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Closing the Western Frontier: 1880-1920

Building the Transcontinental Railroad

Along with the development of the atomic bomb, the digging of the Panama Canal, and landing the first men on the moon, the construction of a transcontinental railroad was one of the United States' greatest technological achievements. Railroad track had to be laid over 2,000 miles of rugged terrain, including mountains of solid granite.

Before the transcontinental railroad was completed, travel overland by stagecoach cost $1,000, took five or six months, and involved crossing rugged mountains and arid desert. The alternatives were to travel by sea around the tip of South America, a distance of 18,000 miles; or to cross the Isthmus of Panama, then travel north by ship to California. Each route took months and was dangerous and expensive. The transcontinental railroad would make it possible to complete the trip in five days at a cost of $150 for a first-class sleeper.

The first spikes were driven in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Two companies competed to lay as much track as possible. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, Calif., while the Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Neb. The government gave the companies rights of way of 200 feet on each side of the track and financial aid of $16,000 to $48,000 for each mile of track laid.

At first, the Union Pacific, which had flat terrain, raced ahead. The Central Pacific had to run train track through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Working three shifts around the clock, Chinese immigrants hand drilled holes into which they packed black powder and later nitroglycerine. The progress in the tunnels through the mountains was agonizingly slow, an average of a foot a day.

Stung by the Union Pacific's record of eight miles of track laid in a single day, the Central Pacific concocted a plan to lay 10 miles in a day. Eight Irish tracklayers put down 3,520 rails, while other workers laid 25,800 ties and drove 28,160 spikes in a single day. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, a golden spike was hammered into the final tie.

The transcontinental railroad was built in six years almost entirely by hand. Workers drove spikes into mountains, filled the holes with black powder, and blasted through the rock inch by inch. Handcarts moved the drift from cuts to fills. Bridges, including one 700 feet long and 126 feet in the air, had to be constructed to ford streams. Thousands of workers, including Irish and German immigrants, former Union and Confederate soldiers, freed slaves, and especially Chinese immigrants played a part in the construction. Chinese laborers first went to work for the Central Pacific as it began crossing California's Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1865. At one point, 8,000 of the 10,000 men toiling for the Central Pacific were Chinese. At one point, Chinese workers were lowered in hand-woven reed baskets to drill blasting holes in the rock. They placed explosives in each hole, lit the fuses, and were, hopefully, pulled up before the powder was detonated. Explosions, freezing temperatures, and avalanches in the High Sierras killed hundreds. When Chinese workers struck for higher pay, a Central Pacific executive withheld their food supplies until they agreed to go back to work.

An English-Chinese phrase book from 1867 translated the following phrases into Chinese:

“Can you get me a good boy? He wants $8 a month? He ought to be satisfied with $6.... Come at 7 every morning. Go home at 8 every night. Light the fire. Sweep the rooms. Wash the clothes. Wash the windows. Sweep the stairs. Trim the lamps. I want to cut his wages.”

Many of the railroad's builders viewed the Plains Indians as obstacles to be removed. General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1867: "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next year, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers."

Construction of the railroad provided many opportunities for financial chicanery, corruption, graft, and bribery. The greatest financial scandal of the 19th century grew out of the railroad's construction. The president of the Union Pacific helped found a construction company, called Credit Mobilier, which allowed investors, including several members of Congress, to grant lucrative construction contracts to themselves, while nearly bankrupting the railroad.

The railroad had profound effects on American life. New phrases entered the American vocabulary such as "time's up," "time's a wasting," and "the train is leaving the station." It also led to the division of the nation into four standard time zones. In addition, the railroads founded many of the towns on the Great Plains on land grants they were awarded by the federal government, and then sold the land to settlers.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad changed the nation. Western agricultural products, coal, and minerals could move freely to the east coast. Just as the Civil War united North and South, the transcontinental railroad united East and West. Passengers and freight could reach the west coast in a matter of days instead of months at one-tenth the cost. Settlers rushed into what was previously considered a desert wasteland. The 1890 Census would declare that the American frontier had disappeared. The railroad was a major cause.

Equally important, the success of the transcontinental railroad encouraged an American faith that with money, determination, and organization anything can be accomplished. The construction of railroad demonstrated the effectiveness of complex military-like organization and assembly-line processes.

The Great American Desert

When he explored the area that was to become Nebraska and Oklahoma in 1820, Major Stephen H. Long called the region "the Great American Desert." He considered the area "almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence." It was flat, treeless, and arid.

Half a century later, the "Great American Desert" received a new name, the Great Plains. This region consists of the area east of the Rockies and just west of the 100th meridian: the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, a significant part of Texas, and New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Instead of being viewed as an obstacle to America's westward expansion, the plains were quickly transformed into America's breadbasket and the site of many of the country's richest mines.

Americans surged westward after 1860 for many reasons. The discovery of mineral deposits brought thousands of people into the region, causing towns to spring up overnight. By opening up eastern markets to farmers and ranchers, railroad construction also stimulated population growth on the plains.

The Comstock Lode and the Mining Frontier

The richest silver deposit in American history was discovered in 1857 in Nevada. Two brothers, Evan and Hosea Grosh, found the deposit, but died before they were able to record their claims. Henry Comstock, a sheepherder and prospector, who cared for the brothers' cabin, unsuccessfully tried to find gold on the land, sold his claims within months, and died a poor man. But the silver lode came to bear his name.

While the Comstock claim did contain some gold, miners were unable to get to it because it of an abundance of bluish clay. It turned out that the clay was silver of exceptional purity. This discovery triggered a rush of thousands of miners to the area. A railroad was quickly built and the area became one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the West.

Virginia City, a town built on top of the mother lode, was the most important city between Chicago and the Pacific in the 1870s. The population soared from 4,000 in 1862 to 25,000 in 1874. The town's six-story hotel had the only elevator west of Chicago, and downtown had 110 saloons, several opium dens, and 20 theaters and music halls.

Largely because of Virginia City's population boom, Nevada Territory was created in 1861 and statehood came just three years later. By the 1870s, over $230 million had been produced by the mines, helping to finance the Civil War and bolstering the value of the Union's paper greenbacks. But beginning in 1877, Virginia City's population began to decline, and by 1930, only 500 still lived in the town.

Working the Comstock Lode was extraordinarily dangerous. Apart from the risk of cave-ins and underground fires, miners had to worry about underground flooding. The temperature of water below 700 feet rose to 108 degrees. When miners penetrated through rock, steam and scalding water would pour into the tunnel, and miners had to jump into cages, risking death if the hoisting mechanisms failed to lift them quickly enough.

It was in Virginia City that Samuel Clemens acquired the pseudonym Mark Twain. At the age of 26 in the summer of 1862, with just $45 to his name, Clemens accepted a job as a $25 a week reporter for Virginia City's most influential daily newspaper. A year later he began signing the name "Mark Twain" to his columns. In a letter to his mother he described life in the rowdy mining town:

I have just heard five pistol shots down the street.... The pistol did its work well...two of my friends [were shot]. Both died within three minutes.

In his book Roughing It, Twain described the arduous process of refining the ore. Workers, wielding sledgehammers, broke up the ore, which was then pulverized by machines. The dust was mixed with water, mercury, and salt in heated tubs. The mercury attracted particles of silver and gold. When heated, the mercury evaporated, leaving pure gold and silver. About 15 million pounds of poisonous mercury were used to extract gold and silver from the ore. Today, the Comstock mines are contaminated with levels of mercury 26 times higher than the federal standard.

One of the earliest discovers of the Comstock Lode's silver riches was George Hearst, who later found more mineral wealth in the mountains of Utah and South Dakota and finally the Anaconda copper deposits in Montana. His son, William Randolph Hearst would become the nation's most powerful publishing baron. Beginning with The San Francisco Examiner, which his father gave him in 1887, when William was 24, he would develop the nation's first media empire, including newspapers in most major cities and a string of magazines.

In the late 1850s and 1860s, gold and silver strikes brought thousands of miners to Nevada and Colorado. The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 brought more than 100,000 to the area. On land that was promised to Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians in an 1851 treaty, Denver was founded in November 1858. The discovery of precious metals in Nevada and Colorado in the late 1850s was followed by rushes to Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1870s.

The Cattle Frontier

The development of the railroad made it profitable to raise cattle on the Great Plains. In 1860, some five-million longhorn cattle grazed in the Lone Star state. Cattle that could be bought for $3 to $5 a head in Texas could be sold for $30 to $50 at railroad shipping points in Abilene or Dodge City in Kansas. Cowboys had to drive their cattle a thousand miles northward to reach the Kansas railheads.

Although the popular image of the cowboy is of John Wayne or Roy Rodgers, many of the cowboys were African Americans or Mexican Americans. About one in five cowboys was a Mexican American and one in seven was black.

By the 1880s, the cattle boom was over. An increase in the number of cattle led to overgrazing and destruction of the fragile Plains grasses. Sheep ranchers competed for scarce water, and the sheep ate the grass so close to the ground that cattle could no longer feed on it. Bitter range wars erupted when cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, and farmers fenced in their land using barbed wire. The romantic era of the long drive and the cowboy came to an end when two harsh winters in 1885-1886 and 1886-1887, followed by two dry summers, killed 80 to 90 percent of the cattle on the Plains. As a result, corporate-owned ranches replaced individually owned ranches.

After the terrible winters, many ranchers decided to fence in their cattle rather than letting them roam freely. The invention of barbed wire made it possible to build fences without lumber and protect railroad tracks from stampeding animals. The first barbed wire was produced in 1868 and early barbed wire had to be manufactured by hand. Two strands of wire were wound together and barbs were then threaded through the wires.

A salesman, John "Bet a Million" Gates, helped convince ranchers to adopt barbed wire. (He received his nickname because he reportedly lost $1 million when he bet about which raindrop would slide down a train window the fastest). In San Antonio, Texas, Gates bet local ranchers that they could not drive steers out of a corral made up of eight strands of barbed wire.

The Farming Frontier

Farming on the Great Plains depended on a series of technological innovations. Lacking much rainfall, farmers had to drill wells several hundred feet into the ground to tap into underground aquifers. Windmill-powered pumps were necessary to bring the water to the surface and irrigate fields. Steel tipped plows were necessary to cut through the plains' grasses dense roots. To make up for a scarcity of farm labor, farmers relied heavily on mechanical threshing machinery.

The Homestead Act

To encourage farmers to settle on the Great Plains, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This act allowed any citizen or any immigrant intending to become a citizen to get title to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on the tract for five years, and making a few improvements. It also allowed settlers to pay $1.25 an acre and own the land immediately.

Homestead Patent No. 1 was granted to a Daniel Freeman in 1862 for a tract in Nebraska. Between 1862 and 1900, the Homestead Act provided farms to more than 400,000 families.

Homesteading proved to be very difficult. About a third of those who tried to develop homesteads eventually failed. On the Great Plains, rain was scarce and a farm or ranch of 160 acres was too small to be economical.

Water and the West

Water was more important than gold or silver or copper in the development of the American West. West of the 100th meridian, a year usually produces less than twenty inches of rainfall. Water was the lifeblood of the arid Plains. The availability of cheap water is an environmental factor that has made possible for such western cities as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City to thrive.

At first, many farmers believed that "water follows the plow." They deluded themselves that if they planted trees and built farms, rainfall would surely follow. It did not.

Windmills allowed late 19th century farmers to tap into underground aquifers. In the 20th century, canals, aqueducts, and the damming of rivers transformed a vast, arid region into a region of sprawling cities and the nation's richest farmland. Today, there are 1,200 major dams in California alone.

During the Great Depression, the construction of dams provided employment to the jobless and a cheap source of electric power. In the 1930s, five major water projects were constructed simultaneously, including the California Central Valley project that drained Tulare Lake, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. When the Hoover Dam was built during the Depression on the Colorado River, it was the largest dam on earth, standing 726 feet high. It was surpassed by the Grand Coulee Dam, which stretched 4,290 feet across the Columbia River and created a 150-mile-long lake as its reservoir. It opened in 1942 and for some time was the world's single most powerful source of electricity. It was not until the 1970s, that environmentalists begun to convince policy makers of the negative ecological consequences of extensive dam building.

Black Gold: The Oil Frontier

The great southwestern oil boom began January 10, 1901 at Spindletop, four miles south of Beaumont, Tex., a prosperous sawmill and farm produce shipping town. Since late October, a three-man crew, working 18-hour shifts, had been searching for oil. With $300,000 from financier Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh, they drilled a pipe 880 feet into the ground. Repeatedly the pipe had gotten stuck. Sand and even quicksand blocked the hole, slowing the drilling. At 880 feet they hit solid rock. The men decided to try a new drill bit.

A low, rumbling sound rose up from the earth. Huge columns of mud and water blasted from the hole, followed by four tons of pipe that they had drilled into the ground. The eruption briefly stopped, and then suddenly a column of oil, 200 feet high, exploded from the earth.

The discovery of vast quantities of cheap liquid fuel at Spindletop made the era of the internal combustion engine possible. Cheap oil also fueled the allied victory in World War II. Drilling for oil had been pioneered earlier in the oil fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake had drilled the nation's first oil well, 69 and a half feet into the ground near Titusville, Pa. It had taken him six months to drill, but the well only produced 10 barrels of oil a day.

In 1901, the most successful oil wells in the United States, located at Corsicana, Tex., produced at most 50 barrels a day. Huge amounts of oil had been found in Russia in 1893, but transportation and refining costs made it prohibitive to get the oil to market at an affordable cost.

Spindletop produced 100,000 barrels a day--more than all the rest of the wells in the world combined. It was, as a newspaper headline read, "An Oil Geyser." It took more than a week to cap the well. By then, the well had spewed more than 900,000 barrels of oil on the ground. Within a month, Beaumont's population of 8,500 had quadrupled. By the end of 1901, almost 140 wells at Spindletop gushed oil. Because Beaumont was just 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy to transport the oil to refineries. Since 1901, the field at Spindletop has produced more than 153 million barrels of oil.

Before Spindletop, most of the country's oil production was controlled by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. But Standard Oil was barred from Texas by the state's anti-trust laws. Andrew Mellon would build a refinery in nearby Port Arthur, Tex., that evolved into the Gulf Oil Company. Other companies that handled oil from Spindletop became the oil giants Texaco and Mobil.

Spindletop was only the beginning of the great Southwestern oil boom. Thirty years later, a 70-year-old wildcatter named Columbus "Dad" Joiner, discovered the East Texas Field spread across five Texas counties. With 7 billion barrels of oil, it was the largest reservoir of oil in the Americas. At a time when the area's water cost $5 a barrel, oil sold for a nickel a barrel.

Closing the American Frontier

In 1890 the superintendent of the U.S. Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." In just a quarter century, the far western frontier had been settled. Three million families started farms on the Great Plains during these years.

Contrary to the popular image of the West as a rural region, by 1890 most of the West's population lived in cities. Not only was the Trans-Mississippi West the country's most culturally diverse region, it was also by 1890, the most urbanized.

The Turner Thesis

In 1893, three years after the superintendent of the Census announced that the western frontier was closed, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian from the University of Wisconsin, advanced a thesis that the conquest of the western frontier had given American society its special character. At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.

In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.

In his address on the significance of the frontier in American history, Turner referred to the Census Bureau's announcement that the frontier was now closed. He speculated that now that the frontier was settled, a crucial epoch in American history was over.

When John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential election in 1960, he called on the country to enter a new frontier. Since that time, Americans have repeatedly searched for new frontiers--in outer space and cyberspace and even below the ocean's surface. The frontier remains a potent symbol more than a century after it physically disappeared.

The West of the Imagination

In 1893, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show arrived in Chicago, popularizing the image of the West as a region of gun-toting scouts and cowboys and marauding Indians. For more than 30 years, from 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was one of the most popular entertainments. It toured the United States and Europe. It contained rodeo-like displays of cowboy skills, feats of marksmanship, riding and roping, and horse races. It also featured attacks on stage coaches and settler's cabins, a cyclone, and a prairie fire.

Until 1869, William F. Cody had been a farmer, teamster, trapper, solider, Pony Express rider, army scout, and buffalo hunter. He achieved fame as the result of a dime novel loosely based on his life that was published in 1869 and was adapted into a stage melodrama in 1871. The Wild West show helped to transform the West into a mythic space, more primitive and natural than the eastern cities.

No region is more shrouded in myth than the area west of the Mississippi River. In popular films and best-selling novels, the late 19th century western frontier was represented as a place where heroic, ruggedly independent pioneers struggled against an unfamiliar environment and brought civilization to a savage wilderness.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the cowboy and the western lawman were the classic American heroes. While other episodes from the American past faded, such as the era of the whale-hunting harpooner or the lumberjack, the western frontier remained a staple of American popular culture.

The very first movie to tell a story, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) had a western setting, and for 30 years, from 1939 to 1969, the Western was Hollywood's most widely produced action film, and John Wayne was Hollywood's most consistently popular star. Roughly a quarter of all Hollywood movies made before 1970 were westerns.

Questions:

Answer each question thoroughly. Short, vague, and incomplete answers are frowned upon.

1. What was the significance of the building of the transcontinental railroad relative to other modes of transportation?

2. What were some of the dangers encountered during the construction of the transcontinental railroad?

3. What was the Comstock Lode?

4. What were conditions like working in the Comstock mines?

5. Why did the cattle boom come to an end in the 1880s?

6. What was the Homestead Act?

7. How was the arid West transformed into the nation’s richest farmland?

8. Describe the discovery of oil in Texas.

9. What is the Turner thesis?

10. What was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show?

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