436 Chapter 16 The Conquest of the West
overcame the legacy of this past is testimony to their
own initiative, and to traditional cultures character-
ized by both perseverance and adaptation. ■
The West After the Civil War
Although the image of the West as the land of great
open spaces is accurate enough, after the Civil War the
region contained several bustling cities. San Francisco,
with a population approaching 250,000 in the late
1870s, had long outgrown its role as a rickety boom-
town where the forty-niners bought supplies and
squandered whatever wealth they had sifted from the
streams of the Sierras. Though still an important ware-
house and supply center, it had become the commer-
cial and financial heart of the Pacific Coast and a center
of light manufacturing, food processing, and machine
shops. Denver, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City were
far smaller, but growing rapidly and equally “urban.”
There was no one West, no typical Westerner.
Although the economy was predominantly agricul-
tural and extractive, commercial and industrial activi-
ties were expanding. The seeds of such large
enterprises as Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss, and half a
dozen important department store empires were
sown in the immediate postwar decades.
Beginning in the mid-1850s a steady flow of
Chinese migrated to the United States, most of them to
the West Coast. About four or five thousand a year
came, until the negotiation of the Burlingame Treaty of
1868, the purpose of which was to provide cheap labor
for railroad construction crews. Thereafter the annual
influx more than doubled, although before 1882 it
exceeded 20,000 only twice. When the railroads were
completed and the Chinese began to compete with
native workers, a great cry of resentment went up on the
west coast. Riots broke out in San Francisco in 1877.
Chinese workers were called “groveling worms,” “more
slavish and brutish than the beasts that roam the fields.”
The California constitution of 1879 denied the right to
vote to any “native of China” along with idiots, the
insane, and persons convicted of “any infamous crime.”
When Chinese immigration increased in 1882 to
nearly 40,000, the protests reached such a peak that
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, pro-
hibiting all Chinese immigration for ten years. Later
legislation extended the ban indefinitely.
Nevertheless, many parts of the West had as large
a percentage of foreign-born residents as the popu-
lous eastern states—nearly a third of all Californians
were foreign-born, as were more than 40 percent of
Nevadans and more than half the residents of Idaho
and Arizona. There were, of course, large populations
of Spanish-speaking Americans of Mexican origin all
over the Southwest. Chinese and Irish laborers were
pouring into California by the thousands, and there
were substantial numbers of Germans in Texas.
Germans, Scandinavians, and other Europeans were
also numerous on the High Plains east of the Rockies.The Plains Indians
For 250 years the Indians had been driven back
steadily, yet on the eve of the Civil War they still
inhabited roughly half the United States. By the time
of Hayes’s inauguration in 1877, the Indians had
been shattered as independent peoples, and in
another decade the survivors were penned up on
reservations, the government committed to a policy
of extinguishing their way of life.
In 1860 the survivors of most of the eastern tribes
were living peacefully in Indian Territory, what is now
Oklahoma. In California the forty-niners had made
short work of many of the local tribes. Elsewhere in
the West—in the deserts of the Great Basin between
the Sierras and the Rockies, in the mountains them-
selves, and on the semiarid, grass-covered plains
between the Rockies and the edge of white civiliza-
tion in eastern Kansas and Nebraska—nearly a quarter
of a million Indians dominated the land.
By far the most important lived on the High Plains.
From the Blackfoot of southwestern Canada and the
Sioux of Minnesota and the Dakotas to the Cheyenne
of Colorado and Wyoming and the Comanche of
northern Texas, the plains tribes possessed a generally
uniform culture. All lived by hunting the hulking
American bison, or buffalo, which ranged over the
plains by the millions. The buffalo provided the Indians
with food, clothing, and even shelter, for the famous
Indian tepee was covered with hides. On the treeless
plains, dried buffalo dung was used for fuel. The buf-
falo was also an important symbol in Indian religion.
Although they seemed the epitome of freedom,
pride, and self-reliance, the Plains Indians had begun
to fall under the sway of white power. They eagerly
adopted the products of the more technically
advanced culture—cloth, metal tools, weapons, and
cheap decorations. However, the most important
thing the whites gave them had nothing to do with
technology: It was the horse.
The horse was among the many large mammals
that became extinct in the Western Hemisphere around
8000 BP. Cortés reintroduced the horse to America in
the sixteenth century. Multiplying rapidly thereafter,
the animals soon roamed freely from Texas to
Argentina. By the eighteenth century the Indians of the
plains had made them a vital part of their culture.
Horses thrived on the plains and so did their
masters. Mounted Indians could run down buffalo
instead of stalking them on foot. They could move
more easily over the country and fight more effec-
tively too. They could acquire and transport more