 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Pruice. This lecture we're going to look at the Civil War, the rise of the cattle culture in cowboys and the Indian Wars. So this is going to be a long lecture and we're covering a lot of time in this. But what we want to understand is the role of the West on sectionalism and then to the Civil War, the role the cattle industry and settlement had on the American West and the factors that led to the end of Native American resistance in the West. So we'll start with the sectionalism of 1854 as it turned out in the Kansas and Nebraska Territory of the West. In a search for a route for the transcontinental railroad to go across the Utah Territory into Nebraska, somewhere in there, there were several options open. There's Stephen Douglas of Illinois drafted a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory and the Kansas Territory separately and to allow popular sovereignty into this part of the formerly unorganized territory. And in doing so, he called for a repeal of the compromise line, the Missouri compromise line, which you can see there above the Indian Territory, Texas line at 3630, said that there would be no slavery above this line. And what popular sovereignty said is let the people decide, let the people who live in that territory decide on what was going to happen. And this set up a tremendous influx of people rushing both Northerners and Southerners supported by organizations either opposed to or in favor of slavery in those territories in order to vote. In Kansas, you had two governments that were competing with each other. The pro-slavery government at Lake Compton and the anti-slavery government at Topeka. And you had a lot of people coming in here causing violence and seeking to disrupt the elections and these are called border ruffians. And the violence continued in both Washington DC and back in Kansas. Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, was attacked on the floor of the Senate. He had made this speech called the crime on Kansas and talking about the border ruffians and the violence that was going on in the territories. And he insulted Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, said he was in bed with that harlot slavery, and this caused a lot of disruptions. The violence in Kansas escalated, 800 pro-slavery people attacked Lawrence, Kansas. And on the banks of the Potawatomi Creek in Kansas, John Brown, a New England abolitionist and kind of a millennialist, kind of an eccentric, attacked and killed people. And this led to more and more violence throughout this civil war that was happening in Kansas. And John Brown escaped, however. Another incident from the West was in the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott was the servant of an army doctor, he was a slave. The army doctor himself was an abolitionist, and they wanted to start a test case. If you took slaves into Northern Territory, which was considered free territory, were they still a slave or not? And so it was on this basis that Dred Scott sued for freedom. When this case reached the Supreme Court, it just started off in St. Louis, Missouri and that's where it first came. When it reached the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice Roger Taney said that, there's a couple of things, slaves could not sue in the Supreme Court, he said. They had no rights to which the white man is bound to respect. And he also said that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, that slaves were property and you cannot remove people's property without due process, he said. So this threw a wrench in a popular sovereignty ideology. And how would it play out? Back in LaCompton, Kansas submitted a pro-slavery constitution. And the President of the United States, James Buchanan, supported it. And he made this an issue for party loyalty. And this caused a split in the Democrats and Stephen Douglas left the President's side and did not support the President in this initiative. The House denied Kansas statehood and the whole thing caused a rift in the Democratic Party itself. In 1858, the next year, Abraham Lincoln, a congressman from Illinois, challenged Stephen Douglas to debates. And at this, Lincoln attacked the idea of popular sovereignty. He said, you know, a House divided itself against itself cannot stand. While Douglas continued to support popular sovereignty and issued the free poor doctrine, which said that territories could prohibit slavery simply by not passing laws favoring it. Now the debates made Lincoln popular, but he didn't win the election and Douglas was really vilified by the South after this. In October of 1859, John Brown reemerges and he launches attack on the federal armory just outside Washington, D.C. at Harper's Ferry in the hopes of formenting a slave revolt. So this was the context of the time, by the time the 1860 election rolls around, the Democrats are split between North and South and you have a constitutional union party which just wants to preserve the union and Abraham Lincoln is nominated by the Republicans. And when the election occurs, you see that it's along sectional lines. The North overwhelmingly in California, Oregon, Washington overwhelmingly voted for Lincoln. However, the South overwhelmingly voted for the Southern Democrats. And this vote and the way it turned out, although Lincoln only got 39% of the popular vote, he won the electoral vote overwhelmingly and became the next president of the United States. As a result of this election, many people in the South feared Lincoln would threaten slavery. There was an attempt at a compromise to protect slavery below the Missouri Compromise Line 3630, but it didn't work out. And in December of that year, South Carolina took the first steps and succeeded from the union. The next year, secession continued, other states fell in line in the South and the Confederate states of America was formed and Jefferson Davis was elected their president. Lincoln for his part wanted to preserve the union, but on April the 12th, 1861, the Civil War began when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina's harbor. In the West, you see very few battles. There were some battles in the New Mexico Territory, but California remained in the union. Texas did have some attempts to capture Galveston and along the coast areas as part of the North's Anaconda plan to squeeze the South by limiting their ability to trade cotton. And this became very important because Texas was able to ship cotton over the Rio Grande and then allow it to sail to Europe on Mexican ships. However, there was a French invasion of Mexico in order to collect some debts. And so the French had the throne in Mexico from 1861 past the end of the war and this caused some trade disruption as well. The cattle empire after the war began developing. Now much of the Midwest was called the Great American Desert and this had been established back in the 1820s that this wasn't really fit land for settlement, but there were a lot of buffalo and there were a lot of cattle out there. And so after the Civil War, the cattle were rounded up in South Texas and driven north along several trails and you see that here, the Good Night Loving Trail, the Western Trail, the Chisholm Trail. What they were trying to do was get those cattle to those railroads coming out of Kansas and Omaha and to the rail lines there, to the traffic routes that were there, the settlement routes along the Oregon Trail and to move cattle north. And then from the railroad it could be shipped east and also brought up to provide settlers in the north with cattle of their own. The cattle industry created several boom towns along that rail line, Abilene, Kansas, Wichita, Kansas, Ellsworth, Dodge City. And it kept moving west as the railroad moved west because there was a lot of animosity against Texas cattle. For one thing, they were blamed for fevers caused by ticks and it was influencing other cattle and so there were laws passed against Texas cattle passing through various towns and so that's why the trails kept moving further and further west. Part of the culture of the cowboy, mostly cowboys were young men. There's a lot of myths because of Hollywoodization in the movies. They're often portrayed as middle-aged or older men. But in reality, cowboy was worked for the young people. It paid very low. There were a lot of African-American, there were a lot of Mexican-American and Chinese and others who were involved in all the cattle trails and they were employed to drive cattle and it was very rough work and so it was for the young. And a lot of cowboy culture was influenced by Spanish and Mexican influences. We also see, just like in mining, the rise of cattle barons, that it doesn't stay just a person who's driving a head of cattle up the trail. It became big business and big business on an international level. A lot of the cattle barons who came in and claimed hundreds and thousands of acres of what they call bonanza farms were not even Americans. The English, Irish and other Europeans had invested in American land and cattle business. The government provided free land, they just simply came in and took advantage of it. In 1883, there is a strike as this continues because cowboys at one point early on by the early 1860s were seen as kind of being independent and commanded much more money. Twenty years later, by the 1880s, that had ended because it was overrun, there was a lot of cattle in other places, not just in Texas anymore. The great trail drives weren't as necessary. There was people who didn't want cattle trampling over their farms. And so pay went down, especially with foreign owners of land. And so in 1883, there was a two and a half month cowboy strike. It was largely unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, but it was an attempt to kind of organize the cowboys in this latched effort to preserve that way of life. The cattle empire declined largely because, however, of some severe winters and droughts in the summers, most especially 1885, 1886. Another example is the children's winter in 1888. Over 200, between 200 and 500 people were killed when the temperatures dropped rapidly, and a lot of these were children walking home from school. There was more and more people moving into the West because of the railroads. The railroads were bringing people in, and so this ended the free range cattle markets. And so there weren't, there was more fencing and barbed wire, and so cattle couldn't just roam freely anymore, and the trail drives became obsolete. The barbed wire also increased the chance of fence wars, as people did try to get their cattle to market by driving them across ranges and running into people who had fences up. There was competition from the sheep industry for grazing. A sheep was big money and big business, and they and cattle ate grass differently. And so the cattle couldn't compete with the sheep. They were also reason for fencing the sheep in, and so this combination of factors led to a lot of problems with the cattle industry. And there was violence, no doubt. You did have some lawlessness in some of these cattle towns, and this gave rise to vigilance committees, vigilantes who came in and formed their own law enforcement branch to cut down on a lot of the violence from young men off the cattle drive who were drinking and causing trouble. You also had cattlemen's associations, and they're passing laws and regulations to limit rustling and people stealing cattle. There were new opportunities for settlers as well, and a lot of these were as a result of the Homestead Act of 1862. Some 400,000 homesteaders moved into the West, took advantage of the land, and became land owners. And when the land, of course, in the West wasn't as wet, wasn't as fitted for growing crops, and so more and more land was added to the amount of land you could claim. And so there was the Timber Culture Act, the Desert Land Act, and the Timber and Stone Act, which increased the amount of land you could get because of these types of products on the land. Finally, I want to mention about the African Americans who were moving West, taking advantage of free land through the Homestead Act. These were called exodusters, and their leader and the advocate for this movement was a man named Benjamin Pap Singleton, and he said that African Americans should go West, get away from the segregated South, and own their own land. Railroads were important in the Western development as well. There were more than two million acres of land making railroads the largest land owners in the American West next to the federal government. They were given land to help allow them to raise their own money by selling that land to prospective settlers, and that land was given out in a checkerboard square fashion, and the railroads own alternating sections. And so they would, of course, sell their land for us to raise money. The money they sold for the government land wasn't theirs to keep, so they weren't as incentivized to sell that land. The vision for a transcontinental railroad was finally brought into being on May 10, 1869, when the two railroad companies, the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific met at Promontory Point in Utah just north of Salt Lake City, but soon before the end of the decade, five other transcontinental lines were established, bringing up farmers and ranchers and other settlers to the West. Railroads therefore became the principal colonizers of the West as a result of this. For the Native Americans, a lot of this new settlement, the railroads, the cattle meant an end to their way of life. And we're talking a lot of Indians were living in the West. Now, some of these had been Native Americans from the East pushed West, but there were people like the Pueblo who lived in settled settlements. They were agricultural people, growing crops, raising animals. You had, of course, the Apache Navajo, the semi-nomadic agricultural Indians, and then Native Americans living on the plains. These are the ones that you see in the movies most, the plains Indians. They were very nomadic. They excelled at the horse. And we think of the Comanche and the Lakota as being two good examples of these plain Indians. A lot of them are kind of romanticized in movies. But it is true that the buffalo was very important to their life and they lived and fed off buffalo and the buffalo hunt. And much of their life and culture was tied around the buffalo. Just a recap of US Indian policy. There had been a policy of removing Indians from the West and putting them on reservations. And this increased in the years before and after the Civil War. Problems with the Indians led President Grant, following the Civil War, to try to develop a peace commission to quote civilize the Indians, what this really meant was to Americanize the Indians, to assimilate them into American culture. And this is called civilizing them. And the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the organization was set up to administer this. And one example of this is the Medicine Lodge Treaty, which required a lot of Native American tribes to sign to, saying that they would return to the reservations and allow themselves to be taken care of by the government. Now there were examples of attacks on Native Americans. I mentioned that Californians had put bounties out on Native American heads. There were other examples, the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. The Wachita massacre in Oklahoma. The Marias massacre in Montana. And the Camp Grant massacre in Arizona. All of these are examples of where white troops attacked Native Americans. Either in retaliation or just out of attempts to red Native Americans from the property. And there was retaliation, of course. From 1875 to 1877, the so-called Sioux Wars are part of the Native American wars, the Indian wars, that ran from the end of the Civil War to about 1890. So this involves two major chiefs sitting bull in crazy horse. The most blatant example of Indian on white violence was on June 25th, 1876, in Montana along the Wyoming border, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where General George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry were defeated and killed by Native Americans. But this was very rare. Most Indians didn't set up camp in that large of a camp. These Native Americans have left the reservation. The army was harassing them, trying to get them to go back on the reservation. And Custer just bit off more than he could chew and his soldiers and he paid the price. Americans learned of the disaster at Little Bighorn. While they were celebrating, a few weeks later, their 100th anniversary of the nation in 1776 to 1876. So this really caused the Native Americans to be put under intense pressure from the army, who wanted to make sure this didn't happen again. And in fact, in a few years later, in 1881, both crazy horse and sitting bull are killed by other Native Americans who were tribal police. Another famous incident is the Nez Perce War. The Nez Pierce Indians, Nez Perce, they resisted moving. And so Chief Joseph and about 500 others left and were trying to meet up with Sitting Bull, who was up in Canada at this time. And they made their way, and they were about 40 miles short of the border, when they had to give up. And that's when Joseph made his famous statement that he would fight no more forever. The final resistance and what some of the worst fighting was the Apache resistance. This was the 1860s throughout the 1880s. In this Cochise, the leader finally agreed to settle down on a reservation. However, there were others like Geronimo, who refused to capitulate. And he continued to fight well almost up until 1890 before he finally surrendered and was taken to Florida and then finally released. The Comanche Wars of 1871 and 1875 were largely in retaliation against Buffalo hunters. The Warren Wagon train massacre was an incident that happened up northwest of Fort Worth. And in fact, it's interesting because William Sheridan, General Sheridan, was sent down to investigate rumors of Native American problems. And they landed at Brownsville. He and some Buffalo soldiers as guards traveled up from Brownsville, up to the various forts in Texas to inspect and to ascertain the Indian attacks that were reported to be going on. And he reported nothing had happened. And he had a few hours after he got to Fort Griffith up northwest of Fort Worth, a wagon train was attacked and Henry Warren and others were murdered. And what had happened, the Native Americans later said, was that they had seen Sheridan and his men and chosen to let them pass. But then they promised to attack the next group, which was this wagon train. And so Sheridan calls for all out warfare as a result. In 1874, because of increased Buffalo hunting, Native Americans under Kwana Parker attacked Adobe Walls and later on in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, up in just south of Amarillo. Kwana Parker finally surrendered the next year. Finally, the ghost dance. This was a religious ceremony meant to protect Native Americans, to invoke the spirits of their dead ancestors. And Wavoka, who was a Paiute prophet, began spreading this religious practice and belief. This frightened a lot of people who were reservation agents, and they called in the army to help put down the ghost dancers. And this included members of the Seventh Cavalry, who at Wounded Knees, South Dakota, destroyed members of the ghost dance religion, who had left the Badlands of the Dakotas. And so they were cut down by the Seventh Cavalry, kind of in retaliation for the losses the Seventh Cavalry had faced as well. By 1887, the policy of the United States was to turn Indians into American farmers. And they began dividing up the tribal land on reservations and any land that was not given to a Native American family would then be available for buying or purchasing or leasing by whites. And so this really took a lot of Native American land out of their hands. There was also an Indian industrial school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania that was established, and the attempt there, according to the director, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, was to kill the Indian to save the white man. In other words, they wanted to assimilate Native Americans, turn them into Americans and cut their hair. They wouldn't speak the language anymore and they would dress like Americans. And it's an attempt to get them into the mainstream culture. Now, there were some attempts on the reservations, however, to preserve Native American culture. Many of these were continued by Native Americans themselves, from holding rodeos and herding sheep and hunting. All of these things were done to maintain their culture from a people who were obviously seeing much of their world that they knew erode. And so if we look at the West and we understand the role that sectionalism played is that although few battles happened during the Civil War in the West, it was the West and the contest over whether or not slavery would extend was one of the reasons why the Civil War happened in the first place. There were a lot of volunteers, although few battles, a lot of volunteers in the West went east to fight. The role of cattlemen and the settlement on the American West, well, after the Civil War, the beef industry did expand and it caused conflict between ranchers and farmers and other new settlers. And of course, the buffalo. The cattle were very susceptible to the winters and to overproduction and eventually the cattle industry declined. What led to the end of Native Americans' resistance in the West? Well, army pressure, the destruction of the buffalo herds, increased Western settlement, the advent of the railroads, disease and attempts to Americanize Native American Indians. All of this led to reduce their resistance and at the same time, cause their numbers to dwindle. Thank you very much for paying attention and we'll see you soon.