The Mammoth Book of the West (60 page)

1859    Gold rush to Pike’s Peak, Colorado; “the Comstock Lode” discovered in Nevada.

1860–5    Civil War between North and South results in troops on Western frontier being recalled.

1860    Smith & Wesson pioneer metal gun cartridges; Bannock and Shoshoni Indians attack Otter–Van Orman wagon train, killing 18 pioneers; the Pony Express
commences service; transcontinental telegraph line completed.

1861    Kansas admitted to the Union.

1862    Battle of Apache Pass between California Volunteers and Apache under Cochise and Mangas Coloradas, July; Homestead Act gives citizens over 21 the right to 160 acres of public domain; Little Crow leads uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota, with the Santee eventually defeated by superior force of militia at Wood Lake, September.

1864    Navajos make the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo; a punitive expedition led by Kit Carson is saved in a battle with the Comanche at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle after deploying two howitzers; massacre of Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, November; “road agent” Henry Plummer hanged by Montana vigilantes.

1865    President Abraham Lincoln assassinated; John Batterson Stetson establishes shop in Philadelphia specializing in headware for the range country; James Butler Hickok duels with Dave Tutt in Springfield, Missouri, July.

1866    Thieves (including Jesse and Frank James) raid bank at Liberty, Missouri, February; the Reno brothers rob a train at Seymour, Indiana; Fort Laramie Council between Government and Northern Plains tribes, June; Texan ranchers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving begin blazing the cattle trail to the Northern Plains which will bear their name; Red Cloud’s Sioux ambush 80 officers and men near Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail in the Fetterman Massacre, named after the arrogant army captain who led the command.

1867    More than 35,000 cattle driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas; Alaska purchased by USA from Russia.

1868    Government to abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail, tacitly admitting that the Sioux are the victors in “Red Cloud’s War”; Roman Nose of the Cheyenne dies in a skirmish with volunteer scouts at Beecher Island; Colonel George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry massacre Black Kettle’s Cheyenne near the Washita River, Indian Territory.

1869    Transcontinental railroad completed; Wyoming extends franchise to women.

1871    Mass shoot-out in a saloon in Newton, Kansas, leaves five dead; Marshal Wild Bill Hickok kills gunfighter/gambler Phil Coe in Abilene, Kansas.

1872–3    Modoc War, northern California, sees 165 Indians led by Captain Jack stand off vastly superior force of US Army until a series of pitched battles forces the Modoc to capitulate.

1873    Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire.

1874    Apache chief Cochise dies; buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls rebuff Comanche attack; Custer leads expedition to determine whether gold exists in the Black Hills of the Sioux.

1875    President Grant appoints Judge Isaac Parker (the “Hanging Judge”) to the Western District Court, the jurisdiction of which includes Indian Territory (Oklahoma); Quanah Parker, chief of the Quahadi Comanche, agrees to accept reservation life.

1876    Custer and 7th Cavalry defeated by Sioux and
allies at Little Big Horn, June; “Wild Bill” Hickok assassinated in Deadwood, August; the James–Younger gang routed by citizens in their attempted robbery of the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, September.

1877    Black American “Exodusters” found Nicodemus in north-west Kansas; after a relentless army campaign Sioux war leader Crazy Horse surrenders in May but is killed two months later; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrenders after fighting for nearly 1,000 miles in his attempt to flee to Canada.

1878    Lincoln County War in New Mexico; Texan outlaw Sam Bass killed by Rangers at Round Rock; Marshal Ed Masterson mortally wounded attempting to disarm drunken cowboys in Dodge City, Kansas.

1880    Cattle ranching established throughout the Great Plains; California gunfighter Walter J. Crow kills five men in the “Mussel Slough Shoot-out” on behalf of Southern Pacific Railroad.

1881    James S. Brisbin publishes
The Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains
; outlaw Billy the Kid is shot by sometime friend Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner in New Mexico, July; gunfight near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, between Earp brothers (with Doc Holliday) and Clanton gang, October; Sitting Bull, the Sioux victor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, surrenders after leaving sanctuary in Canada.

1882    Jesse James assassinated by Bob Ford, April.

1883    Cowboys in Texas Panhandle strike for higher wages; Buffalo Bill Cody begins his Wild West show; bison hunted almost to extinction.

1884    Vigilantes led by grandee rancher Granville Stuart
virtually clear Montana range of horse and cattle thieves.

1885    Fifty-one Chinese massacred by miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming.

1886–7    Blizzards decimate cattle on the northern ranges; the “Beef Bonanza” ends.

1886    General Nelson A. Miles accepts the surrender of Apache warrior leader Geronimo; feud between Graham and Tewksbury families sparks off the Pleasant Valley War, Arizona.

1887    Dawes General Allotment Act begins break-up of reservation lands.

1889    First land rush into Oklahoma, formerly the Indian Territory; celebrated female outlaw Belle Starr is murdered; Montana, Washington, North and South Dakota admitted to the Union, November.

1890    US Census announces the closing of the frontier; Idaho and Wyoming admitted to the Union, July; Sioux Ghost Dancers massacred by units of the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, and Indians at the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation flee in panic, December.

1891    Sioux Indians surrender to Nelson Miles and return to Pine Ridge, January; gold and silver rush to Cripple Creek, Colorado.

1892    Range war in Johnson County between large stock growers and alliance of homesteaders and cattle rustlers; Dalton gang of bank robbers ride to disaster at Coffeyville, south Kansas; historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his seminal paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

1896    Al Jennings begins – and ends – his risible career
as a road agent in Oklahoma; Bill Doolin, “King of the Oklahoma Outlaws”, killed by deputy marshal Heck Thomas while resisting arrest, August.

1898    The Wild Bunch reaches the apex of its career; Pearl Hart and Joe Boot commit the last hold-up of a stagecoach in Western history.

1901    Major oil field found at Spindletop, Texas; Butch Cassidy of the Wild Bunch, accompanied by the Sundance Kid and Etta Place, flees to South America via New York.

1903    Kid Curry, Wild Bunch member, commits suicide as police storm his hideout; range detective and hired killer Tom Horn is executed in Wyoming; first true Western movie,
Kit Carson
, is released; three months later
The Great Train Robbery
was released.

1905    Ex-Governor Frank Stuenenberg assassinated in Caldwell, Idaho.

1907    Oklahoma admitted to the Union.

1908    Pat Garrett murdered.

1909    Geronimo of the Apache dies; professional assassin Jim Miller lynched.

1911    Massacre of Shoshoni Indian family in Nevada; last land rush into Oklahoma.

1912    Ben Kilpatrick (“The Tall Texan”) is killed during the hold-up of a train at Dryden, Texas.

1913–14    Strike by United Mine Workers in Colorado ends in Ludlow Massacre.

1913    Riot of hop-pickers, Wheatland, California; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show closes, burdened by debts.

1916    Henry Starr killed attempting to rob the People’s National Bank at Harrison, Arkansas.

1917    Striking mineworkers deported from Bisbee, Arizona, by owners and vigilantes; International Workers of the World (IWW) leader Frank Little lynched by vigilantes in Butte, Montana; 18,000 people attend funeral of Buffalo Bill Cody, Denver, Colorado.

1919    Massacre of IWW activists at Centralia, Washington.

1924    Killing of Marshal Bill Tilghman in Cromwell, Oklahoma.

1929    Wyatt Earp and cattleman Charles Goodnight die.

1935    Last of the “bronco” Apaches living in the Sierra Madre gives up the old, free life.

The library of Western Americana is vast, and any bibliography necessarily selective. Among the most influential works and those which informed the preceding pages are:

Abbott, Edward C. and Helena Huntingdon Smith,
We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher
. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939

Adams, Andy,
Cattle Brand
. Boston: Houghton, 1906

——
Log of a Cowboy
. New York: Airmont, 1969

Alderson, Nannie T. and Helena Huntingdon Smith,
A Bride Goes West
. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942

Alter, J. Cecil,
James Bridger: Trapper, Frontiersman, Scout and Guide
. Columbus, OH, 1951

Ambrose, Stephen E.,
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
. New York: Penguin, 1975

Andrist, Ralph K.,
The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians
. New York: Collier Books, 1964

Applegate, Jesse,
A Day with the Cow Column in 1843
. Chicago: Caxton, 1934

Arnold, Oren,
Hot Irons: Heraldry of the Range
. New York: Macmillan, 1940

Atherton, Lewis,
The Cattle Kings
. Bloomington, 1961

Baber, D. F.,
The Longest Rope: The Truth about the Johnson County Cattle War
. Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1940

Baldwin, Leland D.,
Steamboats on the Mississippi
. American Heritage, 1962

Barnes, William C.,
Story of the Ranger
, Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 1926

Barth, Gunther,
Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1887
. Berkeley, 1964

Bartlett, Richard A.,
The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier 1776–1890
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974

Bergon, Frank (ed.),
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
. New York: Penguin, 1989

Betzinez, Jason (with W. S. Nye),
I Fought With Geronimo
. New York: The Stackpole Company, 1959

Billington, Ray Allen,
Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier
. New York: Macmillan, 1974

Bourke, John G.,
An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre
. New York: Scribner’s, 1886

Breakenridge, William M.,
Helldorado
. Boston: Houghton, 1928

Breihan, Carl W.,
Badmen of the Frontier Days
. New York: McBride, 1957

——
Great Lawmen of the West
. New York: Bonanza Books, 1963

Brininstool, Earl A.,
Trail Dust of a Maverick
. New York: Dodd Mead, 1914

Brisbin, James S.,
The Beef Bonanza
. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1881

Brown, Dee,
The Fetterman Massacre
. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

——
The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West
. New York: Bantam Books, 1974

——
Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow – Railroads in the West
. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1977

——
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: Indian History of the American West
. London: Arena Books, 1987 (reprint)

Brown, Richard Maxwell,
No Duty To Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society
. New York, 1991

Burdick, Usher L.,
Marquis de Mores at War in the Bad Lands
. Fargo, ND, 1929

Burns, Walter Noble,
The Saga of Billy the Kid
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1926

Canton, Frank M.,
Frontier Trails: The Autobiography of Frank M. Canton
(edited by E. E. Dale), Boston: Houghton, 1930

Capps, Benjamin,
The Great Chiefs
. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1975

Carrington, Frances C.,
My Army Life
. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911

Casey, Robert J.,
Pioneer Railroad
. New York: Whittlesey House, 1948

Clancy, Foghorn,
My Fifty Years in Rodeo
. San Antonio: Naylor Co., 1952

Clay, John,
My Life on the Range
. Chicago: privately printed, 1924

Cody, William F.,
Buffalo Bill’s Own Story of His Life and Deeds
. Chicago: Homewood Press, 1917

Connell, Evan S.,
Son of the Morning Star
. New York: Harper, 1984

Cook, James H.,
Fifty Years on the Old Frontier
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923

Corey, Elizabeth,
Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909–1919
(ed. Philip L. Gerber). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990

Cronon, William, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The
Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,”
Western Historical Quarterly
18:2 (April, 1987)

Cruse, Thomas,
Apache Days and After
. Caldwell, ID, 1941

Cunningham, Eugene,
Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters
. New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1934

Curtis, Natalie,
The Indians Book
. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907

Custer, George A.,
Wild Life on the Plains and Horrors of Indian Warfare
. St Louis, 1891