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5.Tenements were what now is known as penthouses.
6.To prevent fires some cities and states forbade the construction of wooden buildings.
7.New immigrants claimed for good farmland.
8.With the passage of time, the opposition to immigration was growing.
9.Federal legislation barred the entry of Chinese in 1882 because they came to the US illegally.
10.German Catholics aroused anxiety among native Protestants.
11.Economic rivalry led to the isolation of the Irish workers.
12.Japanese formed a readily available unskilled labor market for the growing industrial enterprises.
13.Learning to live as Americans, immigrants didn’t give up their native traditions and customs, but their traditions did not become part of American culture.
14.Immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans.
Talk It Over
1. Why do immigrants often encounter prejudice from native citizens. 2. What is your country’s policy on immigration? Is immigration encouraged or discouraged? 3. Does your country permit “guest” workers? 4. Does immigration threaten native-born Russian workers? 5. What challenges do immigrants have to meet? 6. Does language separate groups in your country in any way? 7. Are there language classes or government programs and policies to help new immigrants assimilate? 8. Do immigrants usually intermarry with natives of your country? 9. Are there any groups in your country that experience discrimination because of their family/national origin? Their race/religion? 10. Are there any laws that either permit or forbid discrimination?
Ask Yourself
1.Would I emigrate to another country if I could have better life there for myself and my family?
2.Should my country encourage refugees from other countries to settle in my country?
3.Would my family object if I chose to marry someone of another race?
4.Should minorities be given preferential treatment in being admitted to college, in being hired on their jobs, and in other ways?
Chapter 10 Growth and Change
WESTERN FRONTIER
Americans settled the western half of the United States. More and more people were needed in the mines, mills, factories. Railroads were expanding and improving.
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In 1862, Congress passed a law called the Homestead Act, under which any citizen 21 years or older could become the owner of the 64 hectares of government land in the plains by living on it and farming it for five years. Many inspired homesteaders went west to settle this free land. They were former soldiers, former slaves and immigrants to the United States eager to get land of their own. The government had given the railway companies millions of hectares of land along the railway tracks. Now the companies sold these lands – which were much better than homestead land because they were near markets and transportation – to settlers. American contractors sent agents from the railway companies went to Europe and convinced Scandinavians, Germans and British to buy the chip land. Posters in different languages advertised: “American land for sale to immigrants on easy terms.” The immigrants traveled in box-like immigrant Zulu cars to settle and farm in Western prairies, now the Upper Midwest - Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakota. By 1880, 70% of the settlers were immigrants or the children of the immigrants.
Thousands of those from the East moved to the frontier to settle on the lands of the Plain Indians. They changed the West and the way the Indians lived.
On the Plains, the proud Indians, the Sioux, roamed on horseback, hunting the buffalo that ranged there. Buffalo gave them everything they needed for life: meat, skin and fur to make clothing, hides to make the tepees, or tents they lived in. They carved buffalo bones into knives and tools. At first, the Sioux allowed the wagon trains heading west to pass through their lands. But then whites began to settle the Plains. The treaties they made with the U.S. government, which solemnly declared “the vast lands between the
Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to be Sioux territory on which whites were prohibited from passing or settling,” were ignored. At the same time, the buffalo that the
Sioux depended on had begun to disappear. The land they roamed was becoming fenced by farmers and ranchers. And whites began to hunt buffalo for sport and for its hide. In 1850, there were still 50 million buffalo on the Plains. By 1885, there were almost none.
Without the buffalo, the Indians’ way of life would end. As European civilization spread rapidly across the continent, the native population declined.
By 1871, the U.S. government had determined that no Indian nation or tribe should be recognized as an independent nation or power. The American government pressured the Indians to give up their traditional way of life and to live only on reservations. Many resisted and fought back in defense of their country. But without the buffalo to feed them, halfstarved, they eventually surrendered and came to live on the reservations. In 1890, unrest developed, resulting from the rapid advance of settlers, the suffering and dependence of the Indians caused by the disappearance of game and crop failures, the
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spread of diseases and the resentment among some Indians of an agreement which reduced the size of the Sioux reservations. Some Indians left their reservations and banded together to be killed in bloody fights with an American cavalry regiment. In South Dakota, visitors are attracted by the mountain carving of Crazy Horse. At almost
650 ft, it is the world’s tallest statue of a Sioux Indian chief who handed a crushing defeat to the troops sent to bring him in the reservation. In the struggle to lock him up, Crazy Horse was stabbed by a soldier. Whether his death was planned by the army or not, it remains a symbol of the white man’s campaign to crush the Indian spirit. A total of perhaps, 7,000 whites and 5,000 Indians were killed in the course of the 19th century. Many more Indians died of hunger and disease caused by the west-ward movement of settlers who forced the Indians from their land and nearly destroyed all the buffalo, the main source of food and hides for the tribes of the Great Plains.
When it was announced that almost two million acres of good land in Oklahoma would be opened for settlement in April 1889, thousands of settlers gathered on the border, waiting for the exact time to be announced. When it was, they literally raced into the territory in wagons and on horseback to claim the best land they could find for themselves. By 1890, almost all of the West, from the prairies to the Pacific, had been settled by townspeople, farmers and cattlemen or ranchers, people who bred cattle and called so because they lived in ranches - small one-floor houses with flat roofs.
Cattlemen needed large areas for their cattle to graze before being sent to market. Cowboys
– men with Stetson hats on their heads, high-heeled boots to protect their legs from thorns and snake-bites, and long lassos in their hands – worked for the cattlemen. People think that all cowboys are white Americans. Actually, the first cowboys were Mexican. The cowboys’ heyday came after the Civil War, when thousands of young war veterans were drawn westward, along with Indians, blacks, who were given freedom and made up a quarter of all cowboys.
People think of the cowboys as of romantic and even rather fairy-tale creatures. It is not so in reality. The cowboys’ life was hard and often boring. They would spend most of the day riding around on horse-back and roping. It required skill and grit to look after the cattle and take them on long drives to market from Texas to Kansas where the cattle-ranchers could get ten times as much money for their cattle. This is how cattle drives began. On the cattle drive, when 10 drovers would trail some 2,000 steers, cowboys had to work from dawn to dusk; at night, they took turns guarding the cattle. They would cover up to 15 miles a day – or less if rustlers or angry farmers set off deadly stampedes. A few years on the range, wrote Theodore Roosevelt, “leaves printed on their faces certain lines which tell of dangers quietly fronted and hardships uncomplainingly endured.” When cowboys got bored during
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long cattle drives, they sometimes organized fun competitions in which they showed their skills in calf roping, bull riding and bulldogging – a way of stopping oxen that were running wild. Cowboys would ride alongside on ox, then jump on its back, grab its horns, somersault across it, and pull the ox on the ground. That is how rodeos were born.
There were no mountains beyond which the Indians could live undisturbed. The government had promised to protect the remaining Indian lands; it had also promised supplies and food. But poor management, inadequate supplies and incompetent or dishonest government agents led to great suffering. Many Indians had no desire to farm, there was no magic in owning private property. So the government sold the remaining lands to white settlers.
Other people moved to the West to look for gold, silver and copper. In 1849, the gold rush struck in California. In1859, a silver rush started in Nevada, Colorado and Montana. With a little luck, a miner could find 25 dollar-worth of silver in a river each day. With a lot of luck, a miner could become a millionaire. Deep mines had to be dug in order to get silver lying far bellow the ground. Large mills were built to process the silver. The silver mines and mills provided jobs for western workers. Later, copper was as important as silverit was used to make electric wire. Further discoveries of gold, silver and copper continued to attract people to the West until the end of the 19th century. Western miners built many cities and towns. Some of them, such as Denver, Colorado and Boise, became important industrial and population centers.
There was no more frontier. The frontier became known as “the Wild West.”
Questions for Discussion
1. Who were homesteaders? 2. Why do you think people leave the places they used to live and become homesteaders? 3. In what ways did the railroads help to settle the West? 4. What made the railroad companies land better than homestead land? 5. Who bought the land? 6. What changed the life of the Indians? 7. Who ignored the frontier treaties: whites or Indians? 8. How did the buffalo disappear off the Great Plains? 9? Did the Indians resist and fight back? 10. Did the government protect the remaining Indian lands? 11. What are reservations? 12. Was the land in the Plains used only for farming? 13.Who were the cowboys? What sort of life did they live? 14. Why were the remaining lands sold to white settlers? 15. What were some Western states rich in? 16. How did industries emerge in the West?
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Consider the Issue
1.From the point of view of the Indians, consider their belief in living in harmony with nature, and their reaction to the “Whites invasion” of their native lands and their having to give up traditional way of life and live in reservations.
2.The government determined that no Indian nation or tribe should be recognized as an independent nation or power. What could justify such determination?
3.God had ordered the White Men to take the land. Is colonization always coupled by physical violence and suppression?
Chapter 11 Frontier Heritage
SURVIVOR AND CONQUEROR
In an essay written in 1893,”The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian
Frederick Jackson Turner attributed American characteristics of toughness, inventiveness, and self-reliance to the formative experience of overcoming the vast frontier.
Americans were different from Europeans, and it was the frontier that had molded their character. Most contemporary American historians claim that Turner was wrong, sometimes reinterpreting some aspects of his thesis. The appeal of the Turner hypothesis lies in suggesting that the vast frontier formed American character, made the Americans themselves larger than life and integrated American character, mystically perhaps, with the development of the nation’s history. “This ever retreating frontier of free land is the key to American development,” he wrote in his essay.
The first settlers survived because they managed to impose their will upon nature and learned how to control their environment rather than to live in harmony with it. It is true that the frontier determined American history, even if it did not form American character. Hard work and resourcefulness began to pay off. In 1783, America was a narrow strip of a nation on the Eastern seaboard; but 70 years later, the nation had taken the western lands from Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. White men imposed their immense will upon the land, developed it, and turned that development into a giant fortune and a small empire. Westerners control nature and bleached it white, even if this literally involved the destruction of colored races.
Americans justified their conquest of the continent with the self-serving idea of
Manifest Destiny: Civilize the world and Rule it afterward. God had ordained them to take the land and control and subsume what is wild in nature in the name of their own authority and as monument to self. In taking the land, populating it, and dominating it, Americans took on the historic task of overcoming time and space. In this way, the