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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433644443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | B&H Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 482,525 |
| File size: | 72 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Reforging the Nation
Out of the wreckage of the Civil War, the American nation began to emerge as a fully continental power with new ambitions that extended to the world stage. The war-torn South would languish for decades, hamstrung by bitter racial strife and the destruction unleashed by the war on its infrastructure and its young men. But immigration, massive capitalist businesses, and urban centers would all boom during the post-Reconstruction era. White settlers would also pour onto the Great Plains and surge out to the Pacific coast, making America a more unified continent than it had ever been before.
For individual settlers, forging a new life in the West was often difficult, full of daily struggles and drudgery. In 1875, a nineteen-year-old woman named Luna Kellie went ahead with her father into Nebraska while her husband stayed behind in Missouri to accumulate more cash for their new farm. She also brought her five-month-old son with her. A few hundred miles northwest of Kansas City, they came to the village of Hastings, Nebraska, which Kellie regarded as a "mudhole" and the "worst looking little town I had ever seen." On the bleak prairie no trees or any other notable structures broke up the monotonous landscape. All she saw were occasional sod houses. She had not expected them to be so dirty. Her father reminded her that sod houses were dirty because they were made of dirt. Her family would live not in a sod house but in a dugout, or a cave excavated into the side of a riverbank. It had the great advantage that its roof did not leak, unlike most pioneer structures.
Only a year before Kellie moved, the Great Plains were struck by an invasion of grasshoppers that reminded many of the plagues that beset Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. Everywhere they stepped, they crushed grasshoppers underfoot. The insects ate all vegetation in sight and reportedly even gnawed on green-colored clothing. They consumed root crops such as carrots and onions down into the ground. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the enduringly popular Little House books about frontier life, wrote that the grasshoppers were the one thing that nearly vanquished her mother's indomitable will. Wilder remembered listening to the incessant "whirring and snipping and chewing" of the innumerable grasshoppers as she lay in bed. Everywhere the grasshoppers went, they laid eggs, ensuring that their progeny would be back the next growing season.
Indian Wars
As people like the Kellie and Wilder families moved into the West, they were not entering an unpopulated wilderness. Continuing an American story that went back to Columbus, the geographic expansion of people of European ancestry put increasing pressure on Native Americans' territory, cultures, and livelihood. At the end of the Civil War, about 250,000 Native Americans lived in the West, in an area that composed about half of the United States' territory. These areas had been absorbed by measures such as the Louisiana Purchase and the surrender of northern Mexico at the end of the Mexican War in the 1840s. But the Indians who lived there had an uncertain and often hostile relationship with the American nation. Some of them, such as the Cherokees, had been forced into the West by Indian removal policies. Others, including the Comanches and the Lakotas, had long lived in the West and experienced less pressure from whites than the Indian groups in the East had before the Civil War.
The West became easier for whites to access because of government forts built to protect settlers and because of growing national railroad networks. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines joined in a ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah. Soon four more transcontinental lines would be completed, and towns spread out around railroad depots throughout the West.
As settlement spread, so did fights, murders, and battles between whites and Indians across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region. In the late 1850s, gold was discovered in the area around Pikes Peak in Colorado, leading to a massive influx of whites and conflict with local Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Cheyenne chief Black Kettle eventually sought to negotiate peace with the US Army and took hundreds of his followers to an encampment at Sand Creek, Colorado. But Black Kettle's people were attacked in November 1864 by forces under the command of Colonel John Chivington. Chivington had declared, "I have come [to Colorado] to kill Indians, and I believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians." When recruiting for his militia, Chivington displayed the bodies of a white family that had been murdered by Indians.
Chivington told the soldiers to "kill and scalp all, big and little. Nits make lice" — he wanted even the Indian children exterminated. When Chivington's force attacked, Black Kettle sought to display an American flag and a white flag of truce to declare their peaceful intentions, but to no avail. Chivington's militia bombarded Sand Creek with artillery and rifle fire and then moved in to individually butcher the elderly, women, and children. (Only a few dozen fighting-age Indians were at the camp.) Some whites were disgusted by the Sand Creek massacre. Frontiersman and soldier Kit Carson wrote that Chivington's "men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call such soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What do you suppose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things?" Black Kettle and his wife survived the massacre, only to be killed when they were trying to flee US forces under the command of George A. Custer in 1868.
The Oglala leader, Red Cloud, launched one of the most effective offensives ever against US forces from 1866 to 1868, in what became known as "Red Cloud's War." Once again the hostilities resulted from an enormous influx of white prospectors and settlers, this time in response to the discovery of gold in Montana in the early 1860s. The US Army sought to protect white travelers along the Bozeman Trail into the region. They built Fort Philip Kearny in present-day northern Wyoming in 1866, but in late 1866 Red Cloud tricked army forces into pursuing his warriors outside the fort and led them into an ambush in which eighty-one US soldiers were killed. The attack was widely treated as a massacre in the national media, but it forced the army to temporarily reconsider its approach to the Great Plains Indians. Red Cloud agreed to the Treaty of Laramie (1868), with the provision that the Oglala and other Lakota peoples be given fairly large reservation lands, where the United States promised to ban white settlement. The army withdrew from forts, including Fort Philip Kearny, which Indians burned when the soldiers left.
In the southern Great Plains, Comanche and Kiowa Indians rose up in the 1870s against the incursions of white buffalo hunters, who were decimating the vast herds of buffaloes (American bison) upon which so many Native Americans of the southern plains depended. Whites killed the buffalo for a number of reasons; the value of their hides was only one. Another was clearing out ranchland for cattle raisers. But many saw killing the buffalo as an assault on the Indian way of life. "Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone," explained one white officer. The effect of the campaign against the buffalo was stunning: the herds went from a total of perhaps 13 million bison in 1850, to only a few hundred left alive in the 1880s. (In America today there are more than 500,000 American bison, most of them held by ranchers.)
The Comanches had long ruled the southern plains as a kind of Indian empire, but by the 1870s they were under severe duress because of the dwindling buffalo herds and pressure from US forces. The Comanches took new inspiration from the prophecies of a medicine man named Isatai, who urged them to return to traditional native rituals for spiritual and military power. In June 1874, Isatai and Quanah Parker, the Comanche leader whose Anglo mother, Cynthia Ann, had been stolen away from her family almost forty years earlier, led an attack on the buffalo hunter outpost of Adobe Walls, in the Texas panhandle. The battle was inconclusive, but it helped precipitate the Red River War of 1874–1875.
Philip Sheridan, a celebrated Union commander in the Civil War, vowed to root out the Comanches from the Texas panhandle once and for all. The decisive battle of the Red River War came at Palo Duro Canyon in September 1874, when US forces trapped a group of Comanches who were known to be leaders in the cattle-rustling trade across the Texas border with Mexico. Many of the Comanches escaped, but they had to leave behind their vast herd of ponies. The soldiers, realizing the ponies' value to the Comanches (and the likelihood that they would steal them back if possible), slaughtered more than a thousand of the animals. Some Comanches and other southern plains Indians continued to fight. But in June 1875, Quanah Parker decided to surrender and take his family and many followers to a reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee
The 1868 Treaty of Laramie did not end the violence between the Lakota people and the US Army. Again, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills region (in what would become South Dakota) in the mid-1870s enticed thousands of white prospectors into Lakota territory. Conflict erupted, and the US Army sent in forces to protect white settlers and to convince the Lakotas to go to ever-smaller reservations. One of the army's commanders in the campaign against the Lakotas was George A. Custer, who overextended his detachment to attack an Indian camp on the Little Bighorn River in Montana in June 1876. (It was the week before the centennial of American independence.) Custer assumed it would be an easy victory, but his 260 soldiers stumbled into an encampment of at least 1,500 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. The warriors under Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull and war leader Crazy Horse were flummoxed by the sight of the small American force attacking the vastly superior native army. Custer's soldiers were utterly decimated. The only ones left alive on Custer's side were his Crow and Arikara Indian scouts and allies. The national media was appalled at "Custer's last stand" and demanded the Lakota resistance be crushed. Most of the Lakotas surrendered to the American army by the end of 1876. Crazy Horse was bayonetted under mysterious circumstances at a Nebraska army fort in 1877. Sitting Bull held out until 1881, when he agreed to retire to a reservation.
The US government sought to reduce the size of the reservations and to get Native Americans to possess land as individuals and families, not tribes. This was the motivation behind the Dawes Severalty Act (1887). This law provided for the breakup of the reservations into 160-acre plots, designed for purchase by heads of Indian families. (This followed a logic similar to that of the Homestead Act of 1862.) Taking the government's offer of a homestead would also make the Indian farmers citizens of the United States. Indians had not been considered citizens before, and section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment had specifically excluded Native Americans from representation. The remaining reservation lands not designated as homestead allotments would become available for purchase by whites.
The Dawes Act tied Indian citizenship to the "civilized" pursuit of family life and sedentary farming. Even Buffalo Bill Cody, the popular Wild West entertainer, endorsed the Dawes Act. "Giving a tribe an immense tract to roam over, and feeding and clothing them until they learned to support themselves . . . is foolish," Cody said. "It would ruin white men if it should be applied to them." Some Native Americans took up the government's offer in the Dawes Act, but they often struggled to provide for their families, as they ended up on lands poorly suited even to subsistence farming. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, sought to reverse the failed policies of the Dawes Act, but the federal government continued to struggle to find effective policies to alleviate the endemic poverty found among many Native American groups.
Meanwhile, episodes of Indian resistance against the United States continued. In 1890, a nativist revival movement centered around the ritual of the "Ghost Dance" gave some of the Lakotas hope of a return of Indian power. The visions of a Paiute Indian leader in Nevada started the Ghost Dance movement, and it filtered up through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. The revelations, said to be from Native Americans' ancestors, urged them to give up alcohol and to turn back to traditional native practices and rites. If they did, the white people's power would falter and the buffalo herds would once again thrive, the prophecies said. When the Ghost Dance movement came to Sitting Bull's reservation, authorities worried that he would encourage the native revival. Lakota policemen came to arrest him in late 1890, and in the ensuing clash, more than a dozen people died, including Sitting Bull.
On December 29, 1890, US soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, George Custer's old unit, confronted hundreds of Lakotas associated with the Ghost Dance movement. They were camped at the snowy Wounded Knee creek in southern South Dakota. A Lakota medicine man reportedly called on the Indians to resist the soldiers, believing the Ghost Dancers' ceremonial garb would deflect bullets. In the struggle a gun discharged, and the soldiers began shelling the encampment with cannon fire. When the shooting stopped, twenty-five soldiers and 146 Indians, including forty-four women and eighteen children, lay dead. Wounded Knee became symbolic for many Native Americans of their treatment by the American government. Eight decades after the massacre, in 1973, an internal dispute among Oglala Lakotas turned into a confrontation with federal law enforcement officials as Lakotas associated with the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee. The U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation laid siege to Wounded Knee for seventy-one days before the protestors finally surrendered.
New Lands and New Opportunities in the West
The decimation of Native American societies west of the Mississippi River opened the door for a massive migration of whites, including new European immigrants, onto the Indians' former lands. Smaller numbers of Asians also migrated into the new Pacific-coast states and territories. Almost 200,000 Chinese people came to the United States between the 1840s and 1880s. By 1870, Chinese people represented about one-tenth of California's population, playing a key role as laborers in the mining and railroad industries. Resentment among native-born and European workers prompted the national government to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which ended immigration from China for a decade.
Hispanics also moved across the Rio Grande into the American Southwest. As the United States came into possession of much of the former Mexican-controlled Southwest in the 1840s, the descendants of the original Spanish colonizers began to lose their hold on the land there. But the Spanish-speaking population continued to grow. Perhaps one-fourth of the population of Los Angeles County was Spanish-speaking as of 1880. (Los Angeles was founded in 1781, with the Catholic parish church of Our Lady the Queen of Angels [1784] serving as a focal point in the city's life for much of its first 150 years of existence.) The city of Los Angeles was growing fast, as was its Mexican population. Some 5,000 Mexicans lived in the city in 1910, but that number soared to 30,000 in 1920, when Los Angeles's total population was about 570,000. Federal authorities created the Border Patrol in 1924, in part to monitor the US–Mexico border.
African Americans from the South also migrated in ever-greater numbers to Los Angeles and other parts of the West in the early twentieth century, attracted by the prospect of greater economic and social opportunities. One of those migrants was an African American Pentecostal preacher named William Seymour, who in 1906 would lead one of the most significant events in twentieth-century religious history, the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles. That revival attracted crowds of whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, many of whom said they received the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues. The gift of tongues was frequently mentioned in the New Testament, but until 1906 it had appeared only infrequently in American revivalist movements. Azusa Street birthed a new "charismatic" movement in America. Pentecostal missionaries from America would soon travel around the world. Many regard Seymour's revival as the beginning of the modern Pentecostal Christian movement, which has hundreds of millions of adherents worldwide today.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "American History, Volume 2"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Thomas S. Kidd.
Excerpted by permission of B&H Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 16 Reforging the Nation,
Chapter 17 The Gilded Age,
Chapter 18 Populism and Empire,
Chapter 19 The Progressive Era,
Chapter 20 World War I,
Chapter 21 The Roaring Twenties,
Chapter 22 The Great Depression and the New Deal,
Chapter 23 World War II,
Chapter 24 The Cold War,
Chapter 25 The 1950s,
Chapter 26 Civil Rights and the Great Society,
Chapter 27 Nixon, Watergate, and Carter,
Chapter 28 Reagan's America,
Chapter 29 George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and a Changing America,
Chapter 30 The Age of Terrorism,
Illustration Credits,
Index,