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Introduction for Teachers
The Trip Across
The journey west usually began with a simple yet fervent desire to improve
one's life. The economic dislocations of the Panic of 1837, a perceived
sense of overcrowding in the East, the hope for improved health, the drive
to acquire land, and occasionally the search for adventure kept hundreds
of thousands of emigrants on the move for decades.
Statistics on emigration reveal that most who moved were on average
younger, had less property, and fewer children that those who did not.
Yet, they were also not poor. [1] Historians have noted that prior
to the California gold rush, emigrants were primarily farm-oriented
families who moved west to settle, while those emigrating through the 50's were predominantly men
hoping to make a quick fortune and return home. The trip West, however,
was made only reluctantly by many farm wives. A recent study of hundreds
of diaries written by women who made the overland trip discovered that no
women initiated the trip and, in fact, that at least a third objected
entirely. [2] Popular magazines of the day such as Harper's New Monthly
Magazine readily acknowledged that the pioneer experience was different
and more difficult for women. In an 1858 piece the author wrote that women
must "rough it" and "live a life of the commonest reality." [3]
Other potential emigrants were encouraged to make an even more grueling,
six-month overland trek to the Pacific Northwest due to the greatly
exaggerated schemes and publications of Hall Jackson Kelley (1790-1874), a
Boston educator who in 1829 formed the American Society for Encouraging
the Settlement of the Oregon Territory. For nearly a decade prior to the
Panic, Easterners and others had read or heard of the Oregon Territory
through Kelley. He promised that emigrants would be reimbursed for the
cost of their trip and that free land was available from the government
upon arrival in Oregon. When Congress refused to support his claims,
Kelley abandoned the plan but in the process of promoting it he published
guidebooks, maps, and gave speeches propagandizing the abundant natural
resources of Oregon. His writing helped to fuel the demographic phenomenon
that became known throughout American households as "Oregon Fever."
[4] Ironically, Kelley never traveled to Oregon but among the first
who did were missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in 1836. In a single
year, 1843, approximately 1,000 hopeful pioneers made the journey to
Oregon.
The overland journey to Oregon and California usually began at towns along
the Missouri River—Independence, St. Joseph, Council
Bluffs—that were known as "jump-off" points. The jump-off towns
existed primarily to serve the needs of the travelers. Here, emigrant
parties were outfitted for the trip. This is where they could buy
provisions and equipment, exchange information, purchase guidebooks, maps,
form emigration companies, write letters back home, and hire guides if
necessary. Especially useful to emigrants were the popular and inexpensive
guidebooks that were widely published and gave critical, detailed
information regarding the network of transportation routes and
connections. From these emigrants could learn of the best trail routes,
the location of various ferry crossings, canal date openings, stage routes
and steamboat schedules. For the long journey overland, they could learn
where to camp, where to purchase supplies along the way, the location of
water, grazing land, the amount of provisions to bring and, generally, how
much the trip would cost. Most of the guidebooks gave useful information
while subtly promoting an idealized view of the West. The most useful
guidebooks, however, were those that cautioned emigrants as to the
difficulty of the trip, the hard work ahead, and that the get rich quick
claims of many popular writers were widely exaggerated. Newspapers,
especially the Western press, were also an important source of information
and communication for emigrants. Newspaper editors published letters,
excerpts and announcements of companies that had reached their destination
safely. Some editors even commissioned emigrants as official
correspondents and published portions of their journals in their papers.
Many knowledgeable editors even endorsed particular guidebooks.
[5]
One particularly troubling aspect of the trip across the Plains for
emigrants was the constant fear of attack by Native Americans. Although
Native Americans were frequently hired as guides, sought out for trade and
described as friendly in many types of publications, stories portraying
them as barbaric, murderous savages predominated. Fictitious Indian
massacres were even created for the press which served to mythologize the
danger of the American West.[6] In reality, guidebooks stressed
that the most frequent problem along the trail was the Indian theft of
emigrants' livestock, not murder. Recent scholarship suggests, in fact,
that more Native Americans were killed by whites in the years 1840-60 than
the reverse. [7] Depicting the Natives as savages enabled white
writers to demonstrate the superiority of Anglo-American civilization and
to predict the inevitable demise of the Indian race. In response to the
perceived Native American threat, emigrants and their representatives in
Congress made countless appeals to the federal government for protection.
Shortly after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Congress was presented with
reports from the Committee on Military Affairs, requesting the
establishment of a military road with forts along it to protect the
expanding western frontier against Indian attacks. [8] Congress
responded favorably and by the 1850's the presence of the U.S. Army in the
West was pervasive. As one noted scholar of the overland migration writes,
"by the 1850's emigrants found the U.S. government, through its armed
forces, military installations, Indian agents, explorers, surveyors, road
builders, physicians and mail carriers to be an impressively potent and
helpful force...throughout the 1850's up to 90 percent of the U.S. Army was
deployed at the seventy-nine posts dotting the trans-Mississippi West."
[9] Emigrants came to believe that it was the duty of the federal
government to protect them and to ease their travel.
Settled in 1846 as a result of the search for religious freedom, the
Mormon community at Great Salt Lake became an important and widely known
stop along the way to the far west for emigrants to rest and replenish
their supplies. Because of their knowledge of the territory the Mormons
were known, praised even, for their accurate guidebooks. Their presence
and generally good relations with the Native Americans made it one of the
safer regions through which emigrants might travel. Many emigrants
traveled west in companies bound by constitutions, by-laws and they
jointly owned property. By the time of their arrival to Great Salt Lake
legal disputes were common. The Mormons were sought out for their ability
to try these cases fairly. Yet, despite their usefulness to westering
emigrants, they were still subject to discrimination. Rumors circulated
that the Mormons charged exorbitant prices for their supplies and that
they conspired with Indians to attack emigrants. The emigrants who
wintered in Salt Lake before moving on to the next leg of their journey
complained bitterly about their treatment and accused the Mormons of
wrongfully charging them taxes, not paying them equally for their work,
opening their mail, and using their temporary residence as a way to
increase their numbers for statehood. These charges were published in an
incendiary tract entitled Fruits of Mormonism and reprinted in
anti-Mormon newspapers throughout the country. These sentiments, along
with their official announcement of their practice of polygamy in 1852,
only served to further inflame the nation and to turn public opinion
against them. In the mid-1850's Brigham Young was charged with harassing
federal officials in Utah. President Buchanan responded by sending in
federal troops to quell a possible war. A direct confrontation was averted
but it led to increased tension among the Mormons and settlers. In 1857,
when Missouri and Arkansas settlers crossed into Utah territory the
Mormons, who no doubt recalled their previous persecution by Missourians,
attacked them along with their Indians allies. One hundred and thirty
people were killed on September 11th, in what was known as the
Mountain Meadows Massacre.[10]
The Search For Gold
The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California in May of 1848 was
the single most important factor driving the economic development and
migration to the West in the second half of nineteenth century and into
the twentieth. Rumors of gold circulated throughout California but did not
reach the East Coast until autumn of that year. President Polk confirmed
the rumors in his State of the Union address in December and by displaying
4,000 dollars worth of California gold in the Offices of the War
Department in Washington, D. C. News of the discovery spread like
proverbial wildfire by telegraph and press throughout the world. The
discovery set in place a dramatic migration of tens of thousands of
individuals from all over the globe rushing toward California. An article
published in Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine entitled
"Mining for Gold in California" took a retrospective look in 1857 at the
meaning of gold to a hopeful world. They wrote,
"The reader, no doubt, well remembers the peculiar impressions which the
first tidings of the discovery of gold in California produced upon his
mind. How in every possible way the imagination industriously endeavored
to picture the exhilarating scenes which surrounded, and the pleasurable
excitement which attended the enviable employment of digging for gold.
What lucky fellows they must be, who untrammeled by the common-place
constraint of ordinary business, could, with their own hands, take the
precious metal from the earth, and in a few brief months, perhaps, by
their own labor, become the fortunate possessors of sufficient wealth to
make a whole lifetime happy for themselves and family." [11]
This phase of the migration to California was largely one of single men or
men who had temporarily left their families behind hoping to discover
riches in its streams. Veterans of the Mexican War, ambitious
entrepreneurs, men experiencing hard times, adventurers of every stripe,
Europeans escaping from the regimes put in place by the Revolutions of
1848 and South Americans with considerable mining experience all converged
on California making it, as one scholar notes, "the most multicultural
spot on the globe." (Faragher, 234-273) Mining towns sprung up overnight
crowded with young men and made such towns legendary as spawning grounds
for reckless, dissolute behavior. And as subsequent deposits of gold,
silver and copper were discovered throughout the West, hopeful prospectors
rushed from place to place creating a roving, if rowdy, labor force. Yet,
the image of the individual prospector panning for gold and striking it
rich was a myth which probably sold more newspapers, novels, guidebooks,
and supplies to prospectors than put money in their pockets. The gold
discovered at Sutter's Mill was surface ore that was easily obtained in
the alluvial sand of icy mountain river beds. Called "placer" mining this
type of prospecting required little skill, relatively small investment and
simple tools—a pick axe, shovel and flat pan. By 1849, however, most of
the "placer" gold had already been removed—one report estimated ten
million dollars worth—well before the critical mass of miners even
arrived.
As early as 1852, the mining process had changed significantly. Quartz
mining and hydraulic mining quickly replaced placer mining. Mining of this
type required crushing mills, substantial industrial machinery and
significant amounts of capital and labor to extract ore from the
mountainsides. Investors from the East and abroad quickly formed
corporations and staked thousands of claims that essentially ended the
ability of an individual prospector to make any considerable amount of
money. Instead, these men became day laborers for mining companies.
Popular publications, such as Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper
warned about this trend in an article describing the latest rush to Pike's
Peak in 1858. The author wrote, "many persons who have gone to the mines
without provisions or money are compelled to work as common laborers at
from one dollar to three dollars per day.we should wish to dissuade those
engaged in a business which affords them a means of living from going to
the mines. All the diggings are crowded and more are arriving every day."
[12] Working conditions in underground mines were atrocious,
grossly unsanitary, extremely dangerous, backbreaking and monotonous. The
introduction of improved technology also created the need for fewer men
and thus by the late 1850's unemployment was not uncommon. These
conditions led to the first mining strike at the Comstock Lode in Nevada
in 1864. The trend toward corporatization in mining was replicated in
other important industries in the West such as cattle ranching and
farming. [13] Yet, the image of the individual prospector, with
his pick, pan, and shovel was an appealing one—so appealing that the
image captured the imagination of the entire world and persisted long
after it had ceased to exist.
Life in the West
Perhaps no other place in the west symbolizes the region's universal
appeal and the hope for a better life than the city of San Francisco. With
the discovery of gold in 1849, San Francisco literally grew overnight as
word spread around the globe that California was a place where fortunes
were surely made. The growth of San Francisco was exceptionally rapid from
800 residents prior to the discovery of gold, to 5,000 by July of 1849 to
50,000 by 1856 [14]. What is unique about California in general and
San Francisco in particular is its percentage of foreign born residents.
The state of California was 39 percent foreign born as early as early as
1860 and as high as 30 percent thirty years later, until 1890. The
percentage of foreign-born in other western states for the same period is
significantly lower. Kansas numbered 13 percent, Texas less, Nebraska 20
percent, and Dakotans 32 percent. [15] Yet, San Francisco greatly
exceeded these numbers. In 1880, San Francisco had the highest number of
foreigners in the nation. At 45 percent, there were more foreigners here
than either New York City at 40 percent or Chicago at 42 percent.
[16] San Francisco also equaled New York City in its number of
foreign-born blacks.[17] Just seven years after the start of the
gold rush, the San Francisco City Directory listed the newspapers
published in the city. There were two in French, two in German, and one
each in Spanish, Italian, and Chinese. There was also a Jewish newspaper,
a Mormon paper and, although it was not listed, an African-American
newspaper was also established in the city in 1855. [18]
In 1857, Hutchings' California Illustrated Magazine published a
two-part article appropriately titled "The World in California" which
provided sketches and illustrations, albeit stereotypical ones, of the
ethnic groups and types one could find there. The author named these
groups as: "The Indian," "The Pioneer," "The Miner," "The Englishmen,"
"The Irishmen," "The Jew," "The Negro," "The Hybrid," "Chinese—Male
and Female," "Chileans," "The Hindoo," "Mexicans," "The German," "The
Russian," "Loafers," "The Italian," and "Sandwich Islander." He described
early California as a place of relative equality and cooperation. He
wrote:
"this commingling of men of all creeds, and conditions, from all quarters
of the world, with one common object—that of improving their
condition—and who, more or less, have been dependent upon each
other—more perhaps than in any other land—and long may we
cherish this bond of brotherhood with charity and forbearance."
[19]
Indeed, one recent author has described the first year of gold rush
California as one of "interethnic cooperation" especially because the
Mexicans and South Americans were experienced miners and were highly
regarded for their aid and expertise. [20] Yet, as the population
increased and as the easily obtained surface gold began to vanish
competition became fierce and the discrimination against certain ethnic
groups began in earnest. As early as 1850 the California state legislature
passed a Foreign Miners Tax which was a hefty monthly tax of twenty
dollars. Yet another Foreign Miners Tax was passed in 1852, this one
specifically targeted the Chinese. American miners waged brutal warfare
against Native American Indians who lived on what they considered to be
their mining land, they organized against the Mexicans, and prevented
Black miners from owning claims.[21] Discrimination continued
outside of the mines as well. The Chinese were ghettoized and forced to
live in a segregated district known as "Chinatown." Black and Chinese
children were excluded from the public schools. And, in 1856, the Irish,
who were the city's largest immigrant group and who dominated city
government, were violently forced out. Approximately thirty foreigners,
mostly Irish, were deported by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee.
State law in California prevented "non-whites from voting, from serving in
the militia, from testifying in court when whites were involved and from
marrying whites."[22]
Indian Removal & Wars
The acquisition of land through war, purchase, treaty and annexation
expanded the contiguous border of the United States to its present day
size by 1853. As borders were defined millions of acres were made
available for settlement in the West and for settlement and the expansion
of the plantation system and slavery in the South. Americans continued the
march Westward, directly into lands populated by hundreds of Native
American Indian tribes and bands. Beginning in the late eighteenth century
with the acquisition of the Northwest Territory and war with the Miami
Confederacy (1790-1794) and throughout the nineteenth century ending with
the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, conflict, massacre, and outright war
arose between land hungry settlers and a native population who felt the
encroachment upon their land and white hostility toward their culture as
tantamount to genocide. While many administrations sought to expand the
territory of the United States, the term "Manifest Destiny" coined in 1845
by John O.Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review became a
stridently nationalistic catch phrase and justification for white
Americans claiming land. He wrote that the acquisition of land was "the
fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted
by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying
millions." [23] Many Americans simply believed that the expansion
of the United States was ordained by God and that it was their natural
right to claim land and to do with it as they pleased. Many Americans took
as axiomatic that the Native Americans would either assimilate or vanish.
Some took the extreme view like that of newspaper editor Jane Gray
Swisshelm of the St. Cloud, Minnesota, Democrat, that all Native
Americans should be exterminated. [24]The belief that Native
Americans were an inferior race was widespread; they were routinely
described as "savage," "uncivilized," "brutal," and "degraded." One way that
racist views such as these could be legitimized was through the use of
prominent "scientific" theories in the burgeoning field of archeology.
Throughout the West, legions of amateur archeologists studied the ancient
earthen fortifications, known as the "Mounds" and theorized that their
builders belonged to a "lost" or "superior" race. Most of these amateur
scholars discounted any ancestral connection between the so-called
superior race and the Native Americans, thus reinforcing the prevailing
negative stereotype of the uncivilized Indian. [25]
One of the strategies developed to deal with the conflict between white
American settlers and Native American lands was to negotiate treaties
which voluntarily exchanged the lands of Indian tribes in the east for
lands west of the Mississippi. Five assimilated tribes, the Cherokee,
Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminoles, known as the "Five Civilized
Tribes" negotiated approximately thirty treaties with the United States
between 1789 and 1825. In 1824, President Monroe announced to Congress
that he thought all Indians should be relocated west of the Mississippi.
Monroe was pressured by the state of Georgia to make his statement because
gold had been discovered on Cherokee land in Northwest Georgia and the
state of Georgia wanted to claim it. [26]The Cherokee resisted
and sought to maintain their land. They had adopted a formal constitution,
declared an independent Cherokee nation, and elected John Ross as their
Chief in 1828. As expected, the Georgia legislature annulled the Cherokee
constitution and ordered seizure of their lands. The Cherokees again
resisted and took their claim of sovereignty to the United States Supreme
court. In their second case, Worcester v. Georgia, (1832) Supreme
Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was
entitled to federal protection over those of the state laws of Georgia.
The Court ruled "the Indian nation was a distinct community in which the
laws of Georgia can have no force" and into which Georgians could not
enter without the permission of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity
with treaties. [27]An outraged President Andrew Jackson refused to
enforce the ruling. Instead, Jackson used the funding from his newly
created Indian Removal Act of 1830 to forcibly remove the recalcitrant
tribes. The state of Georgia then moved to confiscate the land and
proceeded to organize two land lotteries which divided up Cherokee land
into lots and gave it away to white settlers. Jackson, and later President
Martin Van Buren, used federal troops to evacuate the remainder of the
tribes. Nearly 20,000 were forcibly marched to Oklahoma along what has
become known as the "Trail of Tears." Approximately 4,000 Native Americans
died along this forced march in 1838. By the decade of the 1840's most
eastern tribes were relocated to reservations west of the Mississippi and
were under the jurisdiction of the Indian Bureau which was created in 1824
as part of the Department of War. [28]
While the Cherokees conducted a legal battle through the Supreme Court to
retain their lands, other tribes battled the U.S. Army in protracted
guerilla warfare. The Florida Seminoles waged three extended conflicts
against the United States from 1818-1858. The longest and most costly
known as the Second Seminole War, from 1835-1842, cost the U.S. government
upwards of 20 million dollars. Fearing the loss of mineral rich land,
miners and mining interests in California protested any Native American
use of the land, even their removal to reservations. This led to the near
extermination of the California tribes through war, disease and
starvation. Ultimately, they were removed to reservations but it is
estimated that by 1856 their population had dropped to a mere 25,000.
[29]
The administration of the Indian Bureau agencies on the frontier often led
to further conflict. British author and explorer Sir Arthur Pendarves
Vivian described the rampant corruption of the Indian Bureau as well as
the government.s inability to contain the demands of settlers as a
continuing source of conflict between Native tribes and the U.S.
government in his book, Wanderings in the Western Land.
He wrote, "these agencies are Government posts, at which the Redskins
reside during winter, and where they are fed and clothed by the Government
on condition of good behaviour. According to all accounts, the robberies
perpetrated by the officials of these posts at the expense of the Indians
have been scandalously great, and is, I believe, one of the principal
sources of the hostile feeling which now exists between the two races. The
Indians have been promised so many thousand blankets, or whatever else it
may have been, by the government on certain specified conditions, which
the Indians on their part generally honourably carry out. And, so too,
would the United States Government were they not so baffled by their
employees who, after the money has been voted by Congress, subject it to a
regular system of blackmail as it were on its way to the Redskin.It would
appear as if the Indian Bureau from top to bottom has been mismanaged and
corrupt." [30]
Indian Bureau mismanagement led to one of the bloodiest massacres of white
settlers by the Dakota Sioux in western Minnesota in August of 1862.
Treaties with the Dakota Sioux that had been negotiated in 1851 provided
for the payment of yearly annuities in the form of food, blankets and
money. Yet, in late summer 1862, the Sioux were starving to death due to
poor harvests and the Indian Agency refused them their yearly payment.
Frustrated, the Sioux attacked the Upper Sioux Agency on the Yellow
Medicine River and ransacked the fully stocked government warehouse. That
attack was followed by the murder of an agency clerk and a more violent
rampage on the Lower Sioux Agency. From there ensued five weeks of
carnage. It is estimated that upwards of 800 white settlers, many of them
recently immigrated from Germany and Norway, were killed. Hundreds of
Sioux were rounded up by United States Army Forces under the command of
Brigadier General H.H. Sibley and made to stand trial before a military
commission. Over three hundred were initially sentenced to death; however,
President Lincoln intervened and reduced the number to 38. On December
26th, thirty-eight Dakota Sioux were hanged at Mankato,
Minnesota in what was the largest public execution in United States
history. [31]
1. Clyde A. Milner II et al., The Oxford History of the American
West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 284-285.
2. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West; A New
Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000),
184-188.
3. .The Upper Mississippi,. Harper.s New Monthly Magazine, XVI,
(March, 1858): 440.
4. George Miles, .Go West and Grow Up with the Country. An
exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Guides to the American West in the
Collections of the American Antiquarian Society. (Worcester: American
Antiquarian Society, 1991), 12; Hine, 184-185.
5. John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the
Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1979, Illini Books edition, 1982), 33-82.
6. Unruh, 134.
7. Unruh, 143-145.
8."On the Establishment of a Line of Posts and Military Roads for the
Defence of the Western Frontier Against the Indians" 24th Congress, 1st
Session, No. 659, March 3, 1836.
9. Unruh, 159.
10.Unruh 253.
11. "Mining for Gold in California," Hutchings' Illustrated California
Magazine, I (March, 1857): 2.
12. "Scenes and Sketches about Pike's Peak," Frank Leslie.s Illustrated
Newspaper, August 20, 1859, p. 182.
13. Milner, 234-250.
14. Milner, 543.
15. Milner, 284.
16. Hine, 421.
17. Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites; A Social and Cultural
History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 17.
18. Samuel Colville, San Francisco City Directory, Volume I,
1856-1857. (San Francisco, 1856), LVI
19. "The World in California," Hutchings' Illustrated California
Magazine, I (March, 1857): 386
21. Hine, 241.
21. Hine, 243; Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trailblazers of
California. (Los Angeles: California Historical Society, 1968),
104.
22. Daniels, 107.
23. Milner, 166.
24.
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org.features/200209/23_steilm_1862-m/swisshelm.shtml
(July 16, 2004)
25. Donna C. West, "Thomas Jefferson, Father of American Archaeology?"
Clio.s Eye, A Film and Audio Visual Magazine for the Historian
http://clioseye.sfasu.edu/Jefferson/Archaeology.htm (August 16, 2004)
26. Hine, 235-236.
27. Hine, 176.
28. Mary Beth Norton et al, A People and a Nation; A History of the
United States. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), 287-290;
Milner, 173.
29. Milner, 175; Norton, 290; Hine, 180.
30. Sir Arthur Pendarves Vivian, Wanderings in the Western Land.
(London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1879), 212-213;
Milner, 173-174.
31. Adrian Ebell, "The Indian Massacres and War of 1862." Harper's New
Monthly Magazine, XXVII, (June, 1863):1-24; Alan R. Woolworth, "Adrian
J. Ebell, Photographer and Journalist of the Dakota War of 1862."
Minnesota History 54/2 (1994) : 87-92.
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