Colin Woodard (37 page)

PART FOUR

CULTURE WARS
1878 to 2010

CHAPTER 22

T
he Far West was the last region of North America to be colonized, and for good reason: it was remarkably inhospitable for Euro-Atlantic civilizations, with their emphasis on cropland agriculture, waterdependent plants and animals, and fixed settlements. It began at the ninety-eighth meridian, which bisects the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. West of that point, only twenty inches of rain reached the parched earth each year, less than a third of the amount that fell in Mobile, Alabama. From the arid brown prairies of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado to the deserts of Nevada and interior California and the dry, scrubby mountains of interior Oregon and Washington, there were few places where agriculture could survive without the help of extensive irrigation projects. The altitude was so high—even the plains and mountain valleys stood above the tallest summits of the Appalachians—that many familiar crops wouldn't grow at all, particularly in soils poisoned by alkali salts. Most of the vast region's rivers were too shallow for navigation, isolating settlers from potential markets for anything they did grow. Its Native American tribes had had two centuries to perfect mounted warfare (after the introduction of horses from El Norte), enabling them to better keep interlopers in check. In the Far West the technologies and techniques of the Appalachian frontiersman were as useless as Yankee and Midlands farming practices. Deep Southern plantation crops couldn't be grown at all.

As a result, settlers from the other nations passed over this region in their rush to the lush Left Coast or the gold mining districts on its far western fringe. In 1860 there were more non-Indians living in San Francisco than in the entirety of the Far West. Few who transited the region saw much reason to linger. Before irrigation, trains, or air-conditioning, the High Plains and Western deserts were frightening places where travelers faced blinding sun, staggering heat, and mind-numbing monotony. Transcontinental trails were littered with the bodies of livestock and people whose water ran out or who were overwhelmed by outlaws or Indian patrols. “After swimming streams and wading sloughs we go to bed at night wet and tired,” an emigrant reported from northeastern Nevada in 1850. “In the morning we get up with stiffened limbs and examine ourselves for ticks, and if any are on us they will be as large as a grain of corn. We traveled all day through swarms of mosquitoes and gnats and had to hunt for grass and water until a late hour.”
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The sheer extremity of the Far Western conditions made it impossible for the other national cultures to take hold here. Greater Appalachia, Yankeedom, and the Midlands each succeeded in adapting to and colonizing the well-watered plains of the Midwest. But as they approached the ninety-eighth meridian, each nation came to a halt, its respective social adaptations no longer able to ensure individual or community survival. There were only two ways for Euro-Americans to expand further into the interior. One was to adopt the nomadic ways of most of the Native American peoples in the region, a practice that worked well for the early fur traders dispatched by the Hudson's Bay Company. The other was to attach themselves to one of the nation's new industrial corporations as it lumbered into the vast interior, deploying capital, machines, mercenaries, and laborers with ruthless singlemindedness. Almost everyone coming to the Far West came in service of the latter model, or found themselves beholden to it.

The Far West, uniquely in North America, is a nation defined not by ethnoregional cultural forces but by the demands of external institutions. It is the one place where environment really did trump the cultural heritage of settlers, imposing challenges that Euro-Americans tried to solve through the deployment of capital-intensive technologies: hard rock mines, railroads, telegraphs, Gatling guns, barbed wire, and hydroelectric dams. As a result, the Far West has long been an internal colony of the continent's older nations and federal government, which possessed the necessary capital. Its people are still often deeply resentful of their dependent status but have generally backed policies guaranteed to preserve the status quo.

 

The Far West's first settlers were the exception to the aforementioned pattern. Arriving in two geographically separate waves in 1847–50, the earliest Euro-American colonists arrived just ahead of industrial capital. One group—the Yankee Mormons of Utah—would found a distinct subculture of independent farmers in Utah and southern Idaho. The other—the gold-hungry Forty-niners—were highly individualistic frontiersmen in the Appalachian mold. Neither would achieve cultural dominance over the Western interior.

The Mormons—followers of a Yankee-led utopian movement with its origins in Vermont and New York's Burnt-over District—began arriving on the shores of Utah's Great Salt Lake in the late 1840s. Fleeing persecution in the Midwest in 1847, they originally intended to settle outside the United States, but their plans were frustrated by the United States–Mexico War and, shortly thereafter, the U.S. annexation of their promised land in the desert. Their leader, Vermont-born Brigham Young, was made the first governor of the Utah Territory in 1850, and two years later 20,000 Mormons were living there. Almost all were from Yankeedom, which explains why in 2000, Utah had the highest percentage of English Americans of any state in the Union, edging out Vermont and Maine.

With a communal mind-set and intense group cohesion, the Mormons were able to build and maintain irrigation projects that enabled small farmers to survive in Far Western conditions. In the process they created an enclave of independent producers in a region otherwise controlled by absentee owners and other external forces. While at odds with Yankeedom over many issues, the Far West's Mormon enclave betrays its Yankee origins in its communitarianism, its emphasis on morality and good works, and its desire to assimilate others. Today the area's influence can be felt across Utah, southern Idaho, and eastern Nevada, and it is the most politically influential homegrown force in the Far West.

The Forty-niners who rushed into California's central valley and eastern mountains in pursuit of gold, in contrast, were atomized, heterogeneous, and hedonistic. They were drawn from all over the world but particularly from Appalachian sections of the East. Consistent with this demographic, the initial emphasis of the settlers was on individual effort and competition, with small producers working surface deposits and holding on to the proceeds. In those early years the size of a claim was limited to what an individual could work himself, and little capital was required to do so. “The life of a miner is one of labor, peril, and exposure,” one journalist wrote of the era, “but it possesses the fascinating element of liberty and the promise of unlimited reward.”
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Unfortunately those compensations were not to last. Within a few years California's surface deposits were depleted, and the mining moved underground, where capital and labor requirements could be met only by companies and bankers. Mining quickly became a corporate affair, with the miners reduced to wage labor and the “unlimited reward” accruing to the owners. When, in 1859, the silver Comstock Lode was discovered over the mountains in what is now Nevada, thousands headed east to work in the hills surrounding Virginia City, Nevada's boomtown, where improvised crushing mills processed what was carted to them. Nevada's territorial legislature was dominated by these “old Californians” who championed independent prospectors and small businessmen as boisterous crowds rallied outside their meeting hall to make the public will known. But this boom, too, was not to last.

The corporate takeover of Nevada's mines and political system followed a pattern that would continue in the Far West for nearly a century. By early 1864 the Comstock's surface deposits had run out. When delegates gathered that summer to write Nevada's first constitution, mining interests introduced a bill that effectively exempted mines from taxation, even though they represented most of the territory's economic activity. Delegates linked with the mining industry claimed taxes would prompt the corporations to leave the region, imperiling the jobs of their hired miners and, by extension, demand for farm goods, cattle, lumber, and other supplies and services provided by locals. The frightened delegates passed the bill, effectively transferring the tax burden to everyone else in Nevada. It was a ruse that would be repeated again and again across the Far West.
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Within a few years it was no longer necessary for big firms to use fearmongering to work their will; they simply owned Nevada's legislators and congressional delegation. By 1870 Nevada politics was no longer a struggle between individual producers and corporate interests but simply a clash between competing cartels. The Bank of California—which had repossessed huge numbers of mining claims during a recession—owned processing facilities, the timber and water supplies, and the key railroad for the Comstock region. Thereafter a rival conglomerate, the Sacramentobased Central Pacific Railroad, bought up most of the bank's competitors in these sectors while monopolizing transportation between Nevada and the rest of the continent and controlling settlement of the 100-mile-wide strip surrounding most of its rail corridor. Both of these competing cartels spent lavishly to put their own associates in office and to build political machines to cultivate new generations of company men for placement in state and federal positions. From 1865 to 1900 every U.S. senator from Nevada save one was closely associated with one or another of the cartels. Eventually the cartels agreed to divide control of Nevada between them. The Bank of California group focused on paying state legislators to pass industry-friendly laws and regulations, while the Central Pacific Railroad bought the congressional delegations. Local offices were left to the labor unions, which focused not on advocating for their constituents but on keeping nonwhites (especially Chinese) out of the mines and other workplaces, sometimes by use of mob violence. The era of the independent producer was over, and not just in Nevada.
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Outside the mining districts, the colonization of the Far West was led by railroad companies, which effectively controlled the development of much of the vast territory. The Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and Northern Pacific had effective monopolies over access to their respective slices of the area, setting fares for passengers and freight. None of them was based in the region.

The railroads also served as the Far West's primary real estate and colonization agents. To encourage the construction of these staggeringly expensive transcontinental projects, the federal government had given these railroads 60- to 100-mile swaths of land around their respective lines. Taken together, the railroads were awarded over 150 million acres of the region in the second half of the nineteenth century, an area the size of Montana and Idaho combined. The companies could sell parcels to settlers who, in turn, became entirely dependent on the railroad for transport of goods and people in or out of the region. First, however, they had to attract the settlers.
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Elsewhere on the continent railroads followed in the wake of colonization, extending their lines in response to demand. In much of the Far West, however, the railroads came first and supervised colonization themselves. They invested in huge marketing campaigns, publishing newspapers, maps, and magazines extolling the arid West. Wyoming's Laramie Plain was comparable to the “fertile prairies of Illinois” even though it was 5,000 feet higher and had a third as much rain and a growing season two months shorter. The Great Salt Lake region was arranged with “striking similarity” to the Holy Land, and the railroads had comparison maps published to prove it. Kansas was “the garden spot of the world.”
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The Northern Pacific set up colonization offices in London, Liverpool, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, issuing brochures in local languages and arranging for discounted “emigration tickets” with the steamship companies. The Union Pacific and Burlington railroads spent $1 million in advertising for Nebraska alone at a time when you could build a house for $700. The Northern Pacific advertised its lands in 200 North American newspapers and 100 European ones. The railroad companies built or contributed to the construction of churches and schools to anchor newly founded prairie towns, and encouraged settlement even in lands outside the swath they controlled, confident that the settlers would still depend on the rails.

The fraudulent ad campaigns benefited from a climatological fluke that delivered record rainfalls in the late 1860s, just as the first big wave of colonists were settling the High Plains. Americans, caught up in the notion of Manifest Destiny, thought they saw the hand of God at work as the brown prairies turned green. Leading scientists of the day encouraged such thinking, endorsing the crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.” Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, proclaimed, “As population increases, the moisture will increase.” Rain was said to be triggered by smoke from locomotives, by the planting of trees and the plowing of land, even by the vibrations generated by humans and their livestock. Government bureaucrats incorporated the assumptions of this New Meteorology into the assignment of land grants, which presumed a family could survive on 160 acres of unirrigated Colorado prairie just as well as their counterparts had on 160 acres of lush Illinois or Indiana grassland. Hundreds of thousands of independent yeoman farmers rode the rails to the middle of nowhere and sank their precious capital into a land that older maps had labeled the Great American Desert.
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The renowned explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell—a native of Yankee New York—tried to get the truth out in a book-length report to Congress. Much of the Far West could not support farming, he told the nation, and even if all the streams and rivers were diverted into irrigation projects, it would redeem only 1 to 3 percent of the land. The government land grants—based on eastern precedents—were ill conceived, as 160 acres of irrigated land would be too much for one family to farm, and 160 acres of unirrigated land was far too small; the latter could be used only for ranching, and in that case would require 2,500 acres to succeed. The “rain follows the plow” theory was bunk, Powell insisted. The country could “expect a speedy return to extreme aridity,” he warned, “in which case a large portion of the agricultural industries . . . now growing up would be destroyed.” He recommended a series of watershed-based federal irrigation districts and communal pasturelands, and a slow, cautious settling of the Far West by individual producers assisted by prudent public investment. Needless to say, Powell's suggestions were ignored.
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