church indeed encouraged polygamy set off a firestorm of controversy that blazed for a half-century. Americans focused on the extraordinary cases—like Brigham Young’s marriage to twenty-seven women and his paternity of fifty-six children. But Young was hardly a typical Mormon. In its heyday no more than 15 percent of LDS families practiced polygamy, and two-thirds of these plural marriages involved just two wives. Though practiced by a minority, polygamy wove through the fabric of the Mormon community as part of the Saints’ conception of their distinctive way of life.

  In 1856 the polygamy controversy broke nationally when the newly formed Republican Party included a condemnation of “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery” in its political platform. The next year, concluding that the territorial government was a sham cloaking the string-pulling of Young and the LDS Church, President James Buchanan ordered a federal military expedition to Utah to bring the Saints in line. With the memory of persecutions in Missouri and Illinois still fresh, the Mormons prepared to burn Salt Lake City and flee into the desert. At the last minute, negotiators from both sides narrowly avoided armed conflict, but not before an agitated group of Mormon vigilantes attacked a wagon train of Missourians at a spot in Utah called Mountain Meadows, killing 120 men, women, and children. Eventually vigilante leader John D. Lee, a committed Mormon, was executed by federal authorities for directing the massacre.

  Saints and gentiles avoided open warfare, but the controversy over polygamy continued. Following the Civil War, feminist advocates of woman suffrage argued that the Mormons presented a case study in the consequences of women’s disenfranchisement. If only Mormon women had the vote, surely they would “do away with the horrible institution of polygamy.” Sensing a public relations opportunity in addition to a major boost to his voting majority, Young approved and in 1870 the Utah territorial legislature passed the nation’s first universal woman suffrage bill. Feminists cheered, and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled to Utah to congratulate LDS women. But the mood shifted when Mormon women, in election after election, voted in concert with Mormon men. Gradually plural wives stopped being seen as victims and began being portrayed as dupes. Proclaiming that “woman suffrage in Utah means only women suffering,” the opponents of votes for women seized on the issue as a cautionary tale—married women were incapable of being independent. The Morm
ons’ “theo-democracy” thwarted outsiders’ desires for political and propaganda victories.9

  Although Congress outlawed polygamy in 1862 and 1874, the 1882 Edmunds Act was the first legislation to stipulate harsh penalties for polygamists. Federal authorities began arresting Mormon men for “unlawful cohabitation,” imprisoning more than a thousand over the next decade. But the LDS hierarchy refused to relent. In 1887 Congress swung even harder, disincorporating the Mormon church, confiscating its real estate, and abolishing women’s suffrage in Utah. The struggle against polygamy widened into a war against the church. Facing institutional collapse, in 1890 the LDS hierarchy agreed to the abolition of polygamy in practice (though not in theory), and in 1896 Congress finally voted to admit Utah to the union as a state. It had been a long and bitter struggle, which the Mormons would always regard as more evidence of the hostility toward their religious beliefs and the communitarian experiment.

  . . .

  In 1879 yet another exodus to the western promised land took place, this one by thousands of African Americans from the Old Southwest. The background of this episode in Americans seeking freedom and plenty through mobility lay in the failure of southern land reform after the Civil War. “Forty acres and a mule”—land and the means to work it—was the cry that echoed throughout the communities of former slaves in the South. In 1866 Congress passed a Southern Homestead Act, extending the terms of the western bill to freedmen and women. But what little remained of the southern public domain was swampy, barren land, far from transportation links, and in the end only a few thousand people benefited from this program. Real land reform required the confiscation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to the African American men and women who had worked the land for years without compensation. But neither Congress nor the southern reconstruction governments wanted to disrupt cotton production or violate private property rights. When, in the 1870s, Republican reconstruction governments gave way to Democrat “redeemer” regimes, soon followed by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, many African Americans looked to the West for a better future.