Chapter XXIII
The West after the Civil War
In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. This was a law that said people did not have to pay for land in the West. People could settle on empty land. After they worked the land for five years, it would belong to them. Anybody could get 160 acres (64 hectares) this way. People came from all of the United States and parts of Europe to get land. There were many settlers from Germany and Czechoslovakia. Before, land had cost $1.25 per acre. Now it did not cost anything. By 1890, all of the land had been taken.
The West was mostly grassland. It did not rain enough for trees to grow. The farmers tried to plant wheat. However, it did not grow well because the climate was too dry. A group of Germans came from the Volga region of Russia. They brought some wheat with them. The Russian variety of wheat grew very well in the West because it did not need as much rain as English wheat. But there was thistle seed in the wheat and soon thistles spread all over America. After the farmers began growing Russian wheat, they had large harvests. A lot of the wheat was exported to England.
The West was the place where the buffalo lived. The British word for buffalo is bison. The buffalo is a very large grass-eating animal. It is much larger than a cow. The buffalo traveled in very large groups. Often there were 2000 buffalo in a herd. Sometimes, there were as many as 10,000 in a herd. It is believed that there were more than fifteen million of them in the West. If a farmer planted a wheat crop, and a herd of buffalo trampled through it, there would be no wheat left for the farmer. The farmers asked the army for help. President Grant sent soldiers to shoot the buffalo. By 1877, there were only about a thousand buffalo left.
However, this caused a very big problem for the Indians of the region. The buffalo was central to their life. The meat of the buffalo was their food. The skins of the buffalo became their shoes, their clothing, their blankets, and even the tents in which they lived. Dried out buffalo dung became the fuel with which they heated their tents or cooked their meals. The entire life of the prairie Indians was dependent on the buffalo. When the army began shooting the buffalo, the Indians thought they had to do something. Many, many years earlier, the Indians had caught some horses that had run away from the Spanish. The prairie Indians became some of the best horsemen in the world. There had been fighting between the Indians and the white people for much more than 200 years. But in 1876, a big war broke out between the Indians and the Americans. The Indians had between 2500 and 4000 soldiers at Little Bighorn in Montana. General Custer led a group of American officers and soldiers to fight them. However, the Indians were able to kill General Custer and all of his soldiers. This was the last battle that the Indians won. After that, they lost every battle. The final defeat took place in Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890. After that, the Indians were too weak to fight any more wars.
In most of the wars, the Indian tribes did not help each other. Usually, the Americans fought one tribe at a time. After a tribe was defeated, it had to agree to live on a reservation. Most of the time, the reservations were situated on land of poor quality, land that nobody else wanted. Each Indian tribe became a separate nation. The reservations were homelands for the Indian nations. On the reservations, the Indians could keep their language, their laws, and their traditions.
Today, in most cases, the laws of a state do not apply on a reservation. On a reservation, the Indians have their own laws. Individuals who do not want to live on the reservation are free to leave and live wherever they want to. Only those Indians that belong to the tribe that owns the reservation have a voice in running the reservation.
The census of 1990 counted 8,708,220 people of Indian descent in the United States. They were the tenth largest ethnic group. But most of them were detribalized. A detribalized Indian is an Indian who does not belong to a tribe. Very often, these people do not know to which tribe their ancestors belonged. Often they do not know one word of an Indian language nor to they keep any Indian custom or tradition. Many people think that detribalized Indians should not be called Indians. Many people think that detribalized Indians should be called Americans with a red skin. Americans have white, black, brown, red, or yellow skins. In 1990, only 1,959,234 Indians belonged to tribes. But even most of the Indians that belong to a tribe have left the reservations. By American law, detribalized Indians are considered to be Americans and not Indians.
In 1990, there were 278 reservations with a total of 340,000 Indians living on them. Most of the reservations are small, but a few of them are large. The largest reservation belongs to the Navajo tribe. Their reservation is larger than the combined areas of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The reservations occupy about 2.5% of the land area of the United States. In 1924, a law made all Indians citizens of the United States.
In the nineteenth century, if a resource such as gold were discovered on an Indian reservation, often the government would take the reservation away, and give the tribe a different, worthless reservation. The American government did not do that in the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, a few of the tribes discovered oil, high quality coal, or uranium on their reservations. These tribes became rich. But most of the tribes are very poor.
During the period around the Civil War, gold and silver and other metals were found in the mountains of the West. Many mines opened. In Central City in Colorado, they found very much gold. Many mines were opened and they dug into the earth for gold. In one square mile near Central City, they dug up seventy million dollars worth of gold. This is more gold than they found in any other spot on earth. Other people found large deposits of copper and lead. Mines were opened in many parts of the West. Many of the mines used workers from China to do the digging. The Chinese had planned to return to China. But some of them died. Today, there are many Chinese cemeteries in the Western states.
In some parts of the West, there is not enough rain to grow wheat or other crops. There, people established ranches with large herds of cattle or sheep. The cows would eat the grass. When the cows were fully-grown, they were put on trains to Chicago. Some of the ranches were more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest railroad. Cowboys on horseback had to drive the cattle to the railroad. Sometimes bandits tried to steal the cows. In Chicago the cows were butchered and cut up and the meat was sent by railroad to all parts of America where it was sold in butcher shops.