 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. In this lecture, we're going to look at the influence mining had on the American West and we're going to look primarily at the period the 1850s through the 1860s. We want in this lecture to identify the importance of mining in Americanizing the West and what do we mean by that is making the West into bringing it into the American sphere. We want to identify the results of this Americanization on the West and evaluate the mythology of mining. A lot of the mythology is that this idea of rugged individualism, that you had somebody out there panning for gold, filing a claim and striking it rich. And that, you know, is this idea that somebody was panning for gold, this placer mining, it's got placker mining as it's sometimes called. And then it was also very violent out in the old West because you had people getting rich quick, you had people trying to gain that wealth from everybody else. And a lot of this is really Hollywood and it's romanticized fiction. And the role of minorities in the West and women are often ignored. In 1848, just outside of Sacramento, California at a place called Sutter's Mill, this was a mill, a logging mill run by a man named Sutter. One of his employees found gold in the American River. And this set off the California gold rush. Some 300,000 people migrated to California as a result of this and they're coming along different trails. Some along the Oregon Trail, others cutting across going down by the Great Salt Lake on the California Trail, others coming on a more southern route through El Paso. By 1850, more wealth was found in Virginia City, Nevada, and what became known as the Comstock Load. Now this was silver, but there was also gold there. The problem with all of this mining is that it's this idea that you had somebody out there with a pan sifting through debris in the river. But that only lasted a very short while before that played out. And then you needed different types of mining. You needed hard rock mining. You needed people digging into the ground and trying to find veins of ore. That doesn't work. They brought in hydraulics. They brought in dynamite to blast away at the side of mountains and in the holes that they dug. And then they started needing greater and greater technology. And so you have these new types of ways of getting gold and silver out of the ground. And you're going to run into all sorts of problems because sometimes you're releasing other gases and chemicals that have been trapped for a long time. And the amount of investment was big. And so the idea that you had these people panning for gold was true for a while, but it quickly gave way to more investment, more industry, and the rise of industrial mining. It also contributed to the need for railroads in the West. Because of the California Gold Rush, many investors saw the need to bring railroads out there to get the ore to market. The idea that you needed a railroad to help get across the nation was also very important. And by 1862, Congress, after many tries, finally passes a transcontinental bill. This is the Pacific Railroad Act to help build railroads across the United States. A northern route had long been identified, and this is eventually what's going to happen with the transcontinental railroad. But there was also a desire for a southern route into California. So in 1854, because there were problems in the Mesilla Valley, this is over by El Paso and Southern Arizona in that region, the United States had wanted a route there because they needed a pass through the Rocky Mountains. And what they had bought with the Mexican Session after the war between the United States and Mexico, it was still very mountainous. And so this route, the Gadsden Purchase, provided a much more southerly route, and it was also going to be a little bit easier for the railroads to get through there. And so we paid another $15 million for the land. Fishing and whaling was another form of extractive resource acquisition in the West. We talk about mining, but in the years before the Civil War, whale oil was a large amount of the American gross national product. About half of what we shipped overseas, about half of what we produced, people always point out was cotton. About the other half was oil from whales. And so we had been doing whaling in the Atlantic for many years, but in 1848 they discovered these whales over in the Bering Straits by Alaska, and shipping began moving over to the Pacific side as well. Whaling off the Southern California, Fournier Coast as well, following those whale routes down. But by 1870s due to some major disasters on the seas, and because of overhunting, whaling in the Pacific pretty much played out. The California Gold Rush was also reproduced in areas like Colorado. And in Colorado around Pikes Peak area, around Denver, in the Little Dry Creek, about 10 years after they found gold on the American River in California, they found gold in Colorado. And this led to the development of several boom towns. Denver City, Boulder City today, Denver and Boulder, Colorado. Gold in Colorado also comes out of this area where people were finding gold. And, you know, 150,000 ounces doesn't sound like a lot, but it was a considerable amount of gold. And that just kept increasing. And of course that plays out that mining that an individual prospector could find in rivers didn't last long. And so it soon gave way to more industrialized mining as well. The effect of mining on minorities is often unexplored. People don't think about this. But the finding of gold and other minerals like silver really attracted a lot of minorities to the West. And so you have about 80,000 people coming into California in 1849 after the gold strike to begin with, and then another 90,000 the next year. And these were also foreign immigrants. You see some 60,000 Chinese and 8,000 Mexicans coming in to California to take advantage of the gold rush, but very quickly by 1851 the California legislature has passed foreign mining laws. And these were taxes placed upon predominantly Chinese and Mexican miners, which effectively prevented them from coming out into the field. It was only $20 a year, but $20 was pretty hard to come by. And a lot of times prospectors, the idea was to prospect. And so sometimes they didn't find gold. So $20 was a lot of money in those days. And if you're not finding any money, if you're not starting to get rich, it's very cost prohibitive. So this was a way they excluded people who were not American from mining in the West and take advantage of these opportunities. For Native Americans, you already had a policy of removal. And this started in about the 1830s, and this was just a continuation of policies that had been going on moving Native Americans further and further west. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, this moved them into the Indian territory, what they called around Oklahoma into the Dakota areas as well, exchanging land in the East for land in the West. But in California it took on a rather disastrous turn that is going to lead to a very diminished population of Native Americans. A lot of this was due to disease, poverty, and starvation. As more and more Americans came into the West, many Native Americans were susceptible to diseases they brought with them. I mean, this is a continuation of the Columbian exchange. But also because of the competition for resources. Native Americans were hunting and fishing for natural resources, but as more and more people began coming in there taking advantage of those resources, and especially with fishing with better technology, the resources began to dwindle, and a lot of Native Americans are kicked off their lands where they naturally hunted at. They normally hunted at. Also their fish are reduced, and so they don't have a way of feeding themselves. And this is going to exacerbate the problem with disease. More horrendously, even more terribly even, was that the state and local governments were oftentimes paying bounties for Native American scalps. Now a lot of the mythology of the West talks about Indians scalping whites, and in fact that did happen, but also the reverse was true as well. And sometimes it was Americans or Europeans who paid the bounties for scalps first. And Native Americans were just imitating that. So there was a intentional and government-sponsored elimination of Native Americans that occurred in places like California and other sites in the West. We'll mention some of these as we go along. One example is the Gratton Affair, 1854. This was when a brulee, Lakota chief, Conqueror Bear, was trying to negotiate some peace. Mormons were upset. Some Mormon settlers were upset because a cow was missing. It turned out Native Americans had found this cow. It had wandered off from the herd, and they ate it. And so the Mormons were very upset about this. Conqueror Bear was trying to negotiate and saying, look, we'll pay for it, we'll exchange horses for it, we'll do something for it. But they demanded the perpetrators be brought for it, and when Conqueror Bear refused, he was murdered. So this is an example of kind of the overreaction a lot of settlers had toward Native Americans and how little they deemed Native American lives. For Mexicans in California, Native Californians, these Californios, the competition was intense. I mentioned the foreign miners' law already, and so I'm going to skip over that, but in 1849, rather, the state constitutional convention, Mexicans, Americans living in California were trying to protect their property, and they wanted legislation printed in Spanish. They wanted schools in Spanish, and there was some effort to do this. And in 1851, California did create a board of land commissioners to try to negotiate claims and to make sure that Native Californios' claims were respected. This didn't always work out. A lot of Anglo-squatters moved in and took lands that were not theirs, and the effort wasn't very effective in protecting Native Californios' rights. You also had other resistance as a result of the wealth and the rapid immigration of people. You had some violence, you had racism. One example of this is the story of Joaquin Murrieta. He was a bandit, apparently, and took matters into his own hands to try to protect people. He became kind of mythologized as a legendary bandit, and in fact is the basis for Zorro. So that story continued, and it was a bounty put out for his head, and many heads came in, of course, not all of them belonging to Joaquin. And there's some debate as to whether or not he actually existed or not. But this did lead to a lot of violence against Mexican Americans in California because Joaquin Murrieta and this hunt for him. Of course, this was the days before people had IDs or photographs. And so any Californio was suspect as maybe being or in leagues with Murrieta, and so their lives were in danger. There were people who created Spanish language newspapers, and there were some profits to be made from the gold rush from ranchers who were selling cattle to hungry prospectors. So there was some give and take in this as well. This wasn't all negative interactions. In Texas, likewise, after the Revolution, many Mexican Americans living in Texas, Tejanos, lost political power. One prime example is the mayor of San Antonio Juan Seguin. Juan Seguin had been active in helping with the Texas Revolution. He had been at the Alamo and then later on left to convey messages, and later on you find him with Sam Houston, who always called him son, very fond of Juan Seguin and his family. Juan Seguin was at San Jacinto and then ends up as mayor of San Antonio. In 1842, however, he was basically run out of San Antonio after some invasions from Mexico because many white settlers viewed Mexicans with suspicion, including mayor Seguin. He did return in the 1850s, but his family was still suspect, and he did win some political seats and held office, but his name had already been tartished by many people. The population of Mexicans in Texas, Tejanos in Texas, decreased tremendously as a result of people leaving and also because of the Anglo settlement, so they were outnumbered. And in 1845 at the Constitutional Convention, when Texas joined the Union, there was only José Antonio Navarro, who was present and representing Tejano interests. Like the California Land Claims Commission, Texas had one as well, the Borland Miller Commission, and unlike the California example, the Texas Commission did validate and uphold most Spanish land grants. And that just may have been because Tejanos in South Texas held a little bit more political clout. Another group that we often see romanticized in westerns are outlaws, orphans, and soiled doves. And soiled doves kind of means prostitution. And so there was prostitution and there were boom towns, but a lot of this mythology of western violence is oversold. There were studies conducted and they looked at violence that happened in the west and violence in the east in some cities and found out that there was a lot of similarity, that there really was no more, the west was no more violent than the east was as a matter of fact. Now you do have some examples. In 1857, the Mountain Meadow Massacre where Mormons attacked and killed under the disguise and blamed it on the Native Americans, a group of immigrants coming through Mormon territory. Eventually the leader of that was executed and there was prostitution in the west. Many women had no other choice than to serve in the sex trade business in order to eke out a living of some sort. There were a lot of abandoned women. There were women whose husbands had died and they had very little opportunities and so prostitution was something that many women turned to even if only for a short period of time. Another often overlooked aspect was the orphan trains. From 1854, a group of concerned child welfare advocates in New York and in other major cities began trying to do something about orphans. A lot of children were abandoned or in trouble or their parents had died and they were orphaned and so some ministers including one Charles Lawing Brace of New York decided that one of the things to do would be to send these children west. Sometimes to work for families, supposedly for wages but that didn't always work out. Sometimes to be adopted by families and sometimes that didn't always work out of course. But the Children's Aid Society sent children on trains to sites in the west to families in the west for up until almost the 1930s. So this went on for a long time and there were thousands of young children sent west. Also one of the overlooked aspects oftentimes is the role of women and there were few immigrant women. A lot of the immigrants, people coming from overseas were mostly male. However, there were a few immigrant women and there was an effort to allow women to vote more frequently in the west than in the east because there were fewer women there, there were fewer men out there and because of the political power that many politicians in the west wanted because of so few people living out there. And so they took advantage of that and they were able to vote in some states many years before the federal government authorized women to vote in national elections. And also one interesting aspect is that sometimes women who were in Mormon, the Mormon Church, were often kind of seen as being victims of polygamy and men having multiple wives. But in some cases women were able to leverage that. For example, there were women feminists and suffragettes who were active and who were Mormon and who defended polygamy. In fact, one is mentioned in the film, Emily Wells. So it did happen and there were women who were able to exert some cause for women's rights out in the west. And so when we look at the west, we see that the importance of mining was that it did increase immigration and migration to the west and that it was a real boost to the American economy, the gold and silver that was found out there. What was the result of the Americanization of the west? Well, it increased ethnic conflict surely and competition and seriously compromised Native Americans and Mexican American population as well as immigrant Asians who came to the west looking to strike it rich. They were often faced with discrimination as well. And if we look at kind of wiping out some of the mythology of mining and the west, this idea of rugged individualism and increased violence is exaggerated. It ignores the presence of the federal government, the role the federal government had in protecting against Indians and establishing trails for settlers and protecting those trails. It ignores the role of big business of coming in and taking over mining and other opportunities in the west like land. Many land claims were filed by corporations. And also it ignores the ethnic diversity and the role of women in the west. So those are avenues that need to be explored further and hopefully you'll do some reading and studies on your own. Thank you very much. We'll see you next time.