Voice from the Past
Fortunately, genocidal phrases rarely enter folklore, but everybody knows the expression “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” It originated with General Philip Sheridan, when a Comanche named Tosawi came to him to sign a treaty after Custer’s “victory” at Washita. “Tosawi, good Indian,” said Tosawi. Sheridan replied: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” The phrase was subsequently transformed through repetition.
Real Life
Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake, 1831-90) made an early reputation as a warrior and was revered for his great bravery, strength, generosity, and wisdom. His fame and influence spread far beyond his own a Sioux tribe. With chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall, Sitting Bull led resistance against the white invasion of the sacred Black Hills after gold was discovered there in 1874. Following the annihilation of Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull and his closest followers fled to Canada. Upon his return to the United States in 1881, Sitting Bull was imprisoned for two years and then sent to Standing Rock Reservation. In 1883, he traveled as a performer with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill was perhaps the only white man Sitting Bull ever trusted.
In 1890, Sitting Bull was identified with the antiwhite religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. He was killed during a scuffle when reservation police (who were Indians) attempted to arrest him on December 15, 1890.
Voice from the Past
Joseph surrendered to Nelson A. Miles with words that have come to symbolize the poignant dignity with which Native Americans ultimately bowed to the inevitable:
“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass [a war chief] is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men [Joseph’s brother, Ollikut] is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
From Panic to Empire
(1869-1908)
In This Chapter
Western agriculture and the day of the cowboy
The triumph of capitalism and the rise of philanthropy
Technological revolution
The phrase Wild West has become so worn with use that it’s hard to say the second word without adding the first to it. The spirit that marked the West pervaded national life during the years following the Civil War. If the West had its cowboys and its outlaws, so did the world of big business and power politics in such cities as New York and Washington. Fortunes were made and lost, it seemed, overnight. A wealth of new inventions suddenly materialized, accelerating American life to a pace many found increasingly frenzied. And if tycoons and inventors were pulling the strings, working men and women were often the ones being jerked around.
Empire of Cows
It the West equaled space, the equation came out differently for different people. To the homesteader, space meant a place to live. To the cattleman, space meant grass and water to fuel the beef herds that made his fortune.
Before the Mexican War, even Texas ranches were relatively modest in size, but the war brought a tremendous demand for beef to feed the U.S. Army. After the cattle industry geared up for this need, it never pulled back. Texans started to drive cattle beyond the confines of the ranch, pushing herds northward to fatten on the grass of public lands before being shipped east. This period was the start of the range cattle industry, which the Civil War threatened to bring to an untimely end. Union blockades kept Texans from shipping their beeves to market, and the cattle were left to run wild on the Texas plains, the ranchers and ranch hands having gone off to fight the war. When the sons of Texas returned after Appomattox, the only visible assets left to many of them were some five million free-ranging animals. Ex-Confederate soldier boys now set up as cowboys, rounding up and branding as many cattle as they could, then “trailing” the herds to grazing lands, marketplaces, and railheads.
American Cowboy
The range cattle industry didn’t just make beef; it also created the single most beloved, celebrated, talked about, and sung about worker in American history. If generations of little boys and girls across the Atlantic grow up on tales of knights in shining armor, American children have long been raised on tales, songs, and images of the noble riders of the range. Cowboys embody a very powerful—very American—myth of freedom and self-sufficiency. But from the cold, hard perspective of economic reality, cowboys were the poorest of the poor. Dirty, dangerous, lonely, and poorly paid, cowboy was a job for desperate men: down-and-out ex-Confederates who had lost all they owned; liberated black slaves who, suddenly masterless, found themselves at loose ends; Indians, struggling at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; and Mexicans, sharing that bottom rung.
On the ranch, the cowboy’s principal job was to ride over an assigned stretch of range and tend the cattle, doing whatever needed to be done. The most demanding labor was the trail drive, in which cowboys moved a herd of cattle—perhaps as small as 500 head or as large as 15,000—to northern ranges for maturing or to market at railhead cattle towns like Abilene, Ellsworth, and Dodge City, Kansas; Pueblo and Denver, Colorado; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Distances were often in excess of 1,000 miles over four principal cattle trails. Hazards of the trails were almost as numerous as the herds themselves: storms, floods, drought, stampede, rustlers, hostile Indians. Pay was about $100 for three or four months’ work.
Law and Disorder
It was not unusual for a cowboy to blow his whole $100 stake during a few nights in the cattle town that lay at the end of the trail. The towns served as points of transfer from the trail to the rails. Here beef brokers shook hands on deals, and the cattle were loaded into rail cars bound for the cities of the East. For the cowboy, a stay in town meant a bath, a shave, a woman (300 prostitutes plied their trade in the small town of Wichita), and plenty to drink (in many towns, saloons outnumbered other buildings two to one). Such towns were also home to professional gamblers who were ready, willing, and able to part a cowboy from his cash. Like the mining camps of California in the the cattle towns of the latter part of the century were rowdy, violent places. Gunfights became commonplace—though, alas, neither so frequent nor so violent as they are on the streets of many American cities today.
Jesse, Billy, and the Rest
Arising from the welter of casually violent men in the West were more than a handful of determined and deliberate criminals. A few have entered into American legend. Jesse James was born in Clay County, Missouri, on September 5, 1847, and, with his older brother Frank (born 1.843), was caught up in the brutality of the Civil War in Missouri. The brothers joined the fierce Confederate guerrilla band of William Quantrill and his lieutenant, “Bloody Bill” Anderson. In the guise of carrying out military operations, these guerrillas were no better than vicious gangsters, and their units became the schools of a generation of accomplished criminals. Cole Younger and Arch Clement, who would become principal members of the James Gang after the war, were also Quantrill-Anderson alumni.