Native Americans, Farmers, Environment

What was Americans’ relationship to nature and the land?

Westward Expansion

Westward Expansion Timeline

1862 Homestead Act1876 The Battle of Little Bighorn1881 Sitting Bull imprisoned1887 Dawes Act1890 The US Census doesn’t locate the frontier line1890 The Battle of Wounded Knee1893 Frederick Jason Turner speech 1901 “Indian Territory”(now Oklahoma) tribes granted citizenship1924 All American Indians granted citizenship

Themes:1. Economic Reasons2. Cultural Explanations3. Paternalism4. Violence

1. Economic Reasons for Expansion

Westward Expansion Map

Settlers in front of a sod house in Nebraska

Major railroads in 1880 with time zones

Indian Reservations, ca. 1890

2. Cultural Explanations

Cultural Explanations for Expansion

1. Frederick Jason Thurner, the Frontier Thesis

The frontier culture defined American democracy:

democratic politicssociety open to immigrationfree market economyrugged individualism

2. Survival of the fittest

Indians seen as childrenAmerican Indian Policy alternated between violence and paternalism

US Territorial Growth

Population Density of the United States in 1890

3. Paternalism

Indians hunting buffalo

Indians hunting buffalo on horseback

Cheyenne woman Woxie Haury in ceremonial dress and in wedding portrait

Boys hoeing garden, Tulalip Indian School, ca. 1912

American Horse with children and relatives during an 1882 visit to the Carlisle Indian School.

Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893

4. Violence

The Battle of Little Bighorn, 1876Forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army on June 25 and 26, 1876 near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory. It was the most prominent action of the Great Sioux War of 1876; led by Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull. The Cavalry, including a force of 700 men led by George Custer, suffered defeat. Five of the Seventh Cavalry's companies were annihilated; Custer was killed. The total U.S. casualty count, including scouts, was 268 dead and 55 injured.

Custer’s last stand, painting

Sioux drawing of the battle of Little Bighorn

General George Custer

Sioux Chief Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

Sioux Chief Crazy Horse

George Kills in Sight interview, 1967

“So he put it on his waist and then they, they didn’t go in with him, but they stand so far and the guards stopped them, and they turn over to the . . . those Pine Ridge members that went after him escorted him to, to the . . . instead of taking him to the Army officer, they take him to . . . right straight to the jail. So there’s two guards on each side of the gate. And this Pine Ridge, members of the Pine Ridge, that escorted him, they told him that was a jail—in Indian. So he turned around, and this guard—he was a white soldier—just run his bayonet through, through the guts. He didn’t shoot him or anything, just . . .

Killed him there. They just let him lay there, and of course he was dead. So, my grandfather and his bunch, they was from Cheyenne. They went up there and they claimed the body. ...

[burial] So they dug a hole in a kind of washout, like a ravine, close up to a ridge. … They laid the body in there, and then put rocks just tight, you know, and put dirt on there, and fixed it so that nobody ever think there was a grave there. So, that’s why when they fixed that monument they wanted to know where he was buried but nobody will tell. Those that were present at the time will never tell!”

Ghost dance, painting

Ghost dance filmed by Thomas Edison Co. in 1894

The Battle of Wounded Knee, 1890On December 29, 1890, the United States 7th Cavalry massacred, without provocation, more than 300 men, women and children who were being relocated to the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge

Frederick Remington, first moments of the battle

1973 Wounded Knee occupation medalIn 1973 the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the Pine Ridge Reservation near Wounded Knee in protest against the federal government and its policies related to Native Americans. They began the occupation on February 27. A 71-day standoff between federal authorities and the AIM ensued. The militants surrendered on May 8.

Populism

The Wizard of Oz, trailer, 1939

The Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum (1900) - an allegory of the silver standard debate?

Yellow brick road = gold standardMagical silver slippers (ruby slippers in movie) = silver standard

Political coalition:Scarecrow = farmersTin Woodman = workersCowardly Lion = politicians

Wizard = the PresidentOz = Washington, DC

Munchkins = the PeopleWicked Witch of the West = the corporation or Trust (enemy of the People)

A Populist family from Nebraska

“Which Will Win?” New York Graphic, 1973

Cartoon about Populist unity

Populist Platform, Omaha convention, 1892

- direct election of US Senators- govenrment control of currency- graduated income tax- system of low-cost public financing- recognition of the right of workers to form unions

1896 Republical Party anti-silver standard poster

William Jennings Bryan Swallowing the Democratic Party, Judge, 1896

William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country….

They tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they say bimetallism is good but we cannot have it till some nation helps us, we reply that, instead of having a gold standard because England has, we shall restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States have.

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Election map of 1896 - republican candidate, William McKinley wins

Samuel Gompers, founder and president of the American Federation of Labor

Mary Elizabeth Lease, Speech, 1890

[speaks to an audience of women] “Speech to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union”

[equality] … there is no difference between the brain of an intelligent woman and the brain of an intelligent man.

[participation] … The doors of the Farmers’ Alliance were thrown open wide to women of the land. … we find at the present time upward of a half-million women in the Alliance …

[political power] … to these women, unknown and uncrowned, belongs the honor of defeating for reelection to the United States Senate of a man [who argued that] “a woman could not and should not vote because she was a woman.”

[addresses white demands only] … as grand Senator [William Morris] Stewart [of Nevada] puts it, “For twenty years the market value of the dollar has gone up and the market value of labor has gone down, till to-day the American laborer, in bitterness and wrath, asks which is the worst—the black slavery that has gone or the white slavery that has come?”

Farmers > Farm Holiday, 1932 and Archibald Willard, The Spirit of ‘76, 1876

Farmers > Dust Storm Approaching Startford, Texas, 1930s

Farmers > Map of Erosion and Dust on the Plains

Farmers > Traveling from South Texas to the Arkansas Delta, 1936

Farmers > Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, March 1936

Farmers > Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother series, March 1936

Farmers > Arthur Rothstein, Steer Skull, Pennington County, South Dakota 1936

Farmers > Arthur Rothstein, the same skull on dry sun-baked earth

Farmers > Arthur Rothstein, the same skull, cows grazing in the background

Pro-environmentalist cartoon