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The American West:

A Conversation with

Frederick Jackson Turner

The Frontier: A New Beginning?

• Reconstruction South– Racial conflict

– Economic transformation

– Political transformation

• Industrial North– Congestion

– Class Conflict

– Ethnic segregation

Turner’s Frontier Thesis

• “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” – Famous speech to the American

Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893 -

American History as the History of the Frontier

• “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.”

The Frontier Defined American Character

• The frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”

• The struggle to transform the wilderness transformed Europeans into Americans:– “The frontier is the line of most rapid and

effective Americanization”

• The frontier promoted individualism, independence, and democracy.

Free land = independence

• “The important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe….The frontier is productive of individualism….It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control….So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.”

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Manifest Destiny Exodusters

Leaving for Kansas, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 1879.

• 6,000 African Americans left the South following Redemption

• By 1880, 40,000 African Americans in Kansas, largest concentration in the West aside from Texas

A closer look at Turner’s Thesis

• Savagery and “free land”

• Frontier as assimilation process

• Western Independence

• Is there a Woman’s Frontier?

The West at a Glance

• In 1877, the U.S. consisted of 38 states

“Free Land”The Homestead Act (1862)

• 160 acres of public domain free to any settler who lived on the land and improved it for at least 5 years

• settler could purchase the land for $1.25 per acre after 6 months’ residence

• 605 million acres available

• land given to male heads of households and single or widowed women

Cost of “Free” Land for Settlers

• Only 10% of western settlers (400,000 families) received their land under the Homestead Act

• State governments and land companies usually held most valuable land

• speculation more profitable than farming

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Free land for Railroads

1862-1872, Congress awarded 100 million acres of public lands to railroad companies

in 1880s, 40,000 miles of track laid west of Mississippi

Railroad and Land Promotion• Sell public lands• develop clientele for

railroad routes• “Why emigrate to

Kansas?” railroad gazette• “Because it is the garden

spot of the world. Because it will grow anything that any other country will grow, and with less work. Because it rains here more than any other place, and at just the right time.”

Rainfall and Agriculture, 1890The costs of westward expansion

for Native Americans

• 360,00 Indian people lived in the Trans-Mississippi West in 1865

• by 1900, fewer than 250,000

Federal Policies towards Native Americans

• Autonomous nations residing within American boundaries

– not U.S. citizens but domestic dependent nations

• Segregation

– Indian Removal Act (1830) - relocate all eastern tribes by force if necessary

Indian Reservations: Segregation and Assimilation

• Beginning in 1840s– Reservations for individual

tribes

• Bureau of Indian Affairs provide guidance– “civilize the savages”

• U.S. military forces ensure protection

• Indian Wars 1864-1890

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overhunting of buffalo• White hunters killed 4

million between 1872-1874

• cut-off food supply for Native Americans

• provide food for labor crews and skins for manufacturing

• prevent obstruction of railroads

• open up prairies for cattle grazing

• sportshunting

A Kinder, Gentler Solution? Assimilation and Citizenship

• Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

• Native Americans as yeoman farmers

• allowed the president to distribute land not to tribes to individuals legally “severed” from their tribes

• 160 acres per male head of family

• individuals could petition for U.S. citizenship

• 60% of reservation lands lost

• 66% of allotted lands eventually lost

Boarding Schools

Students at Toledo Indian School, Iowa, 1899

“Kill the Indian…and save the Man”

The Frontier as Process of Assimilation?Or the Persistence of Ethnicity

• 2.2 million Europeans settled in the West 1870-1900

Rural Ethnic Communities

• kinship migration networks

• intra-ethnic marriage

• Economic cooperation and community institutions

• Why are certain forms of cultural persistence more acceptable than others?

Another Native People: Mexicans and the American Southwest

• 16th C -Spanish Frontier

• 1821- Mexico

• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)– ended Mexican-American War

– ceded half of all Mexican territory (530,000 square miles)

– guaranteed U.S. citizenship and property rights for Mexicans who decided to remain in the area that would become the American Southwest

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Transforming a Pastoral and Subsistence

Economy

• Pastoral economy (cattle and sheep raising)

• Class and racial hierarchy

– “Spanish” landed aristocracy

– Mestizo laboring class

• Anglo-Hispanic interactions dependent upon rate of settlement

• Economic pressures to cede private and communal lands

• Political restrictions

From Villages to Barrios

• Strategy of accommodation: Female villages and male migrant workers

• Regional and Transnational migration– Texas Hispanic population 20,000 in 1850 to 165,000 in 1900

• Eventually relocate to segregated urban ghettoes

Western Independence orthe Industrial West and

the West as Internal Empire

• Economy of the West based not on small, independent producers but large-scale industries

• The West beholden to the financial, political, and industrial centers of power in the East

The Mining Rush

Individual Prospectors corporate mining companies

• finance technological improvements

• federal subsidies– 1866 National Mineral Act (free public land)

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Ecological clean-up

• 1893 CaminettiAct

• give state the power to regulate mines

• Sacramento River Commission

Hydraulic mining

Ecological Preservation

Yosemite, 1890s

The Cattle Industry

Cowboys: symbols of independence or

seasonal wage workers?• 35,000-

55,000 cowboys

• $30/month pay

• 1/5-1/3 Indian, Mexican, or African American

Farming the “Great American Desert”

• Machinery

• High start-up costs ($1200 per farm) = loans

• More Land (est. 300 acres necessary)

Agribusiness• Market rather than

subsistence crops

• Irrigation– 1902 National Reclamation

Act

– 1 million federal acres of irrigated land

– 10 million state acres

• Science and Education -Technological improvements– Morrill Act (1862) land-

grant universities

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High tenancy and turnover rates

• more than 1/3 of all farmers in 1900 were tenants

• 1/3 to 1/2 moved within a decade

• Farm corporations and hired laborers

Realities of Homesteading

• “It has been a long time since I have written, hasn’t it?…When one never has anything fun to write about, it is no fun to write….We have not had rain since the beginning of June, and then with this heat and often strong winds as well, you can imagine how everything has dried out….We are glad we have the oats ( for many don’t have any and must feed wheat to the stock) and had hoped to have the corn leaves to add to the fodder. But then one fine day there came millions, trillions of grasshoppers in great clouds, hiding the sun, and coming down into the fields, eating up everything that was still there, the leaves on the trees, peaches, grapes, cucumbers, onions, cabbage, everything, everything.”

– Ida Lindgren, 25 August 1874, Kansas

Westward Migration and Female Independence?

Women Homesteaders:The Case for Independence

• Land ownership (widows and single women filed 10% of claims)– “Any woman who can stand her own company…and is willing to

put in as much time at careful labor as she does at the washtub,will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”

• Division of labor on the farms - “dual economy”– men’s labor brought in the big payment at the season’s end

– women’s labor provided provisions for the family day by day and carried the family through difficult times

• Suffrage

Limitations of Freedom

• Relatively few unmarried women in the West (property held by men)

• Prostitution as a major female occupation

• decision making (investments, priorities)

• loneliness and crowding• lack of health care

Rachel Calof

“Of all the privations I knew as a homesteader, the lack of privacy was the hardest to bear.”

Returning to Turner• “Free” land not “free”

• The west was and is the meeting ground of diverse cultures and peoples

• Persistence of ethnicity

• West as internal empire - dependent on federal government and corporations

• The West was not a fresh start but a continuation and intensification of racial, economic, and social conflicts of the South and North

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Why mythologize the American West?

• Self-reliance and upward mobility the basis of the American Dream

• Commercialism - package something uniquely American

• nostalgia for ruggedness as country becomes increasingly corporatized and urbanized

What the West Represents

The End of the Frontier?

• The 1890 census declared that the nation’s “unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”

• 2 people per square mile• What happens to American society when

the frontier comes to an end?• What happens when the American Dream is

no longer possible?