The American West Read online

  Jon T. Coleman

  South Bend, Indiana

  Acknowledgments

  Over the years many friends and colleagues contributed ideas and support for The American West: A New Interpretive History. At the Riverside and Irvine campuses of the University of California: Carlos E. Cortes, Edwin Scott Gaustad, Irving G. Hendrick, Spencer C. Olin, and Henry C. Meyer. At Mount Holyoke College: Daniel Czitrom and Joseph J. Ellis. At Yale University: Nancy Cott, Robert Johnston, Howard R. Lamar, Steven B. Stoll, and Robin Winks. At the University of Notre Dame: Patrick Griffin, Annie Gilbert Coleman, and Lindsey Passenger Wieck. In the wider historical world: Kathryn Abbott, Robert Berkhofer, Edwin R. Bingham, Alan Bogue, Elizabeth Fenn, Greg Hise, Paul W. Hirt, Wilbur Jacobs, Elizabeth Jameson, Earl Pomeroy, Rodman Paul, Ruth Sutter, and Eliott West. Several generations of students helped with the research for this book, and we applaud their good work: Laurel Angell, James T. Brown, Robert Campbell, Jack Goldwasser, Jeff Hardwick, Allison Hine-Estes, Jennifer Howe, Benjamin H. Johnson, James Kessenides, Andrew Lewis, J. C. Mutchler, Christina Nunez, Elizabeth Pauley, Robert Perkinson, and Nora Sulzmann. The transformation of manuscript into book was the responsibility of the skilled staff of Yale University Press: we especially want to thank Christopher Rogers, Sarah Miller, and Eva Skewes.

  In 2015, as the work on this revised edition was in progress, Robert V. Hine, the book’s original author, died at the age of ninety-three. Many years ago, when I was a young graduate student, Bob introduced me to the work of doing history. His joints stiffened by rheumatoid arthritis, his eyes blinded by cataracts, he was not able to browse the stacks and read the documents, and in 1969 he hired me to retrieve the things he needed and read them aloud to him. He was working on the original edition of The American West, and he sent me scurrying after monographs and documents of all kinds. For an aspiring historian, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Bob’s eyes had failed him, but the sensitivity of his historical ear was striking. He would sit quietly as I read the things I found, and I knew we’d hit pay dirt the moment he began to punch away on his big brailler. Bob was a master at selecting the telling phrase or quotation that conveys the deep meaning of the evidence. This skill can’t be taught by Socratic method but requires an affective process of learning that engages the spirit as well as the mind. His example helped me become a more sensitive reader, always listening for the song in the text. Bob’s sight was restored by surgery in 1986—a miraculous event he recounted in his wonderful memoir, Second Sight (1993)—and it provided him with renewed opportunity to work during the years of his retirement. It offered us the opportunity to collaborate on a new edition of The American West.

  For this revision, Bob and I were joined by Jon T. Coleman, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Although Bob’s days of doing history were over (in his last years he turned to writing historical novels), he was enthusiastic about passing the torch to a representative of the rising generation. Jon and I join in mourning Bob’s passing but also in celebrating his life’s work. This book is inspired by his vision of western history. As he wrote in the preface to the previous edition: “In alighting out for the West (that’s the way Huck Finn put it) we intend to interpret the story of the American frontier with little pretense of being comprehensive or completely objective. Instead we face with wonder the deep contradictions in our history and try to make sense of them.”

  John Mack Faragher

  Hamden, Connecticut

  Introduction: Dreams and Homelands

  “The West has been the great word of our history. The Westerner has been the type and master of our American life.” When future president Woodrow Wilson wrote these lines in 1895, he infused geography with portent. He was neither the first nor the last to so grandly interpret the American West. An unnamed assemblage of human beings had cultivated a special relationship with a unique space, and Wilson celebrated the mighty people that sprouted there. “The West,” a magical utterance, launched an exceptional history that made America what it was.1

  Wilson was not the first to imagine that power lay in a certain direction. Centuries before they first sailed to the Americas, Europeans were dreaming of unknown lands to the west, places inhabited perhaps by “the fabulous races of mankind,” men and women unlike any seen in the known world. The people might be frightening, but their world would surely be a paradise, a golden land somewhere beyond the setting sun. In the words of Horace, the Roman poet,

  See, see before us the distant glow,

  Through the thin dawn-mists of the West,

  Rich sunlit plains and hilltops gemmed with snow,

  The Islands of the Blest!

  Such visions dared individuals to bet their lives and fortunes (as well as the lives and fortunes of underlings and investors) on finding pockets of wonderment on the far western horizon. Christopher Columbus longed to see the mythical western isles “of which so many marvels are told,” and like Wilson he believed mastery resided there as well. Following the lead of fictional knights who conquered lost islands and ruled them as lords, this Genoese weaver’s son foresaw social advantage at the end of his journey. One trip might turn him, a sailor from a modest background, into a “High Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor in perpetuity.” Columbus sailed to the edge to secure a privileged spot at the center of his world.2

  Anticipating contact with unknown peoples: the “Fabulous Races of Mankind.” From Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Columbus stood in a line of dreamers that stretched behind and before him. They endowed space with myth, building fantasies of golden cities, fountains of youth, labor-free paradises, Amazonian wonder-women, and empire, always empire, out on the horizon. “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” declared Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the mid-eighteenth century, and the first generation of American nationalists adopted that rhetoric as their own. “True religion, and in her train, dominion, riches, literature, and art have taken their course in a slow and gradual manner from East to West,” the Reverend John Wither spoon preached at Princeton in 1775, and “from thence forebode the future glory of America.” As he spoke, settlers and land speculators were carving farms and towns from Indian territory west of the Appalachians. Westward Ho! In the nineteenth century, American expansionists coupled the imagined West to the idea of American greatness and called the result Manifest Destiny.3

  . . .

  Dreams motivate history through the men and women they kick into action. Imagination carried Europeans a long way, but accepted without skepticism, those dreams have carried historical inquiry into thickets of delusion. At the end of their fantasies, western adventurers found other people at home, people living in more than two thousand distinct cultures, speaking hundreds of different languages, and making their livings in scores of dissimilar environments. These peoples did not consider themselves at the margins of anything. Most considered their homes to be the center of the universe.

  Over the centuries of European colonization, native populations would accumulate an assortment of unwanted and misleading nicknames. Europeans garbled native languages. They heard names wrong, pronounced them weirdly, and applied them inappropriately. The Spanish, for example, labeled all the natives living in agricultural villages along the river that would become the Rio Grande “the Pueblos.” They then asked “the Pueblos” to identify their neighbors. “Navajo” and “Apache” grew from these conversions. None of these groups considered these names their own. They called themselves Tewa or Dine or Inde. Native groups’ self-identifications often carried the same idea: they meant “the people.”

  Of course, Columbus pioneered the abuse of proper nouns by labeling all the people he met los indios, mistakenly thinking he had landed in the East Indies. Within a half-century “Indian” had passed into English, used to refer to all Native Americans, lumping together urban Aztec militarists with small-town Hopi farmers with roam
ing Micmac hunters. Just as the term European includes dozens of nationalities and ethnic subgroups, so the term Indian encompassed a cavalcade of diverse humanity.

  The creation of man and woman. Painted pot, Mimbres River culture of southwestern New Mexico, c. 1000. National Museum of the American Indian.

  . . .

  Native peoples’ backstory matched Europeans’ in grandeur and complexity. The ice brought them. Clad in animal skins, bands of hunters trudged across the frozen tundra, crossing to America from Asia across a Bering land bridge some thirty to forty thousand years ago, about the time migrants elsewhere were settling the British Isles. The ice brought them, and as time passed and temperatures rose, the thaw cut them loose from their ancient moorings. They moved south onto the northern Great Plains, a hunter’s paradise teeming with camels, miniature horses, saber-toothed tigers, and wooly mammoths. The humans multiplied with the bounty.

  Remarkably, the oral traditions of many Indian people depict a long journey from a distant place of origin to a new homeland. The Pimas of the Southwest sing an “Emergence Song”:

  This is the White Land; we arrive singing,

  Head dresses waving in the breeze.

  We have come! We have come!

  The land trembles with our dancing and singing.

  The migrants danced, sung, and worked, transforming their natural environments, turning foreign landscapes into homes. They developed a unique tradition of stone tool-making that archaeologists call Clovis, after the New Mexico site where these distinctive artifacts were first discovered in 1932. In the years since Clovis points and choppers have been found in diggings from Montana to Mexico, Nova Scotia to Arizona.4

  Long-term global warming and a profound (and poorly understood) extinction event altered their natural environment. The giant mammals disappeared, opening the way for alternative subsistence regimes suited to higher average temperatures. Groups reinvented themselves as fishers and farmers. An early French visitor to the Florida coast was amazed at the abundant harvests Timucua fisher-men took from the sea. They used elaborate weirs, he wrote, “made in the water with great reeds so well and cunningly set together, after the fashion of a labyrinth or maze, with so many turns or crooks, as it is impossible to do with more cunning or industry.” Across the continent, the peoples of the Northwest Pacific coast exploited aquatic resources to settle in tightly packed populations, the densest in North America. Salmon, which spawned in numbers so great that they sometimes filled the rivers to overflowing, undergirded these distinct societies. The harvests allowed the Tlingits, Haidas, Kwakiutls, and other coastal peoples the abundance to develop a rich and refined material culture, including grand clan houses with distinctive carved and painted wood, fantastic totem poles, and magnificent blankets woven of wild goat’s wool. Powerful clans and families ruled the banks as mighty war canoes patrolled the fisheries.5

  NATIVE CULTURE AREAS

  An Aztec farmer cultivates his corn. “Florentine Codex,” c. 1550. World Digital Library.

  The ice brought them and fish fed some of them well, but domesticated plants changed huge numbers of them forever. North America counts as one of four world sites where late Stone Age people invented the practice of growing their own food. The uniquely American crop combination of corn, beans, and squash—known by the Iroquois as “the three sisters”—originated in the Mexican highlands some five to ten thousand years ago and gradually spread northward. Maize cultivation fueled population growth and the rise of cities with elaborate social hierarchies and cultural practices. Sun kings rose and claimed spots atop massive earthen pyramids built by conscripted labor. Priests sacrificed captives while warriors punished rivals. Kingdoms rose and fell, and the humans of the Western Hemisphere settled into the ruts in which all agricultural civilizations grooved.

  . . .

  The cultivation of foodstuffs instigated similar flowerings of densely settled human populations on many of the planet’s continental landmasses. The same Neolithic revolution, however, produced quite different sets of power relations in Europe and the Americas. When they came together, these farming peoples puzzled over each other’s politics. The Europeans sought kings and bosses among the Indians. They expected to find masters like themselves, captains who issued commands that underlings obeyed. The Indians did have leaders, but these chiefs ruled according to principles that seemed bizarre to the newcomers. Headmen in agricultural communities supervised the farming economy. They acted the boss, directing the work of others. Still, they didn’t appear to profit from their command of labor. The community judged chiefs not by how much wealth and power they accumulated but rather by how well they distributed resources to clans and families. A good chief was often an impoverished chief, an arrangement that struck Europeans as totally wrong. But Indians found European traditions equally obscure. In the early seventeenth century a young Huron visited France, and upon his return he reported his shock at the conditions he found there. “Among the French,” he told his tribesmen, “men were whipped, hanged and put to death without distinction of innocence or guilt.” He had seen a “great number of needy and beggars,” and could not understand why the French people tolerated such conditions, “saying that if [they] had some intelligence [they] would set some order in the matter, the remedies being simple.”6

  TRIBAL LOCATIONS

  Indian chiefs weren’t saints for their poverty. They gave in order to get. By accepting gifts, followers promised favors and allegiance. Headmen could call on them to fight and work, and to support their leadership in times of trouble. Native politicians exercised their authority differently than their European counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t wield power.

  Yet the practice of gift-giving for political advantage kept inequalities in Native America within a narrower range than Europeans’ top-heavy distribution of property, and nowhere in North America did natives own land individually. Kinship groups, clans, and whole tribes claimed productive resources. These collective use rights contrasted sharply with the European tradition of private property. The ideology of European settlers mixed individual property rights with individual righteousness, and they doubted the moral fiber of paupers who didn’t own land. In their society, the better sort monopolized the best agricultural sites and handed down their privileged locations to their children. Their understandings of real estate and inheritance led many settlers to assault the worthiness of Indians’ property systems and personal habits. Deeming the natives to be free-roaming loafers, many settlers denied that the Indians had any rights to the land at all.

  Soil embroiled the grain-eaters in contests over rights and calories. But even as they battled fiercely over earth, they struggled just as mightily to comprehend (and alter) each other’s supernatural beliefs. Probably the most fundamental distinction between invading Europeans and indigenous Indian cultures came down to religion. In general, Indian peoples didn’t recognize a divide between the natural and supernatural. They inhabited a spiritual world in which persons of all kinds—humans and nonhumans, the living and the dead—brought order and instigated chaos. Mystical beings strode the earth while normal humans exited reality in dreams and visions. Spirits were neither wholly malevolent nor benign. They were complicated, just like the people they aided and tormented. Native religion addressed the uncertainty and insuperability of life. Native religion connected Indian people with nature and encouraged a strong sense of belonging to their own places, their homelands.

  Europeans, by contrast, were less concerned with sacred places than with sacred time, the movement toward a second coming or a new millennium, a way of thinking that encouraged people to belief in progress, to believe that by picking up and moving to a new land they might better their future. Christians prayed to one indivisible god, and their monotheism drew their thoughts toward grand designs and single causes. Instead of fluidity, hierarchy governed their reality. The Bible taught them that they were separate and distinct from the rest of nature, granted them domi
nion over “every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The Christian God revealed himself as a man, not as a coyote or a rock.7

  “The Arrival of the Englishmen in Virginia” (detail). Engraving by Theodore de Bry, based on a watercolor by John White, from Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  . . .

  Religion is a fitting end to this opening. One might imagine a final scene: a split-screen image of an Aztec priest hacking off a captive’s head alongside a Spanish inquisitor disemboweling a heretic. Fade from viscera red to ocean blue as the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria bobbed at anchor somewhere in the Bahamas, and we are on the frontier.

  Nothing inspires sorrow like fanatical certainty. On the seams of geography and culture, human beings of many creeds, casts, and colors wreaked much havoc with deadly self-assurance. These attitudes skewed the writing of history long after their originators perished. The American frontier, declared Frederick Jackson Turner at the end of the nineteenth century, was “the meeting point between civilization and savagery.” His phrase rang with the arrogance of the victors in the centuries-long campaign of colonial conquest. Frontiers bred violence, as colonizers sought territory and power and Indians struggled to defend their homelands. Turner felt certain that he knew who belonged on which side. But many Americans are no longer sure who exactly was the savage and who the civilized.8