454 Chapter 16 The Conquest of the West
In 1885 masked Nebraskans seeking access to water posed for
photographer S. D. Butcher, who captioned the picture, “Settlers
taking the law into their own hands: Cutting 15 miles of the Brighton
Ranch fence.”
and with unparalleled fury. Blizzards raged and tem-
peratures plummeted far below zero. Cattle crowded
into low places only to be engulfed in giant snow-
drifts; barbed wire took a fearful toll. When spring
finally came, the streams were choked with rotting
carcasses. Between 80 and 90 percent of all cattle on
the range were dead. “We have had a perfect smashup
all through the cattle country,” Theodore Roosevelt
wrote sadly in April 1887 from Elkhorn Ranch.
That cruel winter finished open-range cattle-
raising. The large companies were bankrupt; many
independent operators, Roosevelt among them,
became discouraged and sold out. When the industry
revived, it was on a smaller, more efficiently organized
scale. The fencing movement continued, but now
ranchers enclosed only the land they actually owned. It
then became possible to bring in pedigreed bulls to
improve the breed. Cattle-raising, like mining before
it, ceased to be an adventure in rollicking individualism
and became a business.
By the late 1880s the bonanza days of the West
were over. No previous frontier had caught the imag-
ination of Americans so completely as the Great West,
with its heroic size, its awesome emptiness, its mas-
sive, sculptured beauty. Most of what Walter Prescott
Webb, author of the classic studyThe Great Plains
(1931) called the “primary windfalls” of the region—
the furs, the precious metals, the forests, the cattle,
and the grass—had been snatched up by first comers
and by individuals already wealthy. Big companies
were taking over all the West’s resources. The frontier
was no more.
But the frontier never existed except as an intellec-
tual construction among white settlers and those who
wrote about them. To the Indians, the land was simply
home. The “conquest of the frontier” was thus an
appealing evasion: It transformed the harmful actions
and policies of the nation into an expression of human
progress, the march westward of “civilization.”
“Civilization,” though, was changing. The
nation was becoming more powerful, richer, and
larger, and its economic structure more complex
and diversified as the West yielded its treasures. But
the East, and especially eastern industrialists and
financiers, were increasingly dominating the econ-
omy of the entire nation.Resources and Conflict in the Westat
http://www.myhistorylab.comSeetheMap1859 Discovery of the Comstock Lode lures miners west
1864 Chivington massacre of Cheyenne
1869 Union Pacific Railroad completed
Board of Indian Commissioners established
1873 Timber Culture Act encourages western
forestation
1876 Sioux slaughter Custer’s cavalry at Battle of
Little Bighorn
1877 Desert Land Act favors ranchers
U.S. troops capture Chief Joseph of Nez Percé
after 1,000-mile retreat1878 Timber and Stone Act favors lumber companies
1879 Major Powell’sReport on the Lands of the Arid
Regionsuggests division of West
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act bans Chinese immigrant
workers for ten years
1886– Blizzards end open-range ranching
1887
1887 Dawes Severalty Act splits tribal landsMilestones
Chapter Review