The Opportunities and Challenges of Life in the American West
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Introduction
The rugged individualism associated with life in the American West has long been celebrated in American history. This concept centered on independence and the ability of individuals to take charge of their own lives. As the West expanded in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this spirit of autonomy came alongside both significant opportunities and formidable challenges faced primarily by settlers and Native Americans.
In this exploration, we will examine the multifaceted experiences of diverse groups during this period. Special attention will be given to the lives of Native Americans, homesteaders, and the structural changes brought by legislation like the Dawes Act and the Homestead Act.
Life in the West: An Overview
The Expanding Frontier
The American West in the late 19th century was a realm of promise. Immigrants and native-born Americans flocked to the region, seeking new beginnings. The motivations included:
- Land Ownership: The lure of available land was strong, especially for immigrants escaping overcrowded conditions in Europe.
- Economic Opportunities: The burgeoning industries, like cattle ranching and railroad construction, provided potential for prosperity.
- Adventure and Freedom: The romanticized notion of adventure attracted many seeking to escape societal norms and restrictions.
Rugged Individualism
The narrative of rugged individualism is prevalent in American culture, suggesting that the ideal settler was self-reliant and independent. However, this image glosses over the complexities of community reliance:
- Communal Support: Settlers often relied on neighbors for survival during harsh winters or times of crisis.
- Challenges of Isolation: Life on the frontier could be lonely, with individuals sometimes isolated for weeks, relying on their own resourcefulness to survive.
Opportunities in the West
The Homestead Act of 1862
The Homestead Act allowed Americans to claim land with minimal costs, transforming dreams of land ownership into reality. The main features included:
- Free Land: Eligible applicants could claim 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, improving that land through cultivation or construction.
- Population Growth: The act encouraged a wave of settlers, particularly from Europe, to migrate westward. Over time, approximately ten percent of U.S. land was distributed under this act.
- Economic Development: New towns and communities emerged, fostering economic interdependence.
Opportunities for Minorities
While the narrative of homesteading often focuses on white settlers, many minorities—including freed slaves and other marginalized groups—also sought land and opportunity:
- Exodusters: Many African Americans migrated to the West after the Civil War in search of better living conditions and the promise of autonomy.
- Cultural Diversity: This period saw an influx of diverse cultures contributing to the tapestry of American identity.
Challenges of Life in the West
Environmental Hardships
Settlers faced tremendous challenges that tested their resolve and adaptability:
- Severe Weather Conditions: Tornadoes, droughts, and unpredictable seasons made farming and survival incredibly difficult.
- Sod Houses: Many settlers lived in sod houses, created by cutting blocks of earth and stacking them, providing inadequate shelter from the elements.
- Locust Swarms: Devastating swarms of locusts could decimate crops, leading to food shortages and despair.
The Dawes Act of 1887
The Dawes Act aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture by allotting individual plots of land:
- Forced Assimilation: The act took communal lands from tribes and divided them into smaller plots for individual families.
- Cultural Disruption: This policy fundamentally disrupted native cultures, which were traditionally communal and family-oriented.
- Loss of Land: Excess lands from reservations were sold to settlers, further diminishing Native American territories.
The Interplay of Cultures
Native Americans and Settlers
It's essential to recognize the complex and often tragic interactions between Native Americans and settlers:
- Cultural Collisions: The expansion of white settlers led to significant conflicts, including violent confrontations like the Battle of Little Bighorn.
- The Disappearance of the Buffalo: The near-extermination of buffalo herds, crucial to many Plains tribes, left Native Americans without resources, leading to displacement.
Shared Struggles
While the experiences of Native Americans and settlers differed widely, both faced their own sets of challenges:
- Resistance and Resilience: Native Americans fought to preserve their lifestyle and rights amidst tremendous pressure.
- Settler Sacrifices: Homesteaders endured harsh conditions that often resulted in personal and communal tragedy.
Conclusion
The West was a land of stark contrasts—an area of promise and peril. The ideals of opportunity and rugged individualism were juxtaposed against the realities faced by settlers and Native Americans. The Homestead Act facilitated land access for many, yet also instigated significant hardship and displacement for indigenous populations. Moreover, the Dawes Act intended to aid assimilation but ultimately led to cultural erosion and loss of tribal lands. Understanding this history is vital in recognizing the enduring impact of these policies on American identity and the diverse narratives that continue to shape the fabric of the nation.
this is kind of where that reputation and continues here in the west of the rugged individualism the idea that the
american uh especially as we were continuing to expand west love their independence and love their ability to
run their own lives without a whole lot of people telling them what to do where to go and how to live
i can describe the opportunities and challenges of life in the west the west we talked about and introduced
the west on monday in the late 1800s and early 1900s for various americans minorities and whites alike
and native americans using primary and secondary documents so that's going to be the focus of our first about 20-25
minutes of class here what i have is a series of documents that i've copied for you and you're going to be
working with a partner and each one of these documents have questions attached to them okay
they're copied but they're copied from the original i redid the copies from the original so you can see exactly what you
need to be seeing on these uh if you're struggling with any of it trying to figure out what something is i do have
the originals up here and i can i'm going to be walking around facilitating anyway so we can talk about it but each
one of them have questions attached to them some of it has to do with life of native americans someone has to do with
the buffalo and disappearance of them some of it has to do with the life of a homesteader which deals with other of
our objectives up here a few of them has to do with the dawes act and the assimilation of native americans during
this time period as well so it it touches on a variety of different aspects that are the focal points of
chapter 26 and so you're going to be digging into these in order to give you a little bit of background hopefully
this will give us some folder for discussion a little bit later in the class as well okay so you understand
what you're doing here each one of these questions you and a partner can answer just one set of
answers to those and you will be turning those in at the end of this session so you can get some a grade for that and
want you to do i want you to partner up got 25 copies here so if there's a few of you that want to work by yourself
that's okay but for the most part i'd like for you to be working in partners uh and be discussing these uh back and
partner raise your hand and i'll get your copy there's a lot of different reasons and you're hitting on one
one of it had to do with you know the plains indians used these native these buffalo in order to survive right they
lived very symbiotic relationship with the buffalo on the plains they follow them around use them for a food source
use them obviously for teepees for blankets all kinds of different things and you see in one of the images there
tells you all the different things that the buffalo were used for by the native americans so if you get rid of that
source then the plains indians don't have their way of life anymore right so that's part
so i mean it was it was a lot of different factors involved and it's capitalism too right
i mean the whites are going there some of them are wanting to make money you know these things were very valuable and
they became like a fad or a fashion to have a buffalo hide in your home not on a massive scale no they might use
them for trade but it wasn't something it wasn't marketed in this way it wasn't commercialized in this way yeah
and if it was then it was later and it was when they were already losing their ability to live the way they wanted to
americans there were some people who simply wanted to push him off into no man's land not
mileage right but and so these were the people who were you know concerned about the native americans well-being
because they what they said was this life is swallowing them up this life being american life is
swallowing up their way of life their buffalo is leaving their ability to feed themselves to live the way they've
always lived is is fading away and so this is the best chance that we think that they have for success and
forget the term for it or whatever it's like a qualitative negative or something like that qualitative yeah
that because i mean qualified but at the same time forced assimilation by the 1930s this was perceived as a
mistake and they go back to allowing the native americans to live the way they want to live and encouraging them to
redevelop their tribal type of lifestyle and culture but by then generations of native americans had
grown up under assimilation so it was difficult to bring it back what i want to do is just touch up
really quickly on some of the content that you all have been diving into through these primary and secondary
documents with that activity and explain a few things having to do with the homestead act and the dogs act
to make sure you understand those principles and then we're going to jump to a little bit of a video clip on the
heartland so you can have that out um i believe if i'm not mistaken that we left off with mr woolley
we talked about some of the encroachment of white settlers on native american lands whether it was through gold rushes
or whether it was through the transcontinental railroad itself or the establishment of new towns
all these things impacting the natural way of life that native americans have been living for generations and you saw
certainly that has to do with the battle of little bighorn as well remember that there was a gold rush into the black
viewed the black hills as an area that was almost sacred to their people and there was gold found there by white
settlers so what do you think those the rest of white settlers wanted to do go get the gold yeah go get the gold uh
and there was a brief gold rush there into the black hills the government you know kind of had a difficult time
preventing white settlers from moving into the region so they tried to work with the sioux uh to build a road into
that area through their reservation the sioux didn't particularly like that and this brought federal troops to the
region to try and protect white settlers and keep the peace if you will but that also created tensions and led to
conflict okay specifically you talk about the battle a little bighorn where general george armstrong custer and all
for those of you who've gotten into that reading why was this such a big deal two reasons really there we go
you're you're kind of getting into a little bit more of uh the sand creek more so than this one
just come up here stephanie it kind of like betrayed the confidence of the men like they tricked
the native americans and did something interesting and then they sand creek yes in colorado this one's a
little bit different though this is one we haven't talked about in class yet little bighorn this one deals largely
and don't worry about writing what's on the slide right now just listen to the words and listen to the explanation
americans knew this guy's name as a as a union civil war hero okay some people thought him to be
arrogant that knew him but in general his reputation was civil war hero he and all his men are slaughtered by native
americans that's what the papers put it out as and that is kind of what ends up happening
indian slaughter on the white soldiers okay an indian slaughter the white soldiers and so what do you
against white soldiers but in the end it it all it does is bring more attention unfortunately to
and i'm going to skip through a couple of these slides to go ahead and jump to the dawes act itself just to make sure
that you understand the the premise behind it why it was done and the impact that it had on native americans
here we go so the dawes severalty act uh the doll's general allotment act is sometimes the
this is a huge turning point when it talks about the relationship between the federal government and the native
reservation system okay the reservation system is what was used before the dawes act to where literally you're cornering
in the reservation system before the nawaz act allowed to live however they wanted to live on that land
okay they could live their traditional tribal way of life they were not forced to live any particular way
but as the decades were on and more and more people moved west and you see more and more images of capitalists who are
slaughtering the buffalo who are taking land and who are building railroads and changing the ability for native
to understand the dawes act was not meant or i guess i could say it was not its intention was not punishment
believe it or not the people who created the dawes act were generally viewed as people who were
sympathetic to the native americans how might that be true billy they wanted to uh give the native
native americans should be assimilated into their culture because they felt that that would be a better lifestyle
for them than they would be more advanced yeah very good so so these the people who created this piece of
legislation said all right native americans we're seeing whites and american culture and the american way of
life swallowing you up you are becoming more and more isolated your ability to live the way you've
always lived is getting less and less possible it's becoming less and less possible the
buffalo are dying off your lands are being taken you're being kind of moved the best chance you have it's success
and the future of this country is for us to help you assimilate into what is surrounding you
in many cases native american young native americans would be taken off of their lands put into boarding
schools there was a famous one in pennsylvania that literally had inscribed above their door kill the
indian save the man what does that term mean you think take away their culture and save the
human being save the human being take away their culture and replace it with what agriculture with the white culture
with the american culture it wouldn't be something acceptable today in 2014 but but the these were the
people who were sympathetic to them at that time because there were other people who weren't sympathetic who said
you know i don't even let's put them in a desolate section of the country and just let them be
so it's it's difficult to understand but that all right do you understand generally what the purposes of the dolls
all right uh then let's go ahead and move on here i mean literally they were individualized they were told in many
cases that they could not live their typical ancestral way of life to the point to where they were put on
okay but their lands weren't really suitable for a lot of the farming that they were being taught to do
the government provisions that were supposed to be coming in to allow them to flourish while they were learning
these things were in short supply so there was a a big challenge for them to be able to really succeed
and another big part of this i'll show you this slide then we'll talk briefly about the homestead act before i show
you a couple of clips here and you'll be jotting down your notes on your viewing guide on that one
of the native americans because what would happen is let's say that you have a huge set of
land that's set aside for the crow reservation right here before the dawes act well once the dawes act put into
family which is roughly what they did either 160 or about 380 depending on whether they were doing livestock or
families that plot of land what do you think they did with the extra land typically that became government
property and sold it to railroad companies or settlers or homesteaders or what have you and here's the result
you looked at those are what i'm going to ask you to think about when i say a homesteader when i say a homesteader i
want you to be thinking about those salt houses that you looked at earlier this period okay
the people who were living in these you know basically a burrow in the ground okay in many cases digging into a
hillside having that be the back of their home and creating kind of uh literally you know digging out little
bricks of sod and using that to build their homes that was their temporary structure for their home until they
could afford to do something else that was a typical homestead's first home this was created actually believe it or
not in 1862 in the midst of the civil war lincoln actually signs this into law the homestead act
it does help to settle the west faster than it would have been otherwise okay the homestead act itself sets aside
about 160 acre plots for individual families to be buying up and what they would do is is try and
create again settlements out of this what do you think the purpose of the federal government was in creating the
certainly was this made to be expensive no this process was made to be streamlined okay i mean in the end all
you had to do was stay there for five years you had to dig a well you had to build a 16 by 16 home you had to connect
land was yours 160 acres do you realize how significant that is europe's population from 1800 to 1900
europe and you've got hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming from there to america and america is handing
cases would have had a very difficult chance ever owning their own piece of the earth in europe
that's a huge difference and it offers so much opportunity to people now not everybody succeeded and it was a hard
way of life as you saw from those images but that opportunity is how a lot of these immigrants saw america
that's very significant to understand court cody couldn't that cause a lot of problems if they like overlaid
the land from people because they got it mixed up with boundary lines uh there would be issues with that but a lot of
times and there's movies that actually have these especially in oklahoma which was one of the last areas opened up by
you would have literally people with covered wagons and horses that would line up in kind of a prairie great
plains type of setting and the government officials would have already gone out to the local area and staked
out the land they would have already staked this the property lines out and what you would do
it would be somebody that would fire a gun say at high noon and everybody would go out and they would try and find the
stake of land that they wanted they'd pull up the stake they'd replace that stake with their stake and then they'd
have to go back to the beginning of the race turn in the stake and then that's their claim
could they do that more than once they would yeah i mean not necessarily in the same area but new areas that they
were opening up especially in the late part 1890s they would do that in a couple of cases now that wasn't the norm
in the earlier sections in 1860s and 70s and so boundary areas were kind of a challenge in some areas but but a lot of
times they were trying to use natural boundaries like creeks and rivers or tree lines or what have you i'd imagine
that if you're getting 160 acres of land for 18 you're not going to complain too much in many cases they didn't however
it was a challenging life okay so we've got a couple of different things we've gone through describe the impact
the reservation system on native american life how it transitioned to the daws act and assimilation and the impact
that had on native american life in addition to that we've dealt with life in the west and the homesteaders and the
purposes of the homestead act and the challenges and lifestyles of those homesteaders so what do you think you
okay all right uh we've got a limited time left we got about 13 minutes left so what we're going to do is dive into
you already need and i believe we're going to be starting off yes we're going to be starting off with number two so
this expands on what we just talked about with the homestead act and we'll tell you about some of the challenges of
so were all these homesteaders white no they were not i mean they just told you there were minorities involved here
some of them were exadusters those freed slaves that had left the south in order to try their hand in the west so
it was more of a variety than you see sometimes represented in those western films these are people who never
great admiration they just wanted to control their own future and to have children who could control their own
of where that reputation and continues here in the west of the rugged individualism the idea that the american
especially as we were continuing to expand west love their independence and love their ability to run their own
lives without a whole lot of people telling them what to do where to go and how to live all right i mean these
homesteaders were absolutely in many cases living on isolated areas wouldn't see people especially if they were just
on their homestead maybe for days weeks at a time right and they had to be self-reliant they had to be
individualistic they had to be very proud people and they had to work very hard and deal with a lot of
challenges in order to succeed so you know eventually they will tell you here and i'm going to pause it and we're
tell you here that about half of the individuals who came out to the homestead region in nebraska
that half of them stayed dealt with tornadoes dealt with living in sought houses dealt with breaking
biblical type of creatures that were a huge problem uh in the plains uh during the 1870s and 80s
eating up crops and literally blocking out the sun in some cases there would be so many of them coming through until
their uh their the lands where they uh uh proliferated were were plowed up and and so their breeding
grounds were done away with and they they are no longer that problem today out there but they were in the 1870s and
80s so a bunch of different challenges and weather extremes all these sorts of things right