What Was It Like to Live in the Wild West

Western frontier life in America

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Pioneers traveled in wagon trains

Western frontier life in America describes i of the most exciting periods in the history of the United States. From 1850 to 1900, swift and widespread changes transformed the American West. At the beginning of that period, a great variety of Native American cultures dominated nigh parts of the region. By the finish of the era, the West had become a bustling society populated by new immigrants of all kinds.

Historians sometimes ascertain the American Due west as lands west of the 98th meridian, or 98� due west longitude. This line of longitude runs though the middle of Texas and Kansas upwardly through the eastern third of Nebraska and the Dakotas. Some definitions of the region include all lands west of the Mississippi or Missouri rivers. For the consummate story of western expansion in the United States, see Westward movement in America.

Regardless of the precise boundary line used, the western frontier differed in many ways from the eastern Usa. Much of the Due west had a drier climate than that of the East, and western terrain often proved much harsher. As a result, immigrants to the West had to adapt and find new ways of doing things to survive. Their efforts were aided by improvements in transportation, communication, farm equipment, and other areas.

This article will first describe the corking changes experienced on the western frontier and the unlike peoples who inhabited that frontier. Information technology will and then focus on iii major economic activities that transformed the region: mining, ranching, and farming. The article will also look at conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers. Finally, it volition examine the ways in which the West left its mark on American culture.

The shifting frontier

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Covered wagons

The frontier moves westward. Throughout the 1800's, America's borderland moved steadily westward. Yet in the 1840's, immigrants to the West saw well-nigh of the region equally an obstacle, not a destination. They feared the area's vast deserts, rugged mountain ranges, and many Indian tribes. Immigrant farmers initially skipped over nigh of the West, migrating instead to fertile valleys in California and Oregon by a variety of land and sea routes.

Two events helped spur a much larger migration by 1849. First, the U.S. victory in the Mexican War (1846-1848) gave the immature nation vast new areas of land in the West. Second, a gilt rush in California in 1849 attracted droves of American fortune seekers called "Twoscore-Niners." The gold rush also attracted Chinese, Europeans, South Americans, and others, all hoping to strike it rich.

Later on discoveries of rich ore deposits spurred new migrations to a diverseness of places, including Pikes Elevation in Colorado, the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and the Blackness Hills of South Dakota. In each instance, the local population soared, equally miners poured in and people engaged in supplying the miners' many needs flocked to the latest boom towns. Miners required food, equipment, clothing, services, and entertainment, so businesses competed to provide them. Miners needed pack animals too as meat, so ranchers as well benefited. For case, some ambitious Oregonians drove cattle due south to the California gold mines.

Improvements in transportation. Equally more Americans pushed westward, new technologies assisted them. Earlier the 1850's, almost people traveled due west by boat or wagon. These methods proved dull and expensive, and they provided limited access to western lands. The railroad, or "atomic number 26 horse," became a vital new travel selection, especially afterward the 1860'south.

The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 authorized a transcontinental rail line. The Union Pacific Railroad built this line west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific Railroad built it due east from Sacramento, California. These two lines met at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. On May 10, to marker the achievement, officials of the 2 railroads drove silver and aureate spikes to join the rails. This feat made possible declension-to-coast travel in 8 to 10 days. Later on railway lines, including the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Great Northern, added further travel options. The fe horse had conquered the Westward.

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Start transcontinental railroad system

In addition to bringing settlers west, railroads stimulated many economic activities. Towns vied to attract rail routes. Railroads enabled people to ship wheat, corn, cattle, sheep, mining ore, and other products more quickly and cheaply. Such companies as Montgomery Ward of Chicago could transport goods to westerners who had ordered them through the companies' postal service order catalogs. Railroads even boosted tourism. In the 1880's, for example, wealthy easterners began boarding trains to spend time on dude ranches, which provided them a cursory gustation of western ranch life.

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The Coming and Going of the Pony Express by Frederic Remington

New forms of communication likewise transformed the Westward. During the early days of the borderland, a letter took months to travel from the Midwest to California. But several developments presently made communication much faster. In Apr 1860, a post service chosen the pony express began carrying mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento. The service's horseback riders usually made their long journey in about ten days (see Pony express).

The telegraph before long ended the need for the pony express. This musical instrument, the offset used to send messages by means of wires and electric current, could transmit letters in minutes. Transcontinental telegraph service was established in 1861. Past virtually 1900, however, the recently invented telephone had begun to cause a reject in telegraph use.

Improvements in farming farther stimulated western settlement. Harsh conditions in the Due west forced immigrant farmers to discover new ways of farming. Unpredictable rainfall and thick, grass-covered sod presented challenges. Pioneers began dry farming on the Slap-up Plains, meaning they grew crops without irrigation in relatively dry out regions (see Dry farming). Past plowing soil deep and frequently, farmers could enhance crops in lands previously idea unproductive. Inventors helped find ways to get in easier to plow, plant, and harvest crops in tough prairie sod and heavy, mucilaginous soil. In 1837, John Deere, an Illinois blacksmith, developed a more constructive turn by incorporating steel into the moldboard, the curved part of a plow that turns the soil to i side. Cyrus McCormick's new mechanical reaper harvested grain more efficiently than did hand methods. In 1858, Lewis Miller patented a mowing machine that permitted farmers to assemble grain into bundles, again improving efficiency. Horses, mules, and oxen provided the ability for plowing, hauling, and other farm chores. Tractors and trucks would not announced until the 1900'due south.

Farmers needed seeds, equipment, household goods, fauna feed, and credit. Thus small towns began to dot the western landscape as retail businesses and banks arose to serve the growing population. Social centers, including churches, schools, and saloons, grew likewise. By the late 1800's, the West had become a patchwork of farms, ranches, and towns amid vast open spaces. So much of the Far West had filled up past 1890 that the Census Bureau declared in a report that a definite frontier line no longer existed.

The people of the western frontier

Early on occupants. In the 1840's, the American West was sparsely occupied. The largest groups of residents included Native Americans, who lived throughout the region, and Spanish-speaking settlers, who were ascendant in the Southwest.

Native Americans, whose cultures were many thousands of years old, had developed an amazing range of adaptations to the American West. Agriculture, fishing, and hunting and gathering provided a varied diet. After the Spaniards introduced horses to the Smashing Plains in the 1600'south, many Indian groups became superb mounted hunters and warriors. Until the belatedly 1800'southward, huge herds of bison offered an ample supply of food and materials for edifice and clothing.

The shifting borderland had devastating effects on Native American cultures. White settlers pushed Indian tribes off their lands. Resistance past the tribes oft led to wars with the U.S. armed services, wars the tribes ordinarily lost. As western lands came under white command, settlers turned grasslands into farms and ranches and hunters nearly wiped out the region's vast buffalo herds.

Castilian-speaking settlers had inhabited what is now the American Southwest since the late 1500's. Farming and ranching occupied most workers, though mining occurred in certain areas. Spanish missions and ranches attracted some Native Americans, who converted to Roman Catholicism and took upwardly the Castilian linguistic communication and culture. By the time American settlers arrived in the 1800's, Spanish culture had become well established throughout much of the Southwest.

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Homestead Deed

Newcomers. Immigrants to the West arrived from a wide range of backgrounds and locations. A large number of these newcomers came from the eastern United States. Others came from outside the land. Mining and ranching attracted mostly young adult males. Farming drew entire families. The U.S. Congress assisted them with laws to encourage settlement. For example, the Pre-emption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Human activity of 1862 fabricated purchasing western lands easier.

The newcomers came for various motives. For example, Mormons migrated to escape religious persecution, and large numbers of African Americans traveled west to escape racial discrimination. Many others, such every bit Chinese workers, sought economic opportunity.

Brigham Young led almost iii,000 Mormons to Utah'due south Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847. This religious grouping is formally known as the Church building of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormons had decided to leave their home in Illinois in search of religious freedom later on the murder of Mormon founder Joseph Smith in 1844.

A afterward Mormon immigrant from England, Jean Rio Baker, kept a diary of her journeying in 1851. She despaired over the road that "was completely covered with stones as big as bushel boxes, stumps of copse, with here and there mud holes, in which our poor oxen sunk to the knees."

The hardy Mormon pioneers settled in the valleys of due north-key Utah. They irrigated the valleys and made farming productive. The Mormons also established Table salt Lake Metropolis. Utah eventually became a U.Due south. state in 1896.

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Blackness homesteaders

Thousands of southern blacks settled in the West, mainly in Kansas, after the American Civil War (1861-1865). Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a old slave from Tennessee, led the migration move. The African Americans who went west were called "Exodusters" because of their exodus (mass departure) to the dusty frontier. Yet near of the Exodusters faced the same discrimination in their new homes as they had faced in the Due south. An 1880 article in Scribner's Monthly magazine described their labors, maxim "about one-tertiary are supplied with teams and farming tools, and may exist expected to get self-sustaining in another year." But the remaining two-thirds had to work as day laborers or house servants for white farmers and ranchers.

Some Chinese immigrants came to the West as contract laborers (workers imported under an understanding to work for a particular employer). The showtime group of Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848. 4 years later on, more 20,000 Chinese arrived. In the 1860'south, the Fundamental Pacific Railroad recruited thousands more than Chinese to build the rail line. The Matrimony Pacific hired thousands of Irish gaelic and other Europeans for the same purpose. By 1880, nearly 105,000 Chinese lived in the United States, by and large in California. Their presence sparked mob violence and calls for clearing restrictions, mostly by laborers who felt that the Chinese undercut wages and working conditions. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese workers.

Mining

The quest for gilded and other precious minerals drew tens of thousands of immigrants to the Westward. In 1848, a millwright named James Marshall discovered golden at Sutter'southward Mill, California. His discovery touched off the first and greatest western gold rush. Inside ii years, 100,000 people had flocked to California to brand their fortune. Would-be miners arrived from around the world. Well-nigh ended up sick, bankrupt, or both. Merchants sold goods and services to miners at highly inflated prices.

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Asian immigrant workers

Men fabricated up about all of the gold seekers who rushed westward. A few women mined, but most worked equally entertainers in saloons or dance halls, as seamstresses, or as laundresses who washed miners' clothes. Other women operated boardinghouses or worked every bit prostitutes. Chinese immigrants besides gear up laundries in some mining camps, merely they often faced bigotry and violence.

Subsequent finds drew more fortune hunters to other western sites. Southwestern Oregon yielded gold nuggets in the early 1850'south, luring miners due north from California. Prospectors flocked to the area nigh Pikes Elevation in Colorado and the Comstock Lode in western Nevada in 1859. In 1873, four miners hit the "Big Bonanza," a vein of gilded and silverish about Virginia City, Nevada. In the mid-1870's, gold miners poured into the Black Hills of Southward Dakota. The Black Hills town of Deadwood became famous for its lawlessness, abuse, and prostitution. In 1878, prospectors discovered rich deposits of silverish near Leadville in central Colorado.

Other minerals likewise spurred mining booms. Copper deposits in Butte, Montana; Bingham Canyon, Utah; and Jerome, Arizona, provided employment for many miners. Toward the terminate of the 1800'south, oil, known as "black gold," became the bang-up strike-information technology-rich article of the Due west. Bartlesville, Oklahoma, became an oil smash boondocks in 1897, followed by Beaumont, Texas, in 1901.

A typical mining camp. A prospector pounded wooden stakes into the ground to mark his merits. If he found no gold, he "pulled upwards stakes" and moved on to stake a new claim. He might also unscrupulously "table salt" the claim—that is, he would plant a few gold nuggets there to pull a fast one on a buyer into purchasing the worthless site.

Mining camps began every bit primitive, homemade diplomacy. One gold seeker explained, "I pitched my tent, congenital a rock chimney at one stop, made a mattress of fir [branches], and idea myself well fixed for the winter." Miners built shacks out of logs and scraps of wood and canvass. Lice, rodents, and other pests infested the primitive dwellings.

Well-nigh miners began working their claim past panning. They dipped up sand and gravel from the riverbed into a metal pan and swirled it effectually. Heavier gold settled to the bottom. Fine "flour" gold might require using mercury to grade a mixture from which the golden could be separated. Miners could utilize a box on rockers to agitate gravel and water, thus removing the gold from the mix. More elaborate claims might include a sluice, a serial of long, slanted wooden boxes into which was dumped gravel and water. This activity separated the tailings (lighter world) from the heavier golden. Away from river sites, miners searched for quartz, a burnished stone that often contained gold. They hacked away at the earth with pickaxes and shovels. Larger mining companies dug deep into hillsides, creating underground mines.

Like other westerners, miners lived a difficult life. Excavation or panning for gold or silverish meant long hours nether the hot sun, oftentimes working in common cold mountain waters. In 1850, a miner named William Young man described the weather at his dig along California'south Yuba River as "five months' rain, four months' high h2o, and three months' dry and adept weather but very hot—almost too hot to work." Leather boots, vests, and aprons deteriorated chop-chop. Rocks tore holes into pants and shirts. Most clothes needed abiding patching.

Life in the mining towns. Few women and children lived in mining camps. Simply if a mining campsite grew into a more than stable boondocks did the population diversify. If the camp prospered, it might abound into a boom town with retail stores, a jail, saloons, dance halls, and assay offices to evaluate and weigh gold.

Mining booms swelled local populations speedily, outstripping the supply of virtually everything, including food and work animals. Men sometimes killed each other for such necessities. Some mining communities formed governing councils and created codes of conduct. These councils handled robberies, assaults, and other crimes. In some cases, mob violence and lynchings took the place of legal proceedings. Organized police forces and judges came simply gradually to the West.

Conflicts broke out between mining companies and miners every bit the latter tried to organize into labor unions. Such labor groups as the Western Federation of Miners protested, enervating legal protections and ameliorate weather nether which to work. The labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, improve known as "Female parent Jones," spent her long life working to meliorate atmospheric condition for miners.

Ranching

Centers of ranching. Spanish and after Mexican ranchers had grazed cattle in the Southwest since nigh 1700. Ranches and missions with Native American labor raised livestock. Local markets purchased meat, and ranchers in California exported cattle hides, tallow (beef fat), and stale beefiness. Newcomers to the West continued much of this ranching tradition in the middle and late 1800'south.

The Ceremonious War generated a dandy blast for western ranchers. During the war, most able-bodied Texas men left the state to fight for the Confederacy. All the same their cattle herds increased by several meg animals, largely untended. Returning after the war to a surplus of longhorn cattle, Texans faced ruin unless they plant new markets. Cattle, worth only a few dollars in Texas, could bring up to $50 a head in eastern markets. So ambitious cattlemen drove herds north to sell them at "moo-cow towns" in Kansas, where buyers had congenital stockyard belongings pens. The animals then traveled east in rail cars to slaughterhouses in Chicago, Kansas City, and elsewhere.

Cattle raising spread gradually due north from Texas and California. Many ranchers got their start by rounding upward wild horses and mavericks (unbranded cattle). Monroe Brackins, born a slave in 1853, spoke of such roundups in south Texas. He said, "I used to rather ketch up a wild horse and break 'im than to eat breakfast."

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Branding of cattle

Most cowboys worked on trail drives or in the busier jump and autumn roundup and branding seasons. They moved from ranch to ranch, taking work when they constitute it. Many were Mexican cowboys, chosen vaqueros �vah KAIR ohz�, or African Americans.

Life on the ranches. Ranch houses in the West ranged from apprehensive, dirt-floored lean-tos to lavish mansions. On small ranches on the plains, an entire family unit might alive in a tiny sod hut. If a ranch had forestlands, the rancher likely built a log cabin. A unmarried fireplace provided winter warmth, and a wood-called-for stove occupied much of the kitchen. Ranchers would expand and improve the dwellings if they made enough profits.

Larger ranches would have outbuildings, including a barn, outhouse, cookhouse, and a bunkhouse for cowboys. The bunkhouse often had old newspapers as wallpaper, which helped seal out the wind and provided reading material. Simple wooden frames tied past string fabricated upwardly a ranch hand's bed. The cowboy slept in the aforementioned bedroll that he used on the range.

Entertainment consisted mainly of gambling (usually card games), reading, swapping tall tales, and reciting poems. The poesy of many old-time cowboys got passed along and written down. Today, readers still savor the piece of work of such cowboy poets as Charles Badger Clark, Jr., Curley Fletcher, and Bruce Kiskaddon. Cowboys would too stage ranch rodeos, challenging hands from nearby ranches in horse racing and roping.

The cattle bulldoze. The heyday of the great trail drives came just after the Civil War, when cowhands drove millions of longhorns from Texas to Kansas. The Chisholm Trail, which ran near 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) between southern Texas and Abilene, Kansas, became the main cattle route. Over the years, other cattle trails developed throughout the West. A Texas cowhand named W. L. Rhodes said nearly cattle drives of the 1880's, "The first fifty miles of whatsoever trail bulldoze is ever the hardest because the cattle want to break dorsum to the land they're used to. We sure had to haze a many a i back before we got the herd used to moving."

Cowboys faced many dangers on the trail, including lightning, rain, hailstorms, range fires, tornadoes, and rustlers. An 1885 memoir by a cowboy named Charlie Siringo described a trail bulldoze. He wrote, "Everything went on lovely with the exception of swimming bloated streams, fighting now and and then among ourselves and a stampede every stormy night, until we arrived on the Canadian river in the Indian territory; there we had a little Indian scare."

Cattle stampedes could too crusade great devastation. A cowboy named Edward "Teddy Blue" Abbott described the event of one stampede, writing that, "horse and man was mashed into the ground as flat as a pancake." Abbott said, "The merely matter you lot could recognize was the handle of his six-shooter."

Bad weather, greed, and technology combined to end the smashing cattle drives. Especially harsh winters in the mid-1880'due south killed tens of thousands of cattle trying to fodder on the open up range. Too many ranchers had overstocked the ranges, leading to lower prices and leaving animals unable to feed themselves on lands that did non produce enough grass in dry atmospheric condition. Farther expansion of western railroads made information technology cheaper and quicker to booty cattle by train rather than drive them.

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Texas Rangers

Law and order. Motion pictures and novels often exaggerate the level of the violence in the W, equally well as the average cowboy's skill with a gun. Ambush, rather than one-on-one gun duels, characterized nigh western killings.

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Guess Roy Bean

Ranching frontier regions had few police force enforcement officers, judges, and jails. At Fort Smith, on the present-24-hour interval border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, Isaac C. Parker built a reputation as "the hanging approximate." During his 21 years in court that began in 1875, nearly 160 people received a sentence of death. Most half that number were executed past hanging.

Lacking regular police force enforcement, other areas often resorted to justice by self-appointed groups of citizens called vigilantes (meet Vigilante). People defendant of rustling cattle or horses oft ended up hanged by such vigilantes. Large cattle ranchers might ring together into livestock grower'south associations to protect their interests. They often suspected smaller ranchers and farmers of stealing their livestock. In some cases, they hired gun fighters to track downwards and kill suspected rustlers. Tom Horn became a celebrated hired gun.

Other types of economic conflict arose. Resentful of encroaching farmers and their fences, some ranchers destroyed barbed wire barriers that cut off admission to rangeland grasses and h2o. Spinous wire, patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1873, enabled farmers to protect crops against cattle. Cattle and sheep ranchers also fought over access to grass and water. Ethnic violence arose frequently, especially around mining camps, with whites attacking Chinese and Latin Americans every bit unwanted competitors.

Farming

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Cornhusking

The spread of farming. Pioneer farmers, or homesteaders, began settling in California, Oregon, and other parts of the Due west during the early on 1800's. After the Civil State of war, withal, western farming expanded greatly. Homesteaders, mostly white, quickly populated the Great Plains from 1870 to 1890. Wheat farms spread beyond the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Idaho became a major producer of potatoes. Other crops included barley, corn, flax, oats, and sugar beets.

Life on the farms. Early on pioneering families had to be self-sufficient. They made or gathered their own habiliment, nutrient, shelter, and fuel.

Wearable. Many farmers kept sheep for nutrient and wool. Women carded (cleaned and combed) the wool and spun and wove it into cloth. Some houses had a large spinning cycle for wool and a smaller i for flax. Women also had to knit mittens, mufflers, and stockings as well as patch and mend older wearable.

Men and boys wore overalls made from denim or recycled grain sacks and a brusque jacket. Women wore a calico or gingham apparel and a sunbonnet. Every bit towns grew in size and mail-order catalogs appeared, settlers could purchase cotton appurtenances to make into clothing. They might use walnut bark, sumac, indigo, and other natural materials to dye the material.

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Chuck wagon

Food. A subcontract family had to supply its ain food. Farmers generally used corn as the staple, often making corn-meal mush, corn muffins, or griddle cakes. They also broiled wheat and other grains into bread. Luxuries, such equally white carbohydrate and white flour, could merely exist bought at stores. Cooks sweetened foods with maple sugar, honey, or sorghum molasses. Some farmers planted a fruit orchard that might include apple, cherry, peach, pear, and plum trees. Meat came from such animals as cattle, pigs, chickens, and sheep. A cow supplied milk and cream that families used to make butter and cheese. Subcontract families, specially women and children, also tended vegetable gardens. They canned or dried much of the crop for winter employ. Hunting, fishing, and gathering wild fruits and berries added to the diet.

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Temporary shelters

Shelter. For many subcontract families, a humble shelter dug into a hillside provided their kickoff home. A young woman named Laura Iversen Abrahamson described her family's dugout in South Dakota in the late 1800's. "Our business firm is one that Pap and George Monrad dug out of a sidehill," she said. "The upper office is made of logs, and the roof is of sod."

Few trees grew on the open up plains. Lacking the shelter of a hillside or sufficient trees for a log motel, farmers on the plains cut sod squares from the soil to utilise as building fabric. The sod grasses, with their long, tough, flexible roots, could be cut and stacked to make walls and fifty-fifty the roof. A sod house, often called a soddy or soddie, needed but a small-scale amount of lumber to frame a door and a window or ii. The sod insulated reasonably well, except confronting rain, keeping farmhouses cool during the hot summertime and relatively warm in winter. Heavy rain penetrated the roof and could plow the floor into a muddy mess.

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Pioneer settlers in Nebraska

Later, farmers would haul in lumber to build houses of wood. Josephine Waybright, who lived on a farm about Ashland, Nebraska, in the late 1800's, described the improvements that farmers made over time. "When folks got to building bigger and amend houses," she said, "they would arrange them with parlor and a spare room. The parlor was just used when company come and was kept shut up most of the fourth dimension with the defunction drawn."

Fuel. Lack of wood as well meant a lack of fuel for cooking and heating. Families typically had to apply dried buffalo chips (bison dung) every bit fuel. The fuel gave off a hot, fast-burning fire with little odor. James 1000. Eastman, who grew upwards on a Nebraska farm in the late 1800's, gathered fuel as one of his childhood jobs. He said, "My mother would ship me out to pick up buffalo chips, sunflower stalks, and big weeds and sticks which we piled up for fuel." A family might spend several weeks in the autumn piling up chips to go them through the winter. With the demise of the keen buffalo herds in the 1870's, farm families turned to cow pies (dried cattle dung), cats (twists of dried prairie grass), and dried cornstalks and cobs for fuel.

Recreation. Isolation on the plains meant that farm families had to make their own fun. Reading and music offered good sources of home amusement. Guitars, fiddles, harmonicas, and other musical instruments provided amusement. Musicians enjoyed a warm welcome at occasional dances, which families might travel for hours to nourish. A quilting bee produced needed bedding and offered women a intermission from the isolation of plains life.

Holidays provided a adventure to socialize and gloat. Laura Abrahamson described fun at a Fourth of July celebration in South Dakota in 1895. She said, "We had swings and hammocks and played games and had lemonade and cake and had and so much fun at the picnic that I guess I'll experience all right even if I don't go to anything at present for a long time."

Faith. Religious services also brought people together. Pioneers often first met in someone's soddy until an area could back up a church edifice.

Education. Ane-room schoolhouses began actualization on the plains. Many early schools were fabricated of sod. After, more than substantial wood or brick school buildings appeared. Students sat in handmade desks and wrote on slates with slate pencils. A single teacher instructed all 8 grades. Students had to bring their lunches, ordinarily carried in pails, and sometimes had to bring water as well. They walked or rode horses to grade. Vera Pearson, a Kansas homesteader, recalled that teachers had "no charts, no maps, no pictures, no books but a Speller."

Hardships and challenges. Cracking Plains weather condition could bring extreme heat, cold, pelting, wind, or dust. Hattie Erickson, who survived a blizzard in 1888 at her farm in Due south Dakota, reported, "The storm kept on all night. My kitchen door flew open several times so I had to nail information technology shut. I think information technology was the coldest night I always went through." The storm killed more than than 100 people.

James Eastman recalled prairie fires that "would start way down in Kansas and come up clear up to Nebraska. The fires would go faster than any horse could run. Pocket-sized game, such as rabbits . . . would be burned live." He also told of cold summers that ruined crops. "I take seen frost in Nebraska in July. Seen the leaves freeze off and all of our corn would exist ruined."

Settlers and Native Americans

Westward expansion devastated virtually Native American cultures. Indian tribes constantly faced the pressure of white settlers and their want for territory. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson ordered more 40,000 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians out of their traditional lands in the East. The social club forced the Indians to move to Indian Territory (see Indian Territory), a region in present-day Oklahoma. Several thousand Indians died forth the way. The Cherokee came to call their journey the "Trail of Tears," and this term is sometimes used to refer to the removal of the other tribes as well. Other displacements followed as more whites moved west.

Most white settlers believed Indians posed a barrier to U.S. expansion. This mentality sometimes led to the massacre of innocent people. In 1864, Colonel John Chivington commanded Colorado volunteers against a village of Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. The undisciplined troops killed almost 150 Indian men, women, and children.

In 1866, some ii,000 Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux warriors ambushed Helm William J. Fetterman and nigh fourscore of his troops nigh Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. The Indians, including the Sioux leader Crazy Horse, wiped out the entire command. In 1868, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Calvary against a large Cheyenne camp in Indian Territory. The soldiers killed or wounded more than 100 Indians.

Discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1876 touched off the almost famous Indian battle in American history. Gold seekers flooded the region, ignoring Teton Sioux rights to the land. Subsequently that year, Custer attacked a large Indian camp on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana. Within a half hour, Teton Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors wiped out Custer's command. The Sioux Chief Cerise Horse left an bystander business relationship. "These soldiers became foolish," he said, "many throwing abroad their guns and raising their hands, saying, 'Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners.' The Sioux did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed all of them." More than 200 soldiers died.

The relentless tide of white immigrants and the nearly-devastation of the buffalo doomed Plains Indians to defeat. The last gasp of resistance came with a motility led by the Paiute religious leader Wovoka in 1890. White people chosen it the Ghost Dance religion because it promised that dead Indian ancestors would return to life. The Sioux medicine human Sitting Bull joined the movement, but to exist shot dead when his followers resisted his arrest. A massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890 ended Indian resistance.

The West in American civilisation

The frontier has had a profound influence on American life. Paintings, stories, and films about the W remain an important part of American culture.

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Cowboy painting by Charles Marion Russell

Art. Many artists of the 1800'due south and early 1900'due south used Western subjects in their work. Alfred Jacob Miller painted pictures of many of the West'south natural wonders, including Independence Stone in Wyoming and the Chiliad Tetons of the Rocky Mountains. Painter Albert Bierstadt's work as well celebrated the western mural.

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The Cheyenne, a sculpture by Frederic Remington

Cowboys and Indians likewise became favorite subjects for artists. George Catlin and Karl Bodmer made memorable paintings of Native Americans. Charles G. Russell created paintings and sculptures of the terminal stages of open-range cowboy and Indian life on the northern plains. Frederic Remington sketched, painted, and after sculpted the Westward's inhabitants. Like Russell, Remington expressed what he saw as the freedom and heroism of western life. James Walker created important images of California'due south vaqueros at work in their colorful costumes.

The mining and farming frontiers played an additional, though smaller, role in American art. Charles Nahl ranked as the best-known artist to gloat the mining borderland. His works include the painting Dominicus Morning in the Mines (1872).

Literature. Novelists found the West and its colorful people irresistible subjects. Fanciful tales came from so-called "pulp novelists" in the tardily 1800'southward. Seldom having seen the West, these writers churned out cheap literature filled with potent white heroes, women in need of saving, and vicious Indians and outlaws. "Dime novels," such equally those by Edward L. Wheeler, sometimes romanticized and exaggerated the actions of such real western figures as Martha "Calamity Jane" Canary (also spelled Cannary).

Two easterners, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, promoted their own romantic versions of the W. Roosevelt, after a failed attempt at ranching in the Dakotas, wrote a iv-volume history called The Winning of the West (1889-1896). He subsequently became president of the United States. Wister'due south novel The Virginian (1902) raised Western fiction to a position of disquisitional respect.

Amusement. Ned Buntline, the pen proper noun for Edward Zane Carroll Judson, helped the frontiersman Buffalo Bill become a hero to easterners. Buffalo Bill, whose existent name was William Frederick Cody, starred in Buntline's play The Scouts of the Prairie (1872). Buffalo Bill later started a traveling "Wild Due west" show that became an international striking. Running from 1883 until 1913, the show thrilled audiences with galloping cowboys and Indians, bang-up marksmanship past Annie Oakley, and imaginative re-creations of historical Western events.

The allure of cowboy action drew audiences to rodeo competitions (come across Rodeo). Originally, cowboys from different ranches tested their riding and roping skills against one another. But such competitions became more formal and began offering prize money. By the early 1900's, Cheyenne Borderland Days in Wyoming, the Pendleton Round-Upwards in Oregon, and dozens of other rodeos drew competitors from across the country.

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Western motion picture

New media of the 1900'south—motion picture, radio, and television—brought Western heroes to larger audiences. The cowboy became the best-known and nigh popular Western figure. From the early on days of silent Western films, cowboy stars dominated the box office. Bronco Baton Anderson, Tom Mix, William S. Hart, and other silent movie cowboys entertained moviegoers in the early 1900's. First in the 1930'south, sound films brought the excitement of galloping hooves and blazing guns to the screen. A new generation of heroes arose, including John Wayne and singing cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Many Western films took their plots from "shoot 'em up" novels past Zane Greyness, Max Brand, and others.

In the early 1950's, some Western moving-picture show stars, including Autry and Rogers, made successful transitions to television. Westerns dominated much of prime-fourth dimension television set through the mid-1960'south. Today, Americans go on to revere their frontier past as a time of forcefulness, courage, self-reliance, and honesty.

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Contributor:
• Richard W. Slatta, Ph.D., Professor of History, North Carolina State University.

How to cite this article:
To cite this article, World Book. recommends the following format:

Slatta, Richard W. "Western borderland life in America." World Book Online Reference Heart. 2006. Globe Book, Inc. 19 January. 2006

<http://www.worldbookonline.com/wb/Article?id=ar599110>

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Source: https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/cowboys/essays/front_life2.htm

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