The Mammoth Book of
THE WEST
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The Mammoth Book of
THE WEST
The Making of the American West
Jon E. Lewis
ROBINSON
London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson Publishing 1996
This new edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2001
Copyright © J. Lewis-Stempel 1996, 2001
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1–84119–354–2
eISBN 978–1–78033–700–5
Printed and bound in the EU
Jon. E Lewis was born in 1961. His previous books include the best-selling The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: An Eyewitness History of the World, Eye-witness the 20th Century and Eye-witness D-Day. Other titles in the Mammoth series are The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War, The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast, The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure, The Mammoth Book of War Letters and Diaries, The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, The Mammoth Book of Modern War Stories, The Mammoth Book of Battles, The Handbook of SAS & Elite Forces and The Mammoth Book of Private Lives.
Contents
Introduction
Part I
The Way West
Prologue
Into the Wilderness
The Clash of Empire
Daniel Boone and the Bluegrass
The Revolution in the West
The Voyage of Lewis and Clark
Pike’s Progress, Long’s Labour
Of Mountain Men and Furs
“And Remember the Alamo”
Pioneers Across the Plains
The Donner Tragedy
Westward With God
The Gold Rush
Motive Power
Part II
The Trampling Herd
Prologue
The Cradle of the Cattle Kingdom
On the Trail
Babylons of the Plains
“Oh, To Be a Cowboy”
Bonanzaland
Billy the Kid
Snow, Sheep and Blood
Part III
The Lawless Land
Prologue
The Outlaw Breed
Jesse James and His Men
Frontier Lawmen
The Legend and Life of Wyatt Earp
Texas Rangers, Pinkerton Detectives
Wild, Wild Women
Part IV
The Indian Wars
Prologue
War Comes to the Land of Little Rain
The Great Sioux Uprising
Sand Creek
Red Cloud’s War
Blood on the Grasslands
The Struggle for the Staked Plains
Little Big Horn
Geronimo, Apache Tiger
Ghost Dancers
Part V
The Last Days of the West
Prologue
Settling the Great Plains
The Wild Bunch
The Saga of Tom Horn
Afterword: The West in the Movies
Appendix I: Chronology of the American West
Appendix II: Bibliography
Appendix III: The American Indian Nations of North America
Index
Introduction
The American West was a time, and a place. But above all, it was a state of mind.
For pioneers staring, hip-cocked, into the virgin land of the setting sun, the West represented a new start, a future of endless possibilities, a place where a man or woman might make something of themselves. Wrote Helen Carpenter in her diary on 26 May 1857, the day she began her journey across the plains in an ox wagon: “Ho – for California – at last we are on the way – only seven miles from home (which is to be home no longer) yet we have really started and with good luck may some day reach the ‘promised land’.”
The promised land of the West did not always turn out to be the Eden of pioneer expectations. “Oh, the trees, the trees,” lamented one settler in Kentucky, faced with the awesome task of clearing the looming, claustrophobic forest. Yet, whether they liked it or loathed it, those who endured life on the remote frontier became transformed, even as they transformed the land around them. They became less urbane, less European in outlook. The frontier mentality thus formed was independent, optimistic, eager for material success, and scornful of rank, pretension, and class. Nearly all travellers to the New World noted these pronounced traits. The English writer Anthony Trollope, visiting the USA in the early 1860s, commented in his North America (1862) that “there is an independence which sits gracefully on their [the Americans’] shoulders, and teaches you at first glance that the man has a right to assume himself your equal.”
This frontier spirit was born long before men and women moved to settle the
big, rolling lands beyond the Mississippi. Although the decades 1860–1890 are often equated with “the American West”, the frontier, the moving edge of settlement into the “wilderness”, began on the Eastern side of the Appalachians in the seventeenth century. The final sweep of settlement, the conquering of trans-Mississippi America, was but the finale of a process which had been hundreds of years in the making. Many of those who homesteaded the Great Plains were the descendants of farmers who had toiled on land of the Eastern coastal belt. And pioneers nearly always went West, not North or South, so keeping within familiar climatic zones. New Englanders stuck to the upper reaches of the West; Virginians and Carolinians headed for Alabama, and then crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.
Land for farming was the great spur which prompted men and women to go West. (The cowboy on horseback might be a more romantic, attractive figure, but it was the pedestrian “sod-buster” who tamed the bulk of the West; agriculture was the new country’s basic endeavour.) Sons of farmers, on finding the family claim too small to sustain division, left home and trekked west to find a place of their own. And then, in turn, their sons did the same. Southerners also found themselves driven westwards by soil exhaustion; their cash crops of tobacco and cotton took a heavy toll on the earth. The relative abundance of land did little to encourage good husbandry. There always seemed to be more land for the taking.
That is, for the taking from the continent’s original inhabitants, the American Indian. For the land the settlers thirsted for was not unoccupied; the Indians had to be persuaded to part with it, or prised off it by force. If the frontier mentality had attractive features, it also had ugly aspects. It justified the cleansing of Indians from their lands in the name of Manifest Destiny, and encouraged the cult of the gun, the use of firearms to settle all matters, big or small. To “win” the West took the White man nearly three hundred years of warfare.
What befell the Indian was a tragedy, even a travesty. At times something like genocide was practised against the native people of America. But it is wrong to picture the American Indian as a noble but hapless victim. There are few innocents in war. The Indians did not see themselves as a homogenous entity, just as Europeans do not see themselves as alike, but as English, French, or German. Some Indian tribes, in conflict with their aboriginal neighbours, allied themselves with the White man as a means of winning local power struggles. The example of the Crow is only the most famous. And American Indian tribes could wage war as relentlessly and bloodily as the White man. The long enmity between the 7th Cavalry and the Sioux had as one of its fillips the killing and mutilation of Frederick Wyllyams by Sioux (and Arapaho and Cheyenne) braves at Fort Wallace, Kansas, in 1867. The 7th Cavalry never forgot or forgave what had been done to Sergeant Wyllyams.
The Indian wars had their ironies, as well as their brutalities. In the 1870s the Sioux fought bitterly to keep White settlers out of the Black Hills of Dakota, which they declared to be their ancestral and spiritual home. In truth, the Sioux were settlers too, and had only been in the Black Hills country for a century or so. The much cherished freedom of the Plains Indian to ride free like the wind over the prairie was a gift given him by the White man; the horse, after all, was introduced to America by the Spanish. And if the White man slaughtered the buffalo to near extinction, Indian hunters had long before wiped out the beast’s giant prehistoric relative – along with the mammoth, the mastadon, and more than 70 other species of large game. (This ecological disaster seems to have caused the American Indians to rethink their attitude to American fauna; certainly they came to revere animals and to be zealous in their conservation, never killing more than were needed for the maintenance of the tribe.)
None of these culpabilities, however, excuse the treatment of America’s native people by the White man. They are only given to illustrate the intricacy of the history of the West. The winning (or losing) of the American West is the greatest story ever told, bar one epic of biblical times, but it is not a simple tale of Good versus Bad, however these attributes are apportioned. Western history is infinitely shaded.
And it is even more wondrous and terrible than its fictional and mythic tellings. Few of the legends of the West, the Earps and the Jameses, have much substance when truth is applied, but even a dime novelist would blush to write a scenario where a lone gunfighter engaged 80 assailants and won – which is exactly what Elfego Baca did in 1884. Baca was no superhuman but a naive teenager who wanted to be a lawman and who had tired of local anti-Hispanic racism.
It could only happen in the West, that place of nobility and endless possibilities, cruel violence and depredation.
This book was born in the late 1960s when, sprawled on the floor in my grandparents’ house in the country, I used to watch The Virginian on television. Afterwards, I would go to my bedroom and peep out at the darkening land. With just a touch of childish imagination, the fields below the window would be transformed into open range, the gently lowing Herefords into wiry Texan Longhorns. And then, over the far horizon would come a whooping band of Sioux braves, or a party of rustlers, or a no-good gunfighter.
The Virginian not only hooked me on Westerns; it stimulated an interest in the real West which has never left me. That interest has been abetted by many people over the years and thanks are due to them, as well as to those who helped directly in the preparation of this book. I especially thank my grandfather, Joe Amos, who made me my first bow and arrow and my grandmother, Margaret Amos, who taught me to smell for rain on the wind. My gratitude is also extended to Eric and Joyce Lewis, Kathleen and Bill Ashman, Joan Stempel, Kathryn and Richard Cureton, the Jordan Gallery in Cody, Wyoming, Maria Lexton, Marge and Gene Ensor, Tony Williams and Kathleen Ensor Williams, Phil Lucas, Joe Turner and Michele Lowe, John Powell, Julian Alexander, Nick Robinson, Mark Crean, Jan Chamier, Dinah Glasier, and Eryl Humphrey Jones. Special thanks are due to copy-editor Margaret Aherne for her patience and skill. As ever, my biggest thanks go to my wife, Penny Stempel, who is beyond praise.
For Penny and Tristram Lewis-Stempel – Happy trails to you
To mount a horse and gallop over prairies, completely losing one’s self in vast and illimitable space, as silent as lonely, is to leave every petty care. In these grand wastes, one is truly alone with God. Oh, how I love the West!
Mrs Orsemus Boyd, Army wife
Part I
The Way West
1. The Exploration of the West
Prologue
They came, the first inhabitants of the New World, in small family groups, pushing eastward over the land bridge from Siberian Asia. They sought neither God nor gold but game, in the vast archaic shapes of the mammoth and the mastodon. No one knows for certain when the feet of these nomadic hunters first touched the soil of what would become America; it was some time towards the end of the Ice Age, not before 30,000 BC but not later than 28,000 BC. From Alaska, they fanned out across the northern continent, and then down through the central isthmus to the south. They remained hunters until the mammoth and mastodons were all gone, after which they began to adopt ways of living suitable to the lands into which they had walked. Some who had reached the Southwest, turned to agriculture and built magnificent stone cities. The people of the plains continued to hunt smaller game, especially a sub-species of bison, Bos bison americanus, the million-strong herds of which blackened the landscape. Around the Great Lakes, wild rice gathered by women poling bark canoes was the main means of sustaining the life of the people. Geronimo, the wild Apache warrior, looking back on his homeland from exile, would express the Indians’ beautiful adaptation to the land thus:
For each tribe of men Usen [God] created He also made a home. In the land for any particular tribe He placed whatever would be best for the welfare of that tribe.
With the diversifying of lifestyle, came other changes, of language, culture, even physique. Over time, the people no longer thought of themselves as a single entity but as many differing tribes – Dakota, Mandan, Se
minole, Pequot, Pawnee, Kickapoo, Comanche and nearly 500 others, most of whose tongues were incomprehensible to each other, and some of whom were incessantly warring rivals. (The West never was Arcadia, despite its siren beauty.) The original inhabitants of America, though, retained one common belief wherever they went, whomever they became. They believed that the land belonged to no one. Tribes might fight over hunting grounds, but they had no concept of private property. The land was sacred, to be handed on almost untouched. As an Omaha warrior’s song expressed it:
I shall vanish and be no more,
But the land over which I now roam,
Shall remain,
And change not.
The great ceremonial song of the Navajo, “The Blessing Way”, contained a similar sentiment:
All my surroundings are blessed as I found it,
I found it.
And the aboriginal was bound to the earth by a mystical union. It was part of his body. When it was cut, he wept. The attitude of the European intruder was very different.
The first White to “discover” the New World is usually held to be Christopher Columbus, who reached the Bahamas on 12 October AD 1492. Believing he had reached an outpost of India, he christened the people he found on the island of San Salvador Indios. “So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,” Columbus wrote to his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation . . . and although it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.” Where Columbus had sailed, other Spanish subjects soon followed. Led by the conquistadors, merciless hard-fighting minor noblemen, the Spanish overran the Caribbean and moved remorselessly westwards, lured ever on by the prospect of gold. In 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon landed on the American mainland. He found no gold, only flora. His men duly named the place Florida (“full of flowers”). Another conquistador, Panfilo de Narvaez, decided that Florida, its lack of yellow metal notwithstanding, was ideal for colonization. The attempt proved disastrous. But it accidentally resulted in the first sighting by White eyes of the American West.