The Transformation of the World (74 page)

Only the horse permitted the complete opening up of the plains between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains—800 kilometers from east to west, and more than 3,000 kilometers from north to south. It functioned as an energy transformer, converting the energy stored in grassland into muscle power obedient to human command.
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Now humans could keep up with the bison. It was no longer necessary for the whole population to take part in driving them to the edge of an abyss; mobile groups of young men could take potshots at them from the back of a horse. At the same time a new exchange economy evolved around the horse, and some tribes, foremost among them the Comanche, acquired “prodigious animal wealth” and became suppliers of horses for all sorts of customers far and near.
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The new hunting techniques revolutionized Indian communities. Women's labor was devalued, since their main activity was no longer to produce food on their own but to process the animals killed in the hunt. On the other hand, an increasing demand for bison skins meant that more women were needed to prepare them, so that one man could do with several wives. Women were bought with horses, and the resulting pressure to accumulate was a factor encouraging horse theft.
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The allocation of men to hunting groups led to social fragmentation and an erosion of hierarchy, but it also created new demands for cooperation and coordination. At the same time, the Indian communities and tribes became more mobile than ever, as they had to follow in the tracks of the vast herds of bison.
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It was this horse-and-bison culture that turned the Indians of the Great Plains into genuine nomads. Packhorses made it possible to transport heavy loads such as tents. Anyone who had personal property needed horses, and horses in turn were regarded as prestige objects. They also created advantages in time of war. Here too, creativity and adaptability were required of the Indians. For there was no indigenous tradition of mounted warfare, and the Spanish heavy cavalry, which became known in the South in the seventeenth century, was no model. Since the horse had to serve for hunting
and
battle, it was essential that the techniques for both should be as close as possible to each other. The Indians therefore developed light cavalry tactics, in some cases reaching unsurpassed heights of mastery. The stereotype of the expert rider applies only to the last period in which the Indians led a free existence; it took them three or four generations to perfect their skills. Best of all were the Comanche, who, having expelled previously settled groups, controlled the area east of the southern Rockies and south of the Arkansas River and even constructed a formidable system of dependencies that has been described as a “Comanche Empire” and a powerful player in the imperial game on the North American continent.
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The new horse-and-bison culture of the eighteenth century may be seen as a superb adaptation to a dry climate that was unsuitable for agriculture. The image of ecofriendly Indians, however, living in caring harmony with nature is a sentimental idealization remote from reality;
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the new integration into wider commercial circuits set up many pressures of its own. The first regular contacts
between Indians and whites came about through the fur trade—which for two centuries had linked hunters and trappers in the North American interior as well as Siberia to the world market—and were stabilized thanks to the great adaptability of Euro-American “backwoodsmen” and to marriages across ethnic boundaries. Through the fur trade Indians developed a familiarity with alcohol—a drug which, like opium a few decades later in China, would greatly weaken the cohesion and power of resistance of their communities. The horse-and-bison culture strengthened the ties with external markets. In one direction, the Indians had to cover a growing part of their needs through the buying and selling of goods. Even the most implacable opponent of the whites did not refuse the knives and cooking pots, rugs and materials that could be bought via agents from the factories and workshops of the east. In addition, many Indians acquired firearms that they did not know how to produce or repair themselves. This pushed them further into the web of trade, as did the growing dependence of their bison specialism on uncontrollable market factors. After 1830, for example, bison hides became more important than meat produce in cross-frontier trade, and it was around then that the problem of excessive herd depletion set in. An annual “yield” of six to seven animals per person was manageable (as we know today), but anything above that meant a dangerous level of overexploitation.
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The livelihood of the Plains Indians, whose reaction to the demand stimulus was rational economically but not ecologically, faded before their eyes. As Pekka Hämäläinen has demonstrated for the Comanche, the very success of the Southern Plains horse economy was its undoing: an overabundance of horses and overgrazing “proved too heavy for the grassland ecology, triggering a steep decline in bison numbers.”
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White hunters also muscled in and organized the slaughter of bison on a scale unknown to the Indians, averaging as many as twenty-five
daily
per hunter. Between the end of the Civil War and the late 1870s, the number of bison on the Great Plains fell from 15 million to just a few hundred.
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Profit seeking was cynically dressed up as a wish to remove the “savage” bison herds in favor of a “civilized” economy centered on well-behaving cattle, at the same time forcing the Indians to give up their “barbarian” way of life. By 1880 the horse-and-bison culture of the Great Plains had been wiped out: the Indians no longer had subsistence resources under their control. Only the reservation remained for the erstwhile masters of the prairie.

Was it good or bad for the Indians that the settlers did not systematically need their labor? Perhaps, at the cost of social marginalization, it spared them the fate of forced labor or enslavement. Here and there we come across Indian cowboys, but not an Indian proletariat. As early as the seventeenth century, there were unsuccessful attempts to incorporate Indians into colonial society as a toiling underclass. The Indians of California became the most integrated into the market economy, although this did not open up a stable perspective for them. Adaptation was seldom an effective resistance strategy, and the advance of the increasingly dominant whites everywhere limited the Indians' room for maneuver.

From the beginning there were two different reactions. Sometimes close neighbors might be miles apart in terms of their behavior: the Illinois Indians preferred a strategy of assimilation and near-total abandonment of their own culture; the nearby Kickapoo put up some of the fiercest resistance to intruders of any kind, whether Europeans or other Indian tribes, earning the reputation as the bitterest foes of the whites. Broken militarily by 1812 and eventually driven from their homelands, they nevertheless managed more than most to preserve their culture.
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Settlers

There were two sides to the American frontier: suppression of the Indians and official or private occupation of land that increased the national territory. Each side had its particular demography. The evolution of the Indian population can be calculated only approximately. There are very different estimates of its size on the eve of the first contacts with Europeans, but a figure of 1.15 million would appear to be well founded; the total of their descendants in 1900 was around 300,000.
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On the other hand, official statistics exist for the inhabitants of what they refer to as the “West” of the United States—that is, the entire national territory apart from New England and the Atlantic states down as far as Florida (also excluding Alaska and Hawaii). Since the 1860s, more than half the US population lived in the West thus defined.
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The settlement of the West did not proceed only in Turner's sense of the inexorable filling of empty spaces. There were also sudden leaps: when the Oregon Trail opened up the Pacific coast and, a few years later, the gold frontier appeared in California. The Oregon Trail cut through land where there had previously been no roads, from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon (declared the thirty-third state of the Union only in 1859). It was along the 3,200-kilometer trail that the first settler wagons and cattle herds reached the Far West in 1842, and within a few years the old route of trappers and traders had become a busy transcontinental link. It remained in use until the railroad made it redundant in the 1890s.
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While the reality of the westward movement was shaped by millions of individual decisions, they were all part of a sweeping political vision. For the founding generation, whose spokesman in this respect was Thomas Jefferson, the country's turn to the West created the possibility of achieving a grand spatial utopia; the United States had the chance to avoid the alleged decline of the exhausted and corrupted societies of Europe by developing mainly in space rather than time. This was associated with the further idea that the space could and should be used, indeed exploited, for the general good as well as for personal enrichment.
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Jefferson's ideal for both the eastern and western United States was the farmer as small businessman, who lived with his family in a self-sufficient community and participated in the democratic governance of its affairs.

This was also the model for the settlement of the West in the nineteenth century; the government repeatedly supported it with measures such as Abraham
Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862, which was intended as a social and political alternative to the slave system of the Southern states. This law gave every adult head of family the right to own 160 acres of public land in the West, at almost no cost, after five years of continuous work on it. The reality not infrequently looked different, as numerous families from the urban East that took up the offer eventually sold their homestead to investors with ready cash. The realtor and the speculator were as characteristic of the frontier as was the rugged and frugal pioneer.

The settler's mobility, so often celebrated in the mythology of the frontier, was in many cases a bitter necessity. People had to seek out land where it was available and affordable, moving on to keep out of trouble and repeatedly abandoning unsustainable positions. Alongside the many success stories are lesser-known experiences of failure. Settlers from the eastern cities were not prepared for a hard life in a world almost without infrastructure, where the state could often provide no effective protection. Many feared they would slide into savagery and revert to a low stage of culture long since left behind.
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The developing myth of the frontier could not entirely dispel such anxieties: the contempt of city people for nomads was transferred to the mobile pioneers, and commentaries of the time underlined the affinity with mass migration in other parts of the world.

Until small-town communities stabilized, male pioneers had to find brides from the “civilized” hinterland—which involved a constant to-ing and fro-ing. It was not like the days of the fur traders: marriage across ethnic boundaries was decidedly frowned upon. At least in theory, the frontier had to remain white and to reproduce the Christian family with its clear division of roles. The husband would conquer the world outside, while the wife ensured civility within the home. Almost nowhere else in the world was the ideal of the nuclear family, independent but woven into a web of neighborly relations, as resolutely upheld as it was in the North American West.
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But individualist gold diggers and panners were not the only deviants from the norm of the autonomous pioneer household-cum-business. In California, where the land fell into the hands of large owners, agriculture was soon being conducted along aggressively capitalist lines, and the great majority of immigrants had a future only as landless wage laborers.
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Those who joined the system as farmhands or tenants rarely worked their way up. Second-generation immigrants, too, were in a relatively unfavorable situation; Irish or continental Europeans, for example, who did not manage to acquire land of their own ended in dependent positions.

In the Southwest, the underclass of rural laborers and miners was recruited mainly from Mexicans, who were often discriminated against and overexploited. This was chiefly a result of the offensive war against Mexico, which overnight turned 100,000 Mexicans into inhabitants of the United States. Racist mentalities also played a role.
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Alongside classical “Turnerian” settlers who had headed west as patriotic Americans, the frontier held all manner of other ethnic groups: immigrants from communities in Europe (e.g., Scandinavia) who had come without first acclimatizing themselves in East Coast cities; blacks both free and
servile (some even as slave labor for Indian tribes); and considerable numbers of Chinese, in the wake of the gold rush and especially the beginning of railroad construction. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the frontier was even more ethnically mixed than the urban societies of the East, and just as little an all-devouring “melting pot.”
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It therefore cannot be reduced to a “binary” opposition between “whiteskins” and “redskins.” The settlers had color hierarchies as perceptible as those in the cities.

In comparison with many parts of Europe, it was relatively easy on the North American frontier to obtain land cheaply—in most cases by buying it from the government or at an auction. The minimum price per unit of area, as well as a minimum business size, was usually fixed by law. Since land was not always (as under the Homestead Act) given away free, and since there were few legal obstacles to speculative abuses, funding proved to be a problem for many settlers.
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The pioneer in his log cabin is by no means the whole of the picture. The degree of insertion into market relations at particular times and places has long been an issue of debate. No doubt there was a general trend toward commercialization. By midcentury the dominant social type on the agricultural frontier was no longer the countryman living off the land but the entrepreneurial farmer. Land was by no means as freely available as the official ideology claimed. There was always competition for
good
land, and the costs of acquiring and developing it had to make economic sense. After the Great Plains were “cleansed” of bison and Indians, the Big Business of the cattle barons spread out from Texas, largely funded by city sources or by British capital; it was a “big man economy,” as in frontier lands of other continents.
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