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A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History pp 47–66Cite as

America’s Farther West: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1815–1890

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the period 1815 to 1890—from the end of the War of 1812 to the closing of the American frontier—during the third (and final) phase of the War for North America. It traces and interprets events during this period, within the book’s main themes: conquest (invasion and occupation); dispossession (theft of Indigenous lands and resources); depopulation (the logic of elimination and the genocidal imperative); and repopulation (supplanting the Indigenous inhabitants). It also summarizes the demographic and geopolitical outcome of the third (and final) phase of the Anglo-American settler-colonial supplanting project.

Having followed the teachings of [George] Washington, we have a record of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people of the nineteenth century.

Henry Cabot Lodge (1895, quoted in Richard H. Immermann, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Ben Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 142; italics is mine)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a vivid portrait of one such borderland region, see Natale A. Zappia, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  2. 2.

    John P. Bowes, ‘US Expansion of Its Consequences, 1815–1890’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 94.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 93.

  4. 4.

    Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 706–707, 852.

  5. 5.

    William Earl Weeks, William Earl, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), ix.

  6. 6.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, xiii. Importantly, Walter Nugent’s history of American empire (emphasizing the period 1782–1853) ties together the diplomatic and military history of the nation’s territorial acquisitions with occupation, displacement, and settlement in the American West (themes previously treated separately by most, if not all, historians of early America ).

  7. 7.

    Quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 10–11.

  8. 8.

    Quoted in Hine and Faragher, The American West, 133; emphasis in the original.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 200. For instance, for a study which links Indian policy and national westward expansion, emphasizing the role of the federal government in both, see Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a ground-breaking study on how American westward expansion was ‘engineered’ by the federal government to promote the formation of a ‘white settler nation’, see Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Paul Frymer writes, ‘Political dynamism, population movement, land acquisition, and racial imperialism dominated the early development of the American nation’, with the federal government ‘controlling’ the ‘pace, direction, and scale’ of white settlement (ibid., 1, 9).

  10. 10.

    Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), ix, xiv, 271–272, 274.

  11. 11.

    For the details, see Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War and Nugent, Habits of Empire.

  12. 12.

    Quoted in Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 243.

  13. 13.

    Richard White, ‘It’s your misfortune and none of my own’: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 79. A defeated Mexico lost 602 million acres, about one-third of its national domain (Hine and Faragher, The American West, 212).

  14. 14.

    Paul W. Foos, A Short, Off-Hand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 116, 120–121, 123, 125, 127.

  15. 15.

    Robert M. Utley, ‘Total War on the American Indian Frontier’, in Anticipating Total War, the German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, ed. Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 401, 405, 410. In an 1873 letter, Sherman noted that ‘during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age’ (quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 145).

  16. 16.

    Bill Yenne, Bill, Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2006).

  17. 17.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 76.

  18. 18.

    Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 146–149.

  19. 19.

    Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846–1890 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 164.

  20. 20.

    Nugent, Into the West, p. 44.

  21. 21.

    Walter L. Williams, ‘American Imperialism and the Indians’, in Indians in American History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1988), 234.

  22. 22.

    For a recent study of the Anglo-American dispossession of the American Indian , see Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). In his book, Anderson sees Anglo-American dispossession of the American Indian as ethnic cleansing (and not genocide ).

  23. 23.

    Jeffrey Ostler, ‘The Plains’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 247. As Ostler rightly notes, ‘manifest destiny ’ was an ‘iteration of an already developed ideology upholding settler entitlement to the lands of Indians’ (ibid., 241).

  24. 24.

    Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.

  25. 25.

    Hurt, The Indian Frontier, p. 246.

  26. 26.

    Calloway, ‘Treaties and Treaty Making’, 546–547.

  27. 27.

    Andrew H. Fisher, ‘The Pacific Northwest’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 260.

  28. 28.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, 231.

  29. 29.

    Hine and Faragher, The American West, 334–345.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 281–282.

  31. 31.

    Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian, 329–330, 333.

  32. 32.

    Quoted in ibid., 333.

  33. 33.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 105–106.

  34. 34.

    Paul C. Rosier, ‘Surviving in the Twentieth Century, 1890–1960’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 113.

  35. 35.

    Nugent, Into the West, 66.

  36. 36.

    Troy D. Smith, ‘Indian Territory and Oklahoma’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 373–375.

  37. 37.

    Nugent, Into the West, 65.

  38. 38.

    Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian, 335. Unfortunately, Gary Clayton Anderson does not advise his readers that (using Russell Thornton’s figures) American Indians also lost 95.4 percent of their pre-contact population.

  39. 39.

    Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 289.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 448, 484–485, 496.

  41. 41.

    Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 102–103.

  42. 42.

    Grenier, The First Way of War, 221–222.

  43. 43.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 103.

  44. 44.

    Gary Clayton Anderson, Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

  45. 45.

    Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

  46. 46.

    Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 358.

  47. 47.

    Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 421.

  48. 48.

    For a well-rounded discussion of Indian removal and its consequences, see Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 63–76, 77–84, 115–119.

  49. 49.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 93–94.

  50. 50.

    Quoted in Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Penguin, 2007), 125–126.

  51. 51.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, 229.

  52. 52.

    Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, Volumes I and II, Unabridged Edition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 317.

  53. 53.

    William T. Hagan, ‘The Reservation Policy: Too Little and Too Late’, in Indian-White Relations: A Persistent Paradox, ed. Jane F. Smith and Robert M. Kvasnicka (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1976), 157–169.

  54. 54.

    Quoted in Utley, The Indian Frontier, 63.

  55. 55.

    Quoted in Elliott West, Elliott, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 283.

  56. 56.

    Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 89, 90, 92.

  57. 57.

    Quoted in ibid., 91.

  58. 58.

    M. Annette Jaimes, ‘Introduction: Sand Creek: The Morning After’, in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 7.

  59. 59.

    Victoria Haskins and Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians: The Removal of Indigenous Children as a Weapon of War in the United States and Australia, 1870–1940’, in Children in War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 227–241.

  60. 60.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 104–106.

  61. 61.

    Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3, 129–130.

  62. 62.

    Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2004).

  63. 63.

    Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 151.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 158. For an important study which focuses on sexual violence as a form of patriarchy and colonialism in American Indian communities (both historically and today), as well as the role of sexual violence as a primary tool of genocide , see Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

  65. 65.

    Such knowledge, moreover, was long-standing. In 1794, Henry Knox, President George Washington’s secretary of war, warned the president that the new nation’s ‘modes of population have been even more destructive to the Indian natives’ than the brutal conduct of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru, as evidenced by the ‘utter extirpation of nearly all of the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union’ (quoted in Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 248).

  66. 66.

    The phrase is Walter Nugent’s; see Nugent, Into the West, 83.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 55–56.

  68. 68.

    Ibid.

  69. 69.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, 229–230, 232.

  70. 70.

    Hines and Faragher, The American West, 236, 251.

  71. 71.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, 221, 233.

  72. 72.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 93.

  73. 73.

    Hines and Faragher, The American West, 175.

  74. 74.

    Ostler, ‘The Plains’, 242–244.

  75. 75.

    Gregory E. Smoak, ‘The Great Basin’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 382–386.

  76. 76.

    Nugent, Into the West, 82.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 71, 75, 77, 79.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 67.

  79. 79.

    William J. Bauer, Jr., ‘California’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 287.

  80. 80.

    Nugent, Habits of Empire, 232.

  81. 81.

    Madley, An American Genocide, 3, 77, 300. As historian Ben Madley notes, during the Russo-Hispanic occupation (1769–1846), the California Indian population had declined from some 310,000 to 150,000, due to the effects of colonialization. Genocidal campaigns conducted by the new American settler state further reduced the California Indian population from 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 in 1873 (ibid.).

  82. 82.

    James F. Brooks, ‘The Southwest’, The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 228–289.

  83. 83.

    Hines and Faragher, The American West, 189, 223.

  84. 84.

    Nugent, Into the West, 68.

  85. 85.

    Quoted in ibid., 317.

  86. 86.

    Hines and Faragher, The American West, 189.

  87. 87.

    Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 410.

  88. 88.

    Utley, The Indian Frontier, 4.

  89. 89.

    Bowes, ‘US Expansion’, 106.

  90. 90.

    Russell Thornton, ‘Population History of Native North Americans’, 24. The fact that around 200,000 American Indians survived the American settler state assault has been used by some historians to disallow the genocide of American Indians . For example, historian Gary Clayton Anderson suggests that the fact that ‘many Indian tribes (indeed the vast majority) survived, along with their cultures … weakens and perhaps makes impossible the argument for calling what happened in North America [to the Indians] genocide of any sort’ (Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian, 11). According to one estimate cited by Holocaust historian Ronnie Landau, 2.3 million Jews —or roughly 28 percent of Nazi-occupied Europe’s total prewar Jewish population of 8.3 million Jews —survived the Nazi genocide (Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 316). But the very fact of their survival does not, of course, alter the fact that the Nazis did everything in their power to eliminate the Jewish people as a physical and cultural presence in Nazi-occupied Europe. Nor does it in any way disallow the genocide of European Jewry. For a much-needed detailed study of how American Indian peoples suffered genocide but survived, see Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Jeffrey Ostler’s project is a two-volume study that focuses on the impact of the United States on Native Americans from the 1750s to 1900.

  91. 91.

    Michael R. Haines, ‘The White Population of the United States, 1790–1920’, in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 306.

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    Carroll P. Kakel III

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Kakel, C.P. (2019). America’s Farther West: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1815–1890. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_4

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