The Wild West was a period of American history that lasted from roughly 1865 to 1924. The period, which took place on the frontier of the American West, was marked by lawlessness in America's unincorporated territories, cattle drives, westward expansion and settlement, the proliferation of immoral businesses such as bordellos and saloons, the rise of outlaw gangs, and conflicts with Native Americans. The Wild West has been immortalized by the "cowboy" image, which represented rugged individualism and survival, and came to become a cultural icon of America. The era was brought to an end by intense crackdowns on outlawry by lawmen and bounty hunters, by the incorporation of the Western territories into the union, by technological modernizations (such as railroads and air conditioning) which encouraged further settlement of the West, and the growth of Western cities and the concurrent decline of the rural West.
History[]
The "Wild West" period followed the westward expansion promoted by "Manifest Destiny", which saw the United States acquire vast amounts of territory in the Mexican-American War, the Gadsden Purchase, and through several Indian wars. These newly-conquered lands were organized into "territories", American lands that were not yet granted statehood due to their low populations and their lack of infrastructure.
In 1862, the US government passed the first of the "Homestead Acts", which opened up millions of acres of land in the West to settlement. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the US government could apply, including women, immigrants, and (after 1866) African-Americans. These laws effectively gave free land to those who were willing to farm it, and also gave them the rights to gold if they mined it. After the California Gold Rush, many immigrants and settlers arrived in the West with the objective of mining and keeping their goald. Promises of prosperity led to waves of immigration to the sparsely populated West.
By the end of the American Civil War, the Western territories did not have enough settlers to fill them; lands such as New Mexico had more Spanish speakers than English-speakers, while lands such as South Dakota had more Native Americans than white settlers. Between 1865 and 1898, the United States embarked on the settlement of the West, encouraging Americans to move to the West in droves. The Republican-sponsored Homestead Act, a wartime act meant to encourage Northerners to move West, allowed for settlers to meet with federal officials at local forts and stake claims on 160 acres of unoccupied land (not owned by an Indian tribe or another settler), where they could till the soil, create a homestead, and raise crops. The Homestead Act, which started in 1862, was available throughout the late 19th century (and, indeed, until the 1970s) and allowed for massive settlement. Industrial workers, former slaves, poor tenant farmers, and sharecroppers were too poor and ill-equipped to move to the West and establish their own farms, and even farmers from the Midwest lacked the farming implements to farm on the bad land of the Southwest. Additionally, the hot weather, Indian attacks, low-quality transportation, and the lack of authority (resulting in banditry) initially discouraged many settlers from moving West.
Between 1865 and 1890, however, the West was gradually filled up. The Great Famine in Ireland, as well as the pull of jobs in the United States, resulted in waves of Irish immigration to the West. Technological improvements enabled settlers to farm in the Southwest and to travel with greater ease. The expansion of railroads, subsidized by Republican presidential administrations, enabled ranchers to ship their cattle to population centers in the East, as well as to facilitate transportation. These railroad companies became immensely powerful, bribing politicians in exchange for contracts, and establishing railroads across the West. Immigrants from across the world, including China, were employed on the railroads, and buffalo hunters were employed by the railroads to hunt food for their employees. These hunters utilized rifles to hunt bison rather than the traditional bow and arrow; because bullets were nearly invisible to bison, their flight instincts were never activated, resulting in the bison being hunted to near-extinction.
The densely-populated sedentary Indian populations of the East had been either decimated by disease or forced to accept land in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), while the Indians of the West were sparsely-populated hunter-gatherers. By the onset of the Wild West, most Indians had been assimilated into American culture (or, in the case of the Pueblo, into Hispanic culture) through intermarriage or boarding schools, or had migrated to Oklahoma. Indian tribes often raided white settlements for resources after the white hunters had nearly extincted the buffalo, resulting in retaliation from the federal government. The US Army was directed against the 200,000 Indians of the West in the Plains Indian Wars, resulting in the Indians being forced onto reservations were promises of farming implements and advanced technology were broken. In 1887, the Dawes Act attempted to Americanize Indians by taking their promised lands, reducing their size, and dividing them up among individual Indian landowners in order to enable white settlement in the left-over land.
Another issue in the West was outlawry. Bandits were a presence in the West, but the Eastern press greatly exaggerated the violence and lawlessness of the West for exciting stories.
The challenge of arid land, such as the originally useless Texas Panhandle, was overcome after the exploitation of aquifers and ground water, and the use of wind pumps, enabled the digging of wells and the growing of crops. The Texas Panhandle was transformed into the breadbasket of America, and other formerly arid regions were quickly settled as railroads expanded into the area. Other technologies such as the John Deere plow ("the Plow that Broke the Plains") became widely available, overcoming the challenge of rough ground caused by dry grass and deep roots. Guano fertilizer from the Pacific turned nutrient-poor lands into useful land, and advances in refrigeration enabled the shipping of food from lands like Nebraska to the East.
By 1890, the United States filled the West with settlers, railroads, and technology and admitted states such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma over the next few years. However, the addition of the vast farming lands of the West resulted in the "farm problem" of the late 19th century, as American farmers began to produce more than the market demanded. This resulted in the cheapening of food prices, reducing farmers' income and causing increased tenant farming due to farmers' inability to make ends meet. Additionally, the finite nature of of forests, mines, and oil created problems for loggers, miners, and the oil industry. In response to this crisis, farmers banded together to form local "Grange" organizations to share equipment in order to compete with the big farmers, as well as to influence political parties and elections. The Granges were incapable of dealing with the problem of overproduction, resulting in the farmers forming the Farmers' Alliance to demand regulations on railroad rates and the rent demanded by the owners of tenant farmers.
Divisions between white and black farmers resulted in the Alliance's efforts faltering, but the formation of the Populist Party finally enabled farmers to emerge as a politically competitive force. The Republicans, as the champions of big business, refused to put restrictions on the railroads and other big companies, as they believed that big business would help America out-compete Britain. The farmers also appealed to the Democrats, asking for economic regulations to help the common man; however, the Democrats believed in a hands-off approach towards the economy, and they feared that regulating the railroads would open the door to further regulations. The farmers were forced to form the Populist Party, anchored in the Great Plains states, as a third party which would regulate the economy and inflate it with silver in order to allow for more paper money to enter circulation. While prices on goods would rise as a result of inflation, farmers could repay their debts more easily, as they would make twice as much money at their job and have to work half as much in order to repay their debts. The Populists also called for the creation of government warehouses to store their farm products until they could be sold at good rates, as well as for a progressive income tax, and for the direct election of Senators. Fringe ideologies in the Populist movement included the banning of alcohol and full equality for women. The Populists were accused of being communists, socialists, and anarchists, as their platform was against both the conservative Republican Party's pro-business ideology and the classical liberal Democratic Party's small-government ideology. The Panic of 1893 threatened the Democratic Party's chances of winning the 1896 presidential election, resulting in several agrarian Democrats advocating for the adoption of populist principles in their platform in exchange for the Populist vote, while more laissez-faire Southern Democrats opposed this due to their fear that big government would mean that the government could also interfere with social issues in the South. At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, the laissez-faire Bourbon Democrats, the Populist-leaning Democrats, and the Democrats in favor of economic intervention battled for control of the party, and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech resulted in a majority of Democrats supporting courting the Populist vote. The Populist Party agreed to support the Democrats as part of a "fusion" ticket, and, from then on, the Democratic Party began its shift away from laissez-faire classical liberalism and towards economic interventionism, although still resisting big government in the social sphere. The Democrats succeeded in their goal of merging the West and the South in an agrarian revolt, but the Republican nominee William McKinley won the election due to the Northeast and Midwest's refusal to support Bryan's radicalism.
The United States' successful colonization of the West enabled the United States to focus on imperialism abroad, and America's focus shifted away from the West and towards the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Glossary[]
Cowboys[]
Cowboys with a work horse.
Cowboys were animal herders who tended cattle in ranches, typically on horseback. They were nicknamed "cowboys" because of their herding of livestock, including cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and other animals.
In 1867, the first cattle drive from Texas up the Chisholm Trail arrived at the rail yards of Abilene, Kansas, beginning a series of drives. These drives saw horse-mounted cowboys move herds of cattle long distances to market, and, from 1866 to 1895, 10,000,000 cattle were herded from Texas to railheads in Kansas for shipments to stockyards in Chicago and points east, where they would be slaughtered and turned into meat. Due to the major role that cattle drives had in the Wild West, the cowboy tending to a herd of cattle became the worldwide iconic image of the Wild West.
Cowboys capturing a group of horses at Pike's Basin, 1911.
Ranching also played a major role in the American West, with cowboys living on ranches with their herds of livestock, as well as with their families. At ranches, animals were bred and nourished before cattle drives took place, and the settler families were able to sustain themselves from selling their livestock, as well as by growing or slaughtering their own food. In 1874, Joseph Gilden invented barbed wire, revolutionizing ranching, as animals could now be prevented from escaping by barbs.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the image of the cowboy was politicized by the Democratic Party, which saw the West as a land untouched by the hated Republicans, and viewed cowboys as hard-working, hard-playing, honorable, self-protecting, and independent men who asked nothing of the government. Democratic newspapers romanticized the poverty, danger, and debilitating hours of the cowboy lifestyle, contrasting the rugged individualism of the cowboys with the behemoth government catering to "lazy ex-slaves" the Republicans purportedly sought to establish.
Lawmen[]
Three lawmen
Lawmen were the guardians of the law in the Wild West, including Sheriffs and Marshals. They were responsible for enforcing the law in the frontier towns and settlements, and they often formed posses of townspeople to assist them in protecting and defending the law and innocent townspeople. Lawmen typically wore golden stars to identify them as sheriffs or Marshals, and they were rarely shot by outlaws, as killing a lawman essentially meant a death sentence. By the early 1900s, lawmen had virtually eliminated the outlaws in shootouts or by capturing and hanging many of them.
Location[]
An 1867 map of stagecoach routes in the American West
The Wild West occurred in the lands west of the Mississippi River, including the territories acquired by the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the war with Mexico. Hotspots of outlaw activity included Dodge City in Kansas, Santa Fe in New Mexico, Deadwood in South Dakota, and Tombstone in Arizona. The unsettled lands west of the Mississippi lacked law and order for decades; the Great Plains states saw fierce fighting between the white settlers and the Native American tribes, while the border territories along the Mexican border were occasionally the site of raids by Mexican banditos or local tribes such as the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche. The Wild West shrunk in size as the US government incorporated many of its territories as states, and, with Arizona's incorporation in 1912, all of the Western territories had become states with ample law enforcement.
Mexico[]
Mexican banditos
The Mexican frontier was just as dangerous as the American frontier, and it could be argued that, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, it was even more so. The lack of a defended border allowed for easy travel between the two countries, with horse riders being able to cross the Rio Grande over wooden bridges or over railroad bridges without hindrance. Mexican outlaws, known as banditos, would occasionally raid across the border and engage in robberies and shootouts. In Mexico, it was common for banditos to engage in highway robbery, to steal payroll wagons, or to create gang hideouts full of outlaws. During the Mexican Revolution, civil warfare between the Mexican Army and revolutionary Rebeldes further destabilized the Mexican border states, leading to even more violence. This allowed for banditos such as Pancho Villa and Javier Escuella to attack the American border, and for American outlaws to interfere with the revolution in Mexico. Lawlessness in Mexico would continue for years due to the lack of an effective law enforcement agency and poor economic conditions, but the end of the revolution and the improvement of policing helped to tame the border region.
Native Americans[]
Map of the Native American tribes
Native Americans, as the original inhabitants of the continent, played a major role in the period. The Native Americans were initially peaceful towards the settlers, as they sought to avoid conflict and continue tending to their open lands. However, the rapid increase in the number of settlers led to whites outnumbering the natives, and the US government, through several unfair treaties, forced the natives to give up their lands and move west. Eventually, this led to conflict between the settlers and the Indians, as the natives fought back against encroaching settlers. There were numerous wars, including the Comanche Wars, Colorado War, Red Cloud's War, Great Sioux War, Nez Perce War, and Apache War, all of which would ultimately result in the Native American tribes being forced onto reservations, many of them in the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.
Outlaws[]
American outlaws
The Wild West was famous for being an age of outlaws, who often operated from bases in the wilderness and opposed, attacked, or disrupted the fragile institutions of new settlements. The majority of outlaws preyed on banks, trains, and stagecoaches, which they would rob and distribute the money among themselves. Some ex-Confederates became outlaws after the end of the Civil War, others took advantage of the wilderness and the lawlessness of the frontier to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and others migrated to the frontier to escape prosecution for crimes elsewhere. Famous outlaws included Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, Bill Doolin, Black Bart, the Dalton Brothers, Jesse James, Frank James, William "Curly Bill" Brocius, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, almost all of whom were either killed in shootouts or hanged for their crimes. By 1899, the age of outlaws was almost at an end, as almost all of them had been killed, arrested, or pardoned. The incorporation of America's western territories led to the establishment of better police forces, and outlaws, who were already uncommon figures, practically vanished until the Great Depression era.
Pioneers[]
New immigrants arriving in the West
A major feature of the Wild West was the influx of settlers, also known as "pioneers", into the newly-acquired territories. Initially, many of these settlers came from the East Coast of the United States, and they were descended from the original British settlers. However, they were followed by waves of Scots-Irish and German immigrants, among other groups. The arrival of immigrants helped with the development of thriving outposts into new towns, and civilization spread rapidly into the wild frontier as more settlers arrived.
Native American tribes in the region included the Sioux, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Crow, Sauk, Apache, Navajo, Comanche, Nez Perce, Shoshone, Paiute, Blackfoot, and Kiowa, among others. These tribes mostly fought on horseback with either bows or rifles, having acquired both horses and rifles through trade with the Europeans. The natives were often defeated by the technologically-superior Americans, but they were victorious in Red Cloud's War in 1867 and at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The Americans often perpetrated atrocities against the Indians, including the Sand Creek massacre, but they often portrayed the Indians as savages and as uncivilized. The Shawnee chief Cheeseekau famously said, "When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre."
Politics[]
The bringing of American settlers to the West also brought with it American politics. During the 1870s, the rural farmers, ranchers, and cowboys were Democrats who deeply resisted the influx of Republican merchants, miners, and businessmen moving West. Republican ethics were set on civilizing the West and providing law and order to the West, while Democrats saw them as government lackeys serving the interests of corporate America at their expense. Additionally, political affiliation was influenced by the migrants' states of origin: Northerners and Union Army veterans tended to vote Republican, while Southerners and former Confederates overwhelmingly voted Democratic.
The political system had shifted by the late 19th century, as the Republican Party benefited from the support of the old immigrant groups (English, Scots-Irish, Protestant Germans, etc.) who settled on frontier farms, while the newer (Irish, Catholic German, Polish, etc.) urban immigrants became the base of the Democratic Party in the West. The Republicans came to represent the railroad industry and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant race, while the Democrats represented anti-elitist and immigrant interests. Most Mexicans in the American Southwest were Republicans into the early 20th century, but their manipulation by Republican political machines and the threat of disenfranchisement led to a significant number of Hispanics - including Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo - defecting to the Democrats. Over the years, the voter bases shifted, with German Lutherans becoming alienated by the GOP's support for temperance and assimilation, and the Democrats - who supported minimalist government and traditional values - appealed more to immigrants.
The rise of the Populist Party in the 1890s introduced a social liberal element to the Democratic Party, which increasingly shifted to the political left, while the western Republicans shifted to the right due to their support for the railroad business, religious moralism, and the gold standard. The Populists won the support of impoverished farmers, while finding little support in cities and towns. The Populists attacked Gilded Age corporate interests, international finance (occasionally employing anti-Semitic canards), and Republican-promoted modernization. After the 1896 election, most Populists joined the Democratic Party.
Rustlers[]
Lawmen searching for rustlers
Cattle rustling was a major issue in the Wild West, in which criminals would steal cattle. During the 1840s, the Apache, Comanche, and Navajo Indians took advantage of Mexico's weakness by undertaking large-scale raids hundreds of miles deep into the country to steal livestock for their own use and to supply an expanding market in America. These raids left thousands dead, and the lives of many northern Mexicans were ruined; northern Mexico's demoralized population offered little opposition to the Americans during their invasion in 1846. During the American Civil War, the Mexican government was accused of supporting the habit of Mexicans rustling American cattle, and American rustlers did the same in Mexico. Rustling was held to be a serious crime, and vigilantes often hanged captured rustlers. With the advent of barbed wire and ranches and the decline of the open range system, rustling became less common, as livestock were now guarded in ranches.
Gallery[]
