AP U.S. History Ch. 16 the Conquest of the West

AP U.S. History Ch. 16 The Conquest of the West

Chapter 16 / The Conquest of the Far West
The Western Tribes / The largest and most important group in the Far West before the beginning of the Anglo-American migration was the Indian tribes
A few were from the East (Cherokee, Creek) but most had always lived in the West. More than 300,000 had lived on the Pacific coast before the arrival of the Spanish.
Death, disease, and dislocation by the Spanish had greatly reduced the numbers of Indians living on the Pacific coast and by the mid-19th century (1850’s+) about 150,000 remained
The Pueblos, a farming tribe, eventually formed a relationship with the Spanish and formed an alliance against the nomadic and war-like Apache, Navajo, and Comanche in the region.
However, the Spanish treated the Pueblo as ‘lesser than’ the Spanish. Later the Mexicans replaced the Spanish but the treatment of the Pueblo remained the same.
The most widespread Indian presence in the West was the Plains Indians, a diverse group of tribes and languages groups.
Sometimes they formed alliances with one another; some were in a constant state of conflict; some were farmers, some were highly nomadic.
Despite their differences, they shared some traits:
Cultures based on close and extended family networks
Intimate relationship with nature
Tribes were subdivided into ‘bands’ each with its own governing council and a community-based decision making process
Tasks were divided by gender: women: domestic & artistic; raising children, cooking, gathering roots & berries, preparing hides, tending small fields or gardens
Men: worked as hunters and traders, supervised military and religious life
Many Plains Indians, including the powerful Sioux Nation, subsisted largely through hunting buffalo
The buffalo was the economic basis of the Plains Indians way of life.
By the early 19th century, the Sioux had become the most powerful tribe west of the Mississippi River.
These Plains warriors proved to be the most formidable foes white settlers encountered.
The tribes also suffered from several weaknesses that in the end, made it impossible from them to prevail over the oncoming tide of white settlers from the East:
a. their inability to unite and
b. internal conflicts among themselves
For a brief time, the tribes did manage to unite effectively. The Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne forged a powerful alliance that dominated the northern Plains.
But there remained other economic and ecological weaknesses:
a. competition from an industrially advanced people
b. vulnerability to eastern infectious diseases, especially smallpox
Hispanic New Mexico / For centuries, the Far West had been part of the Spanish Empire, and later the Mexican Republic
Although the lands the United States acquired from Mexico at the end of the Mexican War did not include large populated areas, considerable numbers of Mexican did live in them.
When these Mexicans found themselves suddenly living in the United States most remained.
Spanish-speaking communities were scattered throughout the Southwest, from Texas to California.
The status of Mexicans and Indians would be diminished with the increasing numbers of white settlers, although there was no denying the influence of both groups.
Hispanic California and Texas / Spanish settlement of California had begun in the 18th century, with a string of missions/forts along the coast.
Indians were a labor force for the Spanish with a status similar to slavery. Indian labor helped the missions established herd of cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. They worked as bricklayers, blacksmiths, weavers and farmers.
Few mission profits ever went to Indian welfare.
By the 1830’s, the new Mexican government reduced the power of the church, and mission society largely collapsed.
The influx of Anglo-American settlers in the northern parts of California led to the defeat of the californios, the native Hispanic population of California.
Many lost their lands through corrupt business deals or outright seizures.
In southern California, Mexicans managed to hang on for a time; the population boom in the northern part of the state provided a market for the rancherosand the cattle they raised.
A combination of indebtedness and severe drought in the 1860’s devastated the Mexican ranching culture.
By the 1880’s Hispanic aristocracy had largely ceased to exist.
Increasingly, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans became part of the state’s working class, clustered in barrios in Los Angeles or becoming migrant farmworkers.
A similar pattern occurred in Texas.
Many Mexican landowners lost their land after their territory joined the United States.
This was a result of fraud, coercion, and the inability of even the most prosperous Mexican ranchers to compete with the enormous emerging Anglo-American ranching kingdoms.
There was some resistance (1859 Juan Cortina raided a Brownsville jail, freeing all the Mexican prisoners) but such resistance had little long-term effect.
As in California, Mexicans in Southern Texas (nearly 3/4ths of the population) became an increasingly impoverished working class as unskilled industrial or farm labor.
Overall, Anglo-American migration was less catastrophic for the Hispanic population of the West than it was for the Indian tribes.
For a very few Hispanics, it created new opportunities for wealth, for the most part, the late 19th century saw a destruction of Mexican-American authority in a region they long considered their own.
The Chinese Migration / Many Chinese crossed the Pacific in hopes of better lives than they could expect in their own poverty-stricken land.
Not all came to the United States, some moved to Hawaii, Australia, South and Central America, south Africa, and even the Caribbean.
Those who became indentured servants were known as ‘coolies.’
The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujurati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி] An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qu The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727 Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan
The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation
Some came before the 1849 California gold rush, but most arrived afterward.
By 1880, over 200,000 Chinese had settled in the United States, mostly in California where they made up almost 10% of the population.
Almost all came as free laborers, and for a time, white Americans welcomed the Chinese as a conscientious, hard-working people.
In 1852, the governor of California called them “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens.”
Very quickly white opinion turned hostile.
The Chinese were so industrious and successful that some whites began considering them rivals.
The experience of Chinese immigrants in the West became a struggle to advance economically in the face of racism and discrimination.
Many Chinese worked in the gold mines, and for a time some enjoyed success, but opportunities were fleeting.
A series of laws in the 1850’s were designed to discourage Chinese immigration into the territory.
As mining declined, railroad construction jobs opened up for the Chinese.
Beginning in 1865, more than 12,000 Chinese found work building the transcontinental railroad. Chinese workers formed 90% of the labor force used to construct the Central Pacific line.
Whites preferred Chinese labor as they had no experience with labor organizations, they worked hard, made few demands and accepted relatively low wages.
Railroad work was dangerous and in the spring of 1866, 5,000 Chinese workers went on strike demanding higher wages and a shorter workday.
The railroad company isolated them, surrounded them with strikebreakers and starved them. The strike failed and most returned to their jobs.
1869 – The Transcontinental railroad was completed
Thousands of Chinese were now out of work. Some moved back to California to work on irrigation projects or agricultural laborers picking fruit for low wages.
Some became tenant farmers on lands whites saw no profit in working themselves.
Some managed to acquire land of their own and establish themselves as modestly successful truck farmers.
Increasingly, Chinese immigrants flocked to cities. By 1900, nearly half the Chinese population of California lived in urban areas.
By far, the largest single Chinese community was San Francisco.
The Chinatowns throughout the West revolved around powerful organizations- usually formed by people from a single clan or community in China
These organizations functioned something like benevolent societies, similar to the Irish organizations on the east coast.
Other Chinese organizations were secret societies, known as ‘tongs.’
Some tongs were violent criminal organizations, involved in the opium trade and prostitution.
Few people outside the Chinese communities were aware of their existence, except when rival tongs were engaged in violent conflict.
The Chinese usually occupied the lower rungs of the employment ladder, but some established their own businesses, especially laundries.
Why laundries? Not because of experience, but because they were excluded from so many other areas of employment. Laundries could be started with very little money and required only limited knowledge of English.
1890’s Chinese made up over two-thirds of all laundry workers in California, many of them in their own shops.
There were a small number of Chinese women immigrants; however, from the earliest migrations to the 1880’s, most had been sold into prostitution before they came to the United States.
Both Anglo and Chinese reformers tried to stamp out prostitution in Chinatowns in the1890’s.
By the 1890’s more Chinese women arrived in the United States as wives. Once the ratio of men to women became more balanced, Chinese families were established and the problem of prostitution greatly decreased.
Anti-Chinese Sentiments / With the growth of Chinese communities in western cities came anti-Chinese sentiment.
Anti-coolie clubs emerged in the 1860’s and 1870’s.
They wanted a ban on employing Chinese and organized boycotts of products made by Chinese labor. Some members of these clubs attacked Chinese workers in the streets and were suspected of setting fires in factories in which Chinese worked.
They were afraid Chinese workers would undercut their wages and therefore undercut labor unions.
The Democratic Party saw political value in attacking the Chinese.
The Workingman’s Party of California (1878 Denis Kearney, Irish immigrant) gained political power largely on his anti-Chinese position.
By the mid-1880’s anti-Chinese sentiments and violence spread up and down the Pacific coast and into other areas in the West.
The anti-Chinese sentiment was not only based on economics, it was also cultural and racially motivated.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act
This act banned Chinese immigration for ten years and barred Chinese already in the country from becoming citizens.
Support for the act came from all regions of the country.
1892, Congress renews the Exclusion Act for another ten years and made it permanent in 1902!
The Exclusion Act had a dramatic effect on the Chinese population, which declined by more than forty percent in the forty years after its passage.
The Chinese Americans did not accept the new laws quietly and were shocked that they were lumped together with African Americans and Indians.
They were descendants of a great and enlightened civilization.
They said white Americans did not protest the great waves of Italian* immigrants or the Irish or the Jews. “They are all let in, while Chinese, who are sober, are duly law abiding, clean, educated and industrious, are shut out.
The Six Companies in San Francisco organized vigorous letter writing campaigns, petitioned the president, and even filed suit in federal court but their efforts had little success
Migration from the East / Although there had been earlier settlers migrating from east to west, after the Civil War the number of those making the trek West dwarfed all other migrations.
While settlers had crossed the Plains by the thousands, now they numbered in the millions!
Most of these settlers were from the East, but substantial numbers were foreign-born immigrants from Europe: Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, Russians, Czechs, and others.
Some were attracted by gold and silver, others by pasturelands.
Settlement was also encouraged by the transcontinental railroad line in 1869 and from the newly constructed subsidiary lines.
The Homestead Act 1862 This act allowed settlers to buy 160 acres of land for a small fee if they occupied & improved the land for five years. It was intended as a progressive measure:
It would give a free farm to any American who needed one.
It was also a form of government relief to people who otherwise had no prospects.
It would also create new markets and new outposts for the nation’s growing economy.
BUT….. the Homestead Act rested on a number of misperceptions:
The government thought that mere possession of the land would be enough to sustain a family
They underestimated the effects of increasing mechanization of agriculture and the rising costs of running a farm
They had based their calculations on farming in the east, not the west where 160 acres may not be enough for grazing and farming
Although over 400,000 homesteaders stayed on Homestead Act claims long enough to gain title to the land, a much larger number abandoned the region before the end of the five years, unable to cope with the difficulties of life on the windswept Plains.
Westerners looked to the federal government for solutions to their problems.
In response, Congress increased land allotments.
The Timber Culture Act1873 Permitted homesteaders to receive grants of 160 additional acres if they planted 40 acres of trees
The Desert Land Act of 1877 Homesteaders could buy 640 acres at $1.25 per acre provided that they irrigated part of the land within three years
The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 Applied to non-arable land, authorized sales at $2.50 per acres. These laws made it possible for individuals to acquire as much as 1,280 acres of land at little cost.
Some settlers got more. Fraud was rampant administering these acts. Lumber, mining, and cattle companies used ‘dummy registrants’ and other illegal devices to seize millions of acres of the ‘public domain.’
Political organization came quickly after that.
After Kansas was admitted as a state in 1861, the remaining territories of Washington, New Mexico, Utah, and Nebraska were divided into smaller units that would be hopefully easier to organize.
By the end of the 1860’s, territorial governments were in operation in the new provinces of Nevada, Colorado, Dakota, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Statehood followed for all these before 1900.
Arizona and New Mexico remained territories until 1912 because so few white people lived there, their politics were predominantly Democratic and they were unwilling to accept admission as a single state.
Labor in the West / Farmers, ranchers and miners all needed additional labor as commercial activity increased, but finding workers was difficult.
Far away from major population centers and unable or unwilling to hire Indian workers created a labor shortage and led to higher wages to attract workers.
Working conditions were difficult and job security almost nonexistent.
Competition from Chinese immigrants forced some Anglo-Americans out of work.
Those who owned no land were highly mobile, mostly male and seldom married.
The West had the highest percentage of single adults (10%) and one reason why single women found working in dance halls and as prostitutes as the most readily available forms of employment
Despite the enormous geographic mobility of the West, actual social mobility was limited
The social mobility and distribution of wealth was actually very similar to the patterns already established in the East.
The West was also highly multiracial, English–speaking whites worked alongside African Americans, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans and Indians.
However, the workforce was divided along racial lines with whites occupying the upper levels of employment, including skilled labor and management positions
For example, an Irish common laborer might hope in the course of his lifetime to rise several rungs up the occupational ladder
Racial myths served the interests of employers and more often than not, prevented nonwhites from also moving up