Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The American West: Shenanigans in Gold Country


"We are rough men and used to rough ways."






Gold. Greed. Murder.

When gold was discovered the American West became the place to go, people were eager to try their fortune and strike it rich. There were over ten gold strikes in the west during the second half of the 19th century. The strikes contributed more than anything else in shaping the American West, the idea that people could find an abundance of wealth pouring out of the ground was too much for them to resist. Westward expansion began as a slow progression, but once gold was discovered it became a race. When the Corps of Discovery explored the American West in 1803, they believed it was going to be a unique and agriculturally centered place. The discovery of gold in 1848 turned the American West into a violent struggle for power and wealth.

The discovery and excavation of gold greatly transformed the west in several ways; it encouraged the influx of immigration, migration of Americans to the west, Native American conflicts, and rapid population expansion. Elliot West described the erection of towns during the Pikes Peak gold rush as, “two poles of charged ambition…a lot of energy was crackling, ready for release.”[1] The energy created by the gold rushes changed the dynamics of the west; people moved to the west quickly and began to change the environment. The west became a land of fortitude; it became a "hard land, and it bred hard men to hard ways."[2]

Beginning with the 1849 California Gold Rush, the American West instantly became a place of heavy extraction and a new destination for thousands of people. By 1850 the far west had a new characterization—clusters of settlements separated by hundreds of miles of barren land. The gold rush caused the “sudden movement of tens of thousands across the continent to the Pacific coast.” The environment of the west was drastically upheaved as it saw an incursion of people across a previously untouched landscape. Throughout the west, gold rushes were discovered continually and more towns and people sprung up next to them. The consistent announcements of gold changed the social, economic and imaginative development of the west.[3] During the Colorado gold rush of 1859, more then one hundred thousand people traveled to Colorado, “more then had ever taken to the overland trails in any previous year.”[4] People took to gold rushes extremely quickly; everyone wanted a chance to strike it rich. No longer was the American West a frontier to be explored, it was now a land to be exploited. Gold rushes did not just bring United States citizens to them, but they also attracted many different immigrants and even Native Americans.

Mining for gold was not limited to white Americans, but Mexicans and Native Americans joined the rush in hopes of striking it rich as well. When the California Gold Rush began in 1848, half of the people mining in California were Native American. There was also an influx of Chinese immigrants; by 1850 they began to come to California by the thousands. By 1859 there were about twenty-four thousand Chinese miners in California looking for gold. Originally, the Chinese came as temporary sojourners, but as other gold strikes were announced they would travel deeper into the American West to them.

The diversity of the west found its origin in the gold rushes; this was the way that immigrants spread throughout the country. Immigration was not without discrimination and racism, but despite the prejudice, “a multicultural West was being born.”[5] The new emigrant surge also brought an “economic jolt” and began another “transformation of mid-America.”[6] Originally the eastern portion of the United States was drastically changed by immigration, but now the west faced a similar evolution of its population. Diversity in the west resulted in an amazing amount of discrimination and violence; foreign people were viewed as sub-human by the whites and brutality against them was not just tolerable, it was encouraged. Judge Roy Bean demonstrated this standard with his verdict in an 1882 case: "Gentlemen, I find the law very explicit on murdering your fellow man, but there's nothing here about killing a Chinaman. Case dismissed.”[7]

A huge influence over the evolution of the American West was discrimination, and most of it revolved around gold rushes. Early laws forbid “Indians and Negroes from testifying against whites in court” and newspapers wrote that, “Mexicans have no business in this country.”[8] Laws were also passed that would forbid Chinese testifying in courts against whites, the law claimed that Native Americans originated from the Chinese and thus they had equal standing—less than human. The strong xenophobia that permeated the west was not as much about race as it was about gold and greed. In particular Mexicans had a knack for gold mining and often found success, they were usually the ones to show others how to successfully mine. One observer states that, “As soon as [he] got an inkling of the system…he organized a crusade against these obliging strangers.”[9] Essentially the Americans would learn from foreigners and then attempt to expel them from the area for fear that they would lose out on gold and wealth by letting them stay. Racism abounded in the American West because of the aggressive nature of people during the gold rushes.

One of the most impactful aspects of the American West and racism was the conflict between Native Americans and the United States. During the 19th century it was said that white Americans “valued the life of an Indian just as they do that of a cayota or a wolf” and miners would shoot at and murder thousands of Indians. Originally, Indians mined gold in 1848 by themselves, or even for white contractors. By the time that the forty-niners arrived in California the dynamic changed. Native Americans were run out of their homes and violently attacked, the desire for wealth had men attacking and murdering the natives to acquire land and mine it for themselves. Any excuse to claim someone else’s land for their own was taken by the forty-niners. This attitude was even encouraged by the government when California Governor Peter Burnett exclaimed, “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”[10]

During the gold rushes there was “little to no fear from Indians.” [11] Instead, most of the violence was inspired by racism and greed. The lack of fear meant that the white attitude toward Native Americans was apathetic; they were a nuisance, not a threat. From indifferent attitudes and the hope of wealth the miners murdered and enslaved thousands of natives. By 1860 over three fourths of the Native American population in California was gone; it was a “clear case of genocide” before the term even existed.[12] Outside of California Native Americans were being organized onto reservations and slaughtered because of the other gold rushes. Two examples of this are the Colorado gold rush of 1859 and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1876.

The Sand Creek Massacre was a direct result of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush and the plains wars with the Lakota’s resulted from General George Armstrong Custer’s discovery of gold on their reservation. The refusal of the Native Americans to give ground to the United States let to several battles and massacres. Eventually, the Lakota gave up the Black Hills to the United States, the conflict over gold and land finally over. One of the leaders of the Lakota, Sitting Bull, summarized what he believed about the Americans, saying, “The love of possession is a disease with them.”[13] The discovery of gold and the subsequent rushes were an absolute disaster for the Native Americans. They were merely obstacles to be overcome. The idea of wealth convinced people that they ought to be rich, no matter what the cost.

The atmosphere of gold and wealth was huge for the United States, its impact was monumental and it is still effecting society to this day. The rush of people to gold country made a previously empty land and small towns bustling with people and key stops on the trail to the newest gold rush. Elliot West explains the effect of the gold rush on small outposts and towns by saying, “They were gateways to an opening promise…the Missouri, the plains, and the Rockies were seen as bound organically into an economic whole.”[14]

Gold drastically transformed the American West and created its burgeoning population. When Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 he believed that the west would be a slow progression of people, it would be a frontier for many generations. He never imagined it would take less then three generations before the western frontier would be closed; in fact, it was in 1890 that the United States census officially deemed the American West was no longer a frontier. The strange and anonymous frontier that Lewis and Clark explored in 1803 became an established territory with a swelling populace in only 87 years.

The gold strikes contributed more than anything else in shaping the west and the elimination of the frontier. It was the gold rushes that encouraged the massive influx of immigration to the western United States and it was the gold rushes that changed the landscape of the United States forever, whether it was for better or worse. The discovery and excavation of gold resulted in the rapid population explosion and the violent conflicts with the Native Americans that shaped the west.





[1] Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 137.
[2] Louis L’Amour, Heller With a Gun, (New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955 ), 15.
[3] Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, A Short History of the American West, (London: Yale University Press, 2007), 94-95.
[4] West, The Contested Plains, 145.
[5] Hine and Faragher, A Short History of the American West, 99.
[6] West, The Contested Plains, 116.
[7] Bob Herzberg, Hang’em High: Law and Disorder in Western Films and Literature, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2013), 37.
[8] Hine and Faragher, A Short History of the American West, 98.
[9] Ibid, 98.
[10] Ibid, 100.
[11] West, The Contested Plains, 153.
[12] Hine and Faragher, A Short History of the American West, 100.
[13] Ibid, 102.
[14] West, The Contested Plains, 122.

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