Custer's Last Stand (1876)
As the white men closed in, the western Indians were forced to make numerous treaties with Washington that confined them to reservations and guaranteed needed supplies. But rascally government contractors cheated them with moldy flour, rotten beef, and moth-eaten blankets. In 1875 the discovery of gold on the Sioux reservation in the Dakotas brought stampeding thousands of miners, who brutally ignored treaty guarantees. The Indians took to the warpath, and the dashing General George Custer with only 264 men rashly attacked a hostile force that turned out to number several thousand. Custer and his entire command were wiped out near the Little Big Horn River (Montana), in what the white men call a "massacre" and the Indians a "battle." What does this account in the reformist Harper's Weekly see as the principal mistake in dealing with Native Americans? Who was basically responsible for the situation that had developed?

The fate of the brave and gallant Custer had deeply touched the public heart, which sees only a fearless soldier leading a charge against an ambushed [lurking] foe, and falling at the head of his men and in the thick of the fray. A monument is proposed, and subscriptions have been made. But a truer monument, more enduring than brass or marble, would be an Indian policy intelligent, moral, and efficient. Custer would not have fallen in vain if such a policy should be the result of his death.

It is a permanent accusation of our humanity and ability that over the Canadian line the relations between Indians and whites are so tranquil, while upon our side they are summed up in perpetual treachery, waste, and war. When he was a young lieutenant on the frontier, General Grant saw this, and watching attentively, he came to the conclusion that the reason of the difference was that the English respected the rights of the Indians and kept faith with them, while we make solemn treaties with them as if they were civilized and powerful nations, and then practically regard them as vermin to be exterminated.

The folly of making treaties with the Indian tribes may be as great as treating with a herd of buffaloes. But the infamy of violating treaties when we have made them is undeniable, and we are guilty both of the folly and the infamy.

We make treaties--that is, we pledge our faith--and then leave swindlers and knaves of all kinds to execute them. We maintain and breed pauper colonies. The savages, who know us, and who will neither be pauperized nor trust our word, we pursue, and slay if we can, at an incredible expense. The flower of our young officers is lost in inglorious forays, and one of the intelligent students of the whole subject rises in Congress and says, "The fact is that these Indians, with whom we have made a solemn treaty that their territory should not be invaded, and that they should receive supplies upon their reservations, have seen from one thousand to fifteen hundred [gold] miners during the present season entering and occupying their territory, while the Indians, owing to the failure of this and the last Congress to make adequate appropriations for their subsistence, instead of being fattened, as the gentleman says, by the support of this government, have simply been starved." . . .

It is plain that so long as we undertake to support the Indians as paupers, and then fail to supply the food; to respect their rights to reservations, and then permit the reservations to be overrun; to give them the best weapons and ammunition, and then furnish the pretense of their using them against us; to treat with them as men, and then hunt them like skunks--so long we shall have the most costly and bloody Indian wars, and the most tragical ambuscades, slaughters, and assassinations.

The Indian is undoubtedly a savage, and a savage greatly spoiled by the kind of contact with civilization which he gets at the West. There is no romance, there is generally no interest whatever, in him or his fate. But there should be some interest in our own good faith and humanity, in the lives of our soldiers and frontier settlers, and in the taxation to support our Indian policy. All this should certainly be enough to arouse a public demand for a thorough consideration of the subject, and the adoption of a system which should neither be puerile nor disgraceful, and which would tend to spare us the constant repetition of such sorrowful events as the slaughter of Custer and his brave men.

Harper's Weekly 20 (August 5, 1876): 630-631.

Chief Joseph's Lament (1879)
Chief Joseph, a noble-featured and humane Nez Percé (Pierced Nose) Indian, refused to be removed from his ancestral lands in Oregon and penned up on a reservation in Idaho. After an amazing strategic retreat of about a thousand miles, he was finally captured in 1877 near the Canadian border. The miserable remnants of his band were deported to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where many died of malaria and other afflictions. Chief Joseph appealed personally to the president, and subsequently the Nez Percés were returned to the Pacific Northwest. In the following narrative, what formula does he offer for ending white-Indian wars?

At last I was granted permission to come to Washington and bring my friend Yellow Bull and our interpreter with me. I am glad I came. I have shaken hands with a good many friends, but there are some things I want to know which no one seems able to explain. I cannot understand how the government sends a man out to fight us, as it did General Miles, and then breaks his word. Such a government has something wrong about it. . . .

I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men. They do not protect my father's grave. They do not pay for my horses and cattle.

Good words do not give me back my children. Good words will not make good the promise of your war chief, General Miles. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves.

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians.

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow.

All men are made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper.

I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.

I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast. I would like to go to Bitter Root Valley [western Montana]. There my people would be healthy; where they are now, they are dying. Three have died since I left my camp to come to Washington. When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.

I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also.

Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.

Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars. We shall all be alike--brothers of one father and mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers' hands upon the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race are waiting and praying. I hope no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people.

North American Review 128 (April 1879): 431-432.

Theodore Roosevelt Downgrades the Indians (1885)
Sickly and bespectacled young Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, invested more than $50,000 of his patrimony in ranch lands in Dakota Territory. He lost most of his investment but gained robust health and valuable experience. With little sympathy for Native Americans, he felt that the government had "erred quite as often on the side of too much leniency as on the side of too much severity." The following account, based in part on firsthand observations, appears in one of his earliest books. What light do his observations cast on the allegation that whites robbed Native Americans of their lands? What is his proposed solution to the problem?

There are now no Indians left in my immediate neighborhood, though a small party of harmless Grosventres occasionally passes through. Yet it is but six years since the Sioux surprised and killed five men in a log station just south of me, where the Fort Keogh trail crosses the river; and, two years ago, when I went down on the prairies toward the Black Hills, there was still danger from Indians. That summer the buffalo hunters had killed a couple of Crows, and while we were on the prairie a long-range skirmish occurred near us between some Cheyennes and a number of cowboys. In fact, we ourselves were one day scared by what we thought to be a party of Sioux; but on riding toward them they proved to be half-breed Crees, who were more afraid of us than we were of them.

During the past century a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians' land. Now, I do not mean to say for a moment that gross wrong has not been done the Indians, both by government and individuals, again and again. The government makes promises impossible to perform, and then fails to do even what it might toward their fulfilment; and where brutal and reckless frontiersmen are brought into contact with a set of treacherous, revengeful, and fiendishly cruel savages a long series of outrages by both sides is sure to follow.

But as regards taking the land, at least from the Western Indians, the simple truth is that the latter never had any real ownership in it at all. Where the game was plenty, there they hunted; they followed it when it moved away to new hunting-grounds, unless they were prevented by stronger rivals; and to most of the land on which we found them they had no stronger claim than that of having a few years previously butchered the original occupants.

When my cattle came to the Little Missouri the region was only inhabited by a score or so of white hunters; their title to it was quite as good as that of most Indian tribes to the lands they claim; yet nobody dreamed of saying that these hunters owned the country. Each could eventually have kept his own claim of 160 acres, and no more.

The Indians should be treated in just the same way that we treat the white settlers. Give each his little claim; if, as would generally happen, he declined this, why then let him share the fate of the thousands of white hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.*

The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that. It does not do to be merciful to a few, at the cost of justice to the many. The cattlemen at least keep herds and build houses on the land; yet I would not for a moment debar settlers from the right of entry to the cattle country, though their coming in means in the end the destruction of us and our industry.

*In the Dawes Act of 1887, Congress made provision for granting the Indians individual allotments, as Roosevelt here suggests.

Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1885), pp. 17-19.

Carl Schurz Proposes to "Civilize" the Indians (1881)
Carl Schurz, a notable "forty-eighter," or liberal refugee from the failed German revolution of 1848, had a prominent military career on the Union side in the Civil War and in 1877 became secretary of the interior. A lifelong reformer, he fought against slavery and political corruption and considered himself a friend to the Indians. What is his preferred solution to the "Indian problem"? Is he condescending to Native Americans or simply realistic? In what ways do his comments reveal attitudes about gender roles in nineteenth-century America?

. . . I am profoundly convinced that a stubborn maintenance of the system of large Indian reservations must eventually result in the destruction of the red men, however faithfully the Government may endeavor to protect their rights. It is only a question of time. . . . What we can and should do is, in general terms, to fit the Indians, as much as possible, for the habits and occupations of civilized life, by work and education; to individualize them in the possession and appreciation of property, by allotting to them lands in severalty, giving them a fee simple title individually to the parcels of land they cultivate, inalienable for a certain period, and to obtain their consent to a disposition of that part of their lands which they cannot use, for a fair compensation, in such a manner that they no longer stand in the way of the development of the country as an obstacle, but from part of it and are benefited by it.

The circumstances surrounding them place before the Indians this stern alternative: extermination or civilization. The thought of exterminating a race, once the only occupant of the soil upon which so many millions of our own people have grown prosperous and happy, must be revolting to every American who is not devoid of all sentiments of justice and humanity. To civilize them, which was once only a benevolent fancy, has now become an absolute necessity, if we mean to save them.

Can Indians be civilized? This question is answered in the negative only by those who do not want to civilize them. My experience in the management of Indian affairs, which enabled me to witness the progress made even among the wildest tribes, confirms me in the belief that it is not only possible but easy to introduce civilized habits and occupations among Indians, if only the proper means are employed. We are frequently told that Indians will not work. True, it is difficult to make them work as long as they can live upon hunting. But they will work when their living depends upon it, or when sufficient inducements are offered to them. Of this there is an abundance of proof. To be sure, as to Indian civilization, we must not expect too rapid progress or the attainment of too lofty a standard. We can certainly not transform them at once into great statesmen, or philosophers, or manufacturers, or merchants; but we can make them small farmers and herders. Some of them show even remarkable aptitude for mercantile pursuits on a small scale. I see no reason why the degree of civilization attained by the Indians in the States of New York, Indiana, Michigan, and some tribes in the Indian Territory, should not be attained in the course of time by all. I have no doubt that they can be sufficiently civilized to support themselves, to maintain relations of good neighborship with the people surrounding them, and altogether to cease being a disturbing element in society. The accomplishment of this end, however, will require much considerate care and wise guidance. That care and guidance is necessarily the task of the Government which, as to the Indians at least, must exercise paternal functions until they are sufficiently advanced to take care of themselves. . . .

. . . The failure of Sitting Bull's attempt to maintain himself and a large number of followers on our northern frontier in the old wild ways of Indian life will undoubtedly strengthen the tendency among the wild Indians of the North-west to recognize the situation and to act accordingly. The general state of feeling among the red men is therefore now exceedingly favorable to the civilizing process. . . .

The Indian, in order to be civilized, must not only learn how to read and write, but how to live. . . . Such considerations led the Government, under the last administration, largely to increase the number of Indian pupils at the Normal School at Hampton, Va., and to establish an institution for the education of Indian children at Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, where the young Indians would no longer be under the influence of the Indian camp or village, but in immediate contact with the towns, farms, and factories of civilized people, living and working in the atmosphere of civilization. In these institutions, the Indian children, among whom a large number of tribes are represented, receive the ordinary English education, while there are various shops and a farm for the instruction of the boys, and the girls are kept busy in the kitchen, dining-room, sewing-room, and with other domestic work. In the summer, as many as possible of the boys are placed in the care of intelligent and philanthropic farmers and their families, mostly in Pennsylvania and New England, where they find instructive employment in the field and barn-yard. The pupils are, under proper regulations, permitted to see as much as possible of the country and its inhabitants in the vicinity of the schools. . . .

Especial attention is given in the Indian schools to the education of Indian girls, and at Hampton a new building is being erected for that purpose. This is of peculiar importance. The Indian woman has so far been only a beast of burden. The girl, when arrived at maturity, was disposed of like an article of trade. The Indian wife was treated by her husband alternately with animal fondness, and with the cruel brutality of the slave-driver. Nothing will be more apt to raise the Indians in the scale of civilization than to stimulate their attachment to permanent homes, and it is woman that must make the atmosphere and form the attraction of the home. She must be recognized, with affection and respect, as the center of domestic life. If we want the Indians to respect their women, we must lift up the Indian women to respect themselves. This is the purpose and work of education. If we educate the girls of to-day, we educate the mothers of to-morrow, and in educating those mothers we prepare the ground for the education of generations to come. Every effort made in that direction is, therefore, entitled to especial sympathy and encouragement. . . .

As the third thing necessary for the absorption of the Indians in the great body of American citizenship, I mentioned their individualization in the possession of property by their settlement in severalty upon small farm tracts with a fee simple title. When the Indians are so settled, and have become individual property-owners, holding their farms by the same title under the law by which white men hold theirs, they will feel more readily inclined to part with such of their lands as they cannot themselves cultivate, and from which they can derive profit only if they sell them, either in lots or in bulk, for a fair equivalent in money or in annuities. This done, the Indians will occupy no more ground than so many white people; the large reservations will gradually be opened to general settlement and enterprise, and the Indians, with their possessions, will cease to stand in the way of the "development of the country." The difficulty which has provoked so many encroachments and conflicts will then no longer exist. When the Indians are individual owners of real property, and as individuals enjoy the protection of the laws, their tribal cohesion will necessarily relax, and gradually disappear. They will have advanced an immense step in the direction of the "white man's way." . . .

Carl Schurz, "Present Aspects of the Indian Problem," North American Review 133 (July 1881), pp. 6-10, 12-14, 16-18, 20-24.

A Native American Tries to Walk the White Man's Road (1890s)
From 1883 to 1890, Sun Elk, a Taos Indian, attended the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he learned typesetting. In the following passage, he describes his return to his pueblo in New Mexico. Did his Carlisle education prove beneficial for him? In what ways does his experience suggest the limitations of the reformer's efforts to "civilize" Native Americans?

When I was about thirteen years old I went down to St. Michael's Catholic School. Other boys were joining the societies and spending their time in the kivas [sacred ceremonial chambers] being purified and learning the secrets. But I wanted to learn the white man's secrets. I thought he had better magic than the Indian. . . . So I drifted a little away from the pueblo life. My father was sad but he was not angry. He wanted me to be a good Indian like all the other boys, but he was willing for me to go to school. He thought I would soon stop. There was plenty of time to go into the kiva.

Then at the first snow one winter . . . a white man--what you call an Indian Agent--came and took all of us who were in that school far off on a train to a new kind of village called Carlisle Indian School, and I stayed there seven years. . . .

Seven years I was there. I set little letters together in the printing shop and we printed papers. For the rest we had lessons. There were games, but I was too slight for foot and hand plays, and there were no horses to ride. I learned to talk English and to read. There was much arithmetic. It was lessons: how to add and take away, and much strange business like you have crossword puzzles only with numbers. The teachers were very solemn and made a great fuss if we did not get the puzzles right.

There was something called Greatest Common Denominator. I remember the name but I never knew it--what it meant. When the teachers asked me I would guess, but I always guessed wrong. We studied little things--fractions. I remember that word too. It is like one half of an apple. And there were immoral fractions. . . .

They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means "be like the white man." I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indian ways were wrong. But they kept teaching us for seven years. And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men--burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances. I tried to learn the lessons--and after seven years I came home. . . .

It was a warm summer evening when I got off the train at Taos station. The first Indian I met, I asked him to run out to the pueblo and tell my family I was home. The Indian couldn't speak English, and I had forgotten all my Pueblo language. But after a while he learned what I meant and started running to tell my father "Tulto is back. . . ."

I went home with my family. And next morning the governor of the pueblo and the two war chiefs and many of the priest chiefs came into my father's house. They did not talk to me; they did not even look at me. When they were all assembled they talked to my father.

The chiefs said to my father, "Your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the white men. He has been far away from the pueblo. He has not lived in the kiva nor learned the things that Indian boys should learn. He has no hair. He has no blankets. He cannot even speak our language and he has a strange smell. He is not one of us."

The chiefs got up and walked out. My father was very sad. I wanted him to be angry, but he was only sad. So I would not be sad and was very angry instead.

And I walked out of my father's house and out of the pueblo. I did not speak. My mother was in the other room cooking. She stayed in the other room but she made much noise rattling her pots. Some children were on the plaza and they stared at me, keeping very still as I walked away.

I walked until I came to the white man's town, Fernandez de Taos. I found work setting type in a printing shop there. Later I went to Durango and other towns in Wyoming and Colorado, printing and making a good living. But this indoor work was bad for me. It made me slight of health. So then I went outside to the fields. I worked in some blacksmith shops and on farms.

All this time I was a white man. I wore white man's clothes and kept my hair cut. I was not very happy. I made money and I kept a little of it and after many years I came back to Taos.

My father gave me some land from the pueblo fields. He could do this because now the land did not belong to all the people, as it did in the old days; the white man had cut it up and given it in little pieces to each family, so my father gave me a part of his, and I took my money and bought some more land and some cattle. I built a house just outside the pueblo. I would not live in the pueblo so I built outside a house bigger than the pueblo houses all for myself.

My father brought me a girl to marry. Her name was Roberta. Her Indian name was P'ah-tah-zhuli (little deer bean). She was about fifteen years old and she had no father. But she was a good girl and she came to live with me in my new house outside the pueblo.

When we were married I became an Indian again. I let my hair grow, I put on blankets, and I cut the seat out of my pants.

Excerpts from Indians of the Americas by Edwin R. Embree. Copyright (c) 1939 by Edwin R. Embree, (c) renewed 1967 by Kate C. Embree. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.

"Vote Yourself a Farm" (1846)
Free homesteads from the public domain found a powerful champion in George H. Evans, an immigrant from England who became a pioneer editor of U.S. labor journals. A confirmed atheist, he was preoccupied with "natural rights" to the soil. He hoped particularly to increase the wages of eastern laborers by luring surplus workers onto free lands in the West. On what grounds does he base the following appeal?

Are you an American citizen? Then you are a joint-owner of the public lands. Why not take enough of your property to provide yourself a home? Why not vote yourself a farm?*

Remember Poor Richard's saying: "Now I have a sheep and a cow, every one bids me 'good morrow.'" If a man have a house and a home of his own, though it be a thousand miles off, he is well received in other people's houses; while the homeless wretch is turned away. The bare right to a farm, though you should never go near it, would save you from many an insult. Therefore, Vote yourself a farm.

Are you a party follower? Then you have long enough employed your vote to benefit scheming office-seekers; use it for once to benefit yourself--Vote yourself a farm.

Are you tired of slavery--of drudging for others--of poverty and its attendant miseries? Then, Vote yourself a farm.

Are you endowed with reason? Then you must know that your right to life hereby includes the right to a place to live in--the right to a home. Assert this right, so long denied mankind by feudal robbers and their attorneys. Vote yourself a farm.

Are you a believer in the Scriptures? Then assert that the land is the Lord's, because He made it. Resist then the blasphemers who exact money for His work, even as you would resist them should they claim to be worshiped for His holiness. Emancipate the poor from the necessity of encouraging such blasphemy--Vote the freedom of the public lands.

Are you a man? Then assert the sacred rights of man--especially your right to stand upon God's earth, and to till it for your own profit. Vote yourself a farm.

Would you free your country, and the sons of toil everywhere, from the heartless, irresponsible mastery of the aristocracy of avarice? Would you disarm this aristocracy of its chief weapon, the fearful power of banishment from God's earth? . . . Therefore forget not to Vote yourself a farm.

*"Vote Yourself a Farm" was a Republican slogan in the Lincoln campaign of 1860.

J. R. Commons et al., eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. 7 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke Company, 1910), pp. 305-307.

A Texan Scorns Futile Charity (1852)
Agitation for free land continued to mount, and a homestead bill was introduced in Congress designed to donate 160 acres of land to every landless head of a family needing it. Easterners objected that this was a giveaway scheme to benefit a few new western states at the expense of the old states. It would drain off factory workers and hence push up wages and jeopardize prosperity. Critics further argued that the public domain, which was then being sold to replenish the Treasury, was the property of all the taxpayers and should not be given away to a favored few. Congressman Volney E. Howard of Texas aired additional objections in Congress. What light do his remarks cast on the safety-valve theory--that is, that impoverished eastern families could reduce economic distress and relieve class conflict by moving west and taking up cheap land?*

But, sir, I deny the constitutional power of Congress to grant away the public property in donations to the poor. This government is not a national almshouse. We have no right to collect money by taxation and then divide the proceeds among the people generally, or those who are destitute of land, food, or raiment. . . .

There is no sound distinction between giving money by direct appropriations from the Treasury, and land, in the purchase of which [e.g., the Louisiana Purchase] that money has been invested. It is no more the property of the nation in one case than in the other, nor less an appropriation. What right have we to tax the property and industry of all classes of society to purchase homesteads, and enrich those who may not be the possessors of the soil? . . .

It is a great mistake to suppose that you will materially better the condition of the man in the old states, or the Atlantic cities, by giving him 160 acres of land in the Far West. The difficulty with him is not that of procuring the land, but to emigrate himself and family to the country where it is, and to obtain the means of cultivating it. Without this the grant is useless to the poor man.

The gift, to make it efficient, should be followed up by a further donation to enable the beneficiary to stock and cultivate it. It would be a far greater boon to all our citizens, of native and foreign origin, to furnish them, for a few dollars, a rapid means of reaching the land states in the West; and this, in my opinion, may be accomplished by exercising the legitimate powers of the government, and without drawing upon the Treasury, or diminishing the value of the public domain as a source of revenue.

*The safety-valve theory, popularly attributed to the historian Frederick J. Turner, antedated him by many years. As early as 1843 a British journal referred to "the safety-valve of western emigration" in America (Quarterly Review 71: 522). Only a few eastern mechanics moved to the West, but many incoming immigrants were attracted there who otherwise would have further congested the seaboard cities.

Congressional Globe, 32d Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 583-584.

President James Buchanan Kills a Homestead Bill (1860)
Free-soilers continued to argue that settlers not only had a "natural right" to western land but that they should receive it as recompense for their own expense and sweat in taming the wilderness. In the 1850s homestead bills thrice passed the House, where the North was dominant, but all met defeat in the Senate, where the South was entrenched. Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio cried inelegantly in 1859 that it was "a question of land to the landless," whereas the southern-sponsored bill to buy Cuba was "a question of niggers to the niggerless." Finally, in 1860, a compromise measure staggered through both houses of Congress. It granted 160 acres of land to bona-fide settlers who would pay the nominal sum of twenty-five cents an acre at the end of five years. President Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian under southern influence, vetoed the measure. Comment critically on his views regarding unfairness to nonfarmers and to the older states. Was he correct in arguing that such a law would undermine the nation's moral fiber?

. . . 4. This bill will prove unequal and unjust in its operation, because from its nature it is confined to one class of our people. It is a boon exclusively conferred upon the cultivators of the soil. Whilst it is cheerfully admitted that these are the most numerous and useful class of our fellow citizens, and eminently deserve all the advantages which our laws have already extended to them, yet there should be no new legislation which would operate to the injury or embarrassment of the large body of respectable artisans and laborers. The mechanic who emigrates to the West and pursues his calling must labor long before he can purchase a quarter section of land, whilst the tiller of the soil obtains a farm at once by the bounty of the government. The numerous body of mechanics in our large cities cannot, even by emigrating to the West, take advantage of the provisions of this bill without entering upon a new occupation for which their habits of life have rendered them unfit.

5. This bill is unjust to the old states of the Union in many respects; and amongst these states, so far as the public lands are concerned, we may enumerate every state east of the Mississippi, with the exception of Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota.

It is a common belief within their limits that the older states of the confederacy [Union] do not derive their proportionate benefit from the public lands. This is not just opinion. It is doubtful whether they could be rendered more beneficial to these states under any other system than that which at present exists. Their proceeds go into the common Treasury to accomplish the objects of the government, and in this manner all of the states are benefited in just proportion. But to give this common inheritance away would deprive the old states of their just proportion of this revenue without holding out any, the least, corresponding advantage. Whilst it is our common glory that the new states have become so prosperous and populous, there is no good reason why the old states should offer premiums to their own citizens to emigrate from them to the West. That land of promise presents in itself sufficient allurements to our young and enterprising citizens without any adventitious aid.

The offer of free farms would probably have a powerful effect in encouraging emigration, especially from states like Illinois, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to the west of the Mississippi, and could not fail to reduce the price of property within their limits. An individual in states thus situated would not pay its fair value for land when, by crossing the Mississippi, he could go upon the public lands and obtain a farm almost without money and without price.

6. This bill will open one vast field for speculation. . . . Large numbers of actual settlers will be carried out by capitalists upon agreements to give them half of the land for the improvement of the other half. This cannot be avoided. Secret agreements of this kind will be numerous.* In the entry of graduated lands the experience of the Land Office justifies this objection. . . .

10. The honest poor man, by frugality and industry, can in any part of our country acquire a competence for himself and his family, and in doing this he feels that he eats the bread of independence. He desires no charity, either from the government or from his neighbors. This bill, which proposes to give him land at an almost nominal price out of the property of the government, will go far to demoralize the people and repress this noble spirit of independence. It may introduce among us those pernicious social theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries.

*Buchanan was right. Under the Homestead Act as finally passed, about ten acres were secured by speculators for every acre secured by a bona-fide settler.

J. D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), vol. 5, pp. 611-614, passim.

Preemption Grafters (1858)
The Homestead Act at last passed in 1862, after southern obstructionists had left Congress--and the Union. Actual settlers might obtain 160 acres of land free, if they lived on it for five years, cultivated it, and paid a fee of $10.00. They could also continue to preempt 160 acres by paying $1.25 an acre and by swearing that the land was for their exclusive use and cultivation. After the required five years, settlers would have to prove "by two credible witnesses" that they had lived on and cultivated the grant, and they would have to swear that they had not alienated it to others by secret sale or other collusion. This open invitation to fraud led to grave abuses of the type that A. D. Richardson had discovered in Kansas in 1858. Why was so much perjury tolerated on the frontier among presumably law-respecting people?

During this fall many residents were pre-empting their claims. The law contemplates a homestead of 160 acres at a nominal price for each actual settler and no one else; but land is plenty and everybody pre-empts. A young merchant, lawyer, or speculator rides into the interior, to the unoccupied public lands, pays some settler five dollars to show him the vacant claims, and selects one upon which he places four little poles around a hollow square upon the ground, as children commence a cob house. Then he files a notice in the land office that he has laid the foundation of a house upon this claim and begun a settlement for actual residence. He does not see the land again until ready to "prove up," which he may do after thirty days. Then he revisits his claim, possibly erects a house of rough slabs, costing from ten to twenty dollars, eats one meal, and sleeps for a single night under its roof. More frequently, however, his improvements consist solely of a foundation of four logs. . . .

In three cases out of four, after "proving up," the pre-emptor never visits his land again unless for the purpose of selling it. Says the Spanish proverb, "Oaths are words, and words are wind." Thus this unequivocal perjury is regarded upon the frontier. The general feeling is that it wrongs no one, and that the settlers have a right to the land.

Hundreds of men whose families are still in the East find witnesses to testify that their wives and children are residing upon the land. I have known men to pre-empt who had never been within twenty miles of their claims, facile witnesses swearing with the utmost indifference that they were residing upon them.

The pre-emptors must state under oath that they have made no agreement, direct or indirect, for selling any part of the land. But in numberless instances these statements are falsehoods, connived at by the officers.

In most land offices a man cannot pre-empt unless he has a house at least twelve feet square. I have known a witness to swear that the house in question was twelve by fourteen when actually the only building upon the claim was one whittled out with a penknife, twelve inches by fourteen.

Some officers require that the house must have a glass window. While traveling in the interior I stopped at a little slab cabin where I noticed a window sash without lights hanging upon a nail. As I had seen similar frames in other cabins, I asked the owner what it was for.

"To pre-empt with," was the reply.

"How?"

"Why, don't you understand? To enable my witness to swear that there is a window in my house!"

Sometimes the same cabin is moved from claim to claim until half a dozen different persons have pre-empted with it. In Nebraska a little frame house . . . was built for this purpose on wheels and drawn by oxen. It enabled the pre-emptor to swear that he had a bona fide residence upon his claim. It was let at five dollars a day, and scores of claims were proved up and pre-empted with it. The discovery of any such malpractice and perjury would invalidate the title. But I never knew of an instance where the pre-emptor was deprived of his land after once receiving his title.

No woman can pre-empt unless she is a widow or the "head of a family." But sometimes an ambitious maiden who wishes to secure 160 acres of land borrows a child, signs papers of adoption, swears that she is the head of a family, and pre-empts her claim, then annuls the papers and returns her temporary offspring to its parents with an appropriate gift.

A. D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford: Hartford Publishing Company, 1866), pp. 137-38, 140-41.

Going Broke in Kansas (1895)
The Homestead Act proved to be a bitter trap for thousands of honest settlers who pushed west to their "ultimate destitution." A farm of 160 acres could support a family in well-watered Illinois but not often in the semiarid West. A common saying on the frontier was that homesteading was a gamble: the government was "betting you 160 acres of land that you can't live on it five years." William Allen White then twenty-seven years old and just entering upon a distinguished journalistic career in Kansas, here described a tragic scene. In light of his observations, how "free" were the 160 acres?

There came through Emporia yesterday two old-fashioned "mover wagons," headed east. The stock in the caravan would invoice four horses, very poor and very tired; one mule, more disheartened than the horses; and one sad-eyed dog, that had probably been compelled to rustle his own precarious living for many a long and weary day.

A few farm implements of the simpler sort were in the wagon, but nothing that had wheels was moving except the two wagons. All the rest of the impedimenta had been left upon the battlefield, and these poor stragglers, defeated but not conquered, were fleeing to another field, to try the fight again.

These movers were from western Kansas--from Gray County, a county which holds a charter from the state to officiate as the very worst, most desolate, God-forsaken, man-deserted spot on the sad old earth. They had come from that wilderness only after a ten years' hard, vicious fight, a fight which had left its scars on their faces, and beat their bodies, had taken the elasticity from their steps, and left them crippled to enter the battle anew.

For ten years they had been fighting the elements. They had seen it stop raining for months at a time. They had heard the fury of the winter wind as it came whining across the short burned grass, and their children huddling in the corner. They have strained their eyes watching through the long summer days for the rain that never came. They have seen that big cloud roll up from the southwest about one o'clock in the afternoon, hover over the land, and stumble away with a few thumps of thunder as the sun went down. They have tossed through hot nights wild with worry, and have arisen only to find their worst nightmares grazing in reality on the brown stubble in front of their sun-warped doors.

They had such high hopes when they went out there; they are so desolate now--no, not now, for now they are in the land of corn and honey. They have come out of the wilderness, back to the land of promise. They are now in God's own country down on the Neosho, with their wife's folks, and the taste of apple butter and good cornbread and fresh meat and pie--pie-plant pie like mother used to make--gladdened their shrunken palates last night. And real cream, curdling on their coffee saucers last night for supper, was a sight so rich and strange that it lingered in their dreams, wherein they walked beside the still water, and lay down in green pastures.

Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, June 15, 1895.

Wheat Bowls Become Dust Bowls (1883)
The topsoil of the semiarid great plains, especially beyond the hundredth meridian, was held down by tough prairie grass. Gradually much of this protective covering was eroded by overgrazing cattle and by the plains settlers' plows. In periods of drought, dust storms blew up with increasing intensity. They culminated in the 1930s in the great dust bowl tragedy, which ruined vast areas in a half-dozen or so states. A western journalist here reconstructs the details of a scene that has long been legendary in the West.

One day in the spring of 1883 as a Scandinavian farmer, John Christiansen, plowed his fields in Montana's neighbor state of North Dakota, he looked up to find that he was being watched . . . by an old and solemn Sioux Indian.

Silently the old Indian watched as the dark soil curled up and the prairie grass was turned under. Christiansen stopped, leaned against the plow handle, pushed his black Stetson back on his head, rolled a cigarette. He watched amusedly as the old Indian knelt, thrust his fingers into the plow furrow, measured its depth, fingered the sod and the buried grass.

Then the old Indian straightened up, looked at the farmer.

"Wrong side up," he said, and went away.

For a number of years that was regarded as a very amusing story indeed, betraying the ignorance of the poor Indian. Now there's a marker on Highway No. 10 in North Dakota on the spot where the words were spoken--a little reminder to the white man that his red brother was not so dumb.

J. K. Howard, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943), p. 14.

An Iowan Assesses Discontent (1893)
Farm distress increased during the 1890s, to a large extent in the South but more spectacularly on the western plains. The four "d's"--drought, debt, deflation, and depression--played their dismal role, but the basic trouble was overproduction of grain. Farmers simply could not control prices that were determined by the world supply, and they vented their spleen on scapegoats nearer at hand, notably the railroads. Freight rates had fallen substantially since the Civil War, but no rates seemed fair to farmers whose grain prices were so low that they could not make a profit. And inequities persisted, despite the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. A prominent Iowa journalist here analyzes some of the grievances that caused these hardy children of the soil to beat their Farmers' Alliances into a political plowshare. In the following essay, what are the farmers' most pressing complaints?

Nothing has done more to injure the [western] region than these freight rates. The railroads have retarded its growth as much as they first hastened it. The rates are often four times as large as Eastern rates. . . . The extortionate character of the freight rates has been recognized by all parties, and all have pledged themselves to lower them, but no state west of the Missouri has been able to do so.

In the early days, people were so anxious to secure railways that they would grant any sort of concession which the companies asked. There were counties in Iowa and other Western states struggling under heavy loads of bond-taxes, levied twenty-five years ago, to aid railways of which not one foot has been built. Perhaps a little grading would be done, and then the project would be abandoned, the bonds transferred, and the county called upon by the "innocent purchaser" to pay the debt incurred by blind credulity. I have known men to sacrifice fortunes, brains, and lives in fighting vainly this iniquitous bond-swindle.

Railways have often acquired mines and other properties by placing such high freight rates upon their products that the owner was compelled to sell at the railroad company's own terms. These freight rates have been especially burdensome to the farmers, who are far from their selling and buying markets, thus robbing them in both directions.

Another fact which has incited the farmer against corporations is the bold and unblushing participation of the railways in politics. At every political convention their emissaries are present with blandishments and passes and other practical arguments to secure the nomination of their friends. The sessions of these legislatures are disgusting scenes of bribery and debauchery. There is not an attorney of prominence in Western towns who does not carry a pass or has not had the opportunity to do so. The passes, of course, compass the end sought. By these means, the railroads have secured an iron grip upon legislatures and officers, while no redress has been given to the farmer.

The land question, also, is a source of righteous complaint. Much of the land of the West, instead of being held for actual settlers, has been bought up by speculators and Eastern syndicates in large tracts. They have done nothing to improve the land and have simply waited for the inevitable settler who bought cheaply a small "patch" and proceeded to cultivate it. When he had prospered so that he needed more land, he found that his own labor had increased tremendously the value of the adjacent land. . . .

Closely connected with the land abuse are the money grievances. As his pecuniary condition grew more serious, the farmer could not make payments on his land. Or he found that, with the ruling prices, he could not sell his produce at a profit. In either case he needed money, to make the payment or maintain himself until prices should rise. When he went to the moneylenders, these men, often dishonest usurers, told him that money was very scarce, that the rate of interest was rapidly rising, etc., so that in the end the farmer paid as much interest a month as the moneylender was paying a year for the same money. In this transaction, the farmer obtained his first glimpse of the idea of "the contraction of the currency at the hands of Eastern money sharks."

Disaster always follows the exaction of such exorbitant rates of interest, and want or eviction quickly came. Consequently, when demagogues went among the farmers to utter their calamitous cries, the scales seemed to drop from the farmers' eyes, and he saw gold bugs, Shylocks, conspiracies, and criminal legislation ad infinitum. Like a lightning flash, the idea of political action ran through the Alliances. A few farmers' victories in county campaigns the previous year became a promise of broader conquest, and with one bound the Farmers' Alliance went into politics all over the West.

F. B. Tracy, "Why the Farmers Revolted," Forum 16 (October 1893): 242-243.

Mrs. Mary Lease Raises More Hell (c. 1890)
As the plains seethed with protest, the Populist party emerged from the Farmers' Alliance. Kansas spawned the most picturesque and vocal group of orators. A flaming speaker in great demand was the Irish-born Mrs. Mary E. Lease, a tall, magnetic lawyer known as "Patrick Henry in petticoats." Noting that corn was so cheap that it was being burned as fuel, she demanded the raising of less corn and "more hell." Noting also the disparity between the wealthy families and the people allegedly living out of garbage cans, she insisted on drastic measures. In the following selection, which are substantial grievances and which are demagogic outpourings? Which of her complaints seem to be the most serious?

This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and by our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.

The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East.

Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.

The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef, and no price at all for butter and eggs--that's what came of it.

Then the politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 10,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them.

Tariff is not the paramount question. The main question is the money question. . . . Kansas suffers from two great robbers, the Santa Fe Railroad and the loan companies. The common people are robbed to enrich their masters. . . .

We want money, land, and transportation. We want the abolition of the national banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to a tract thirty miles wide and ninety miles long has been foreclosed and bought in by loan companies of Kansas in a year.

We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.

Elizabeth N. Barr, "The Populist Uprising," in W. E. Connelley, ed., History of Kansas, State and People, vol. 2 (1928), p. 1167.

William Allen White Attacks the Populists (1896)
The embittered farmers and laborites, organized into the People's (Populist) party, met in a frenzied convention in Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892. They nominated General James B. Weaver for president and adopted a scorching platform. In addition to other grievances, they pilloried corruption among politicians and judges, the subsidized and "muzzled" press, the impoverishment of labor, the shooting of strikers, and the hypocrisy of the two major parties. More specifically, the platform demanded distribution of monopolized land to actual settlers; government ownership of the telegraphs, telephones, and railroads ("The railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads"); reduction of bloated fortunes by a graduated income tax; and inflation of the currency by issuing more paper money and coining all silver produced.

Four years later, the Populists nominated William Jennings Bryan and temporarily fused with the Democratic party, which also nominated Bryan, in a bid for national power. In Emporia, Kansas, newspaperman William Allen White had long been critical of the Populists and now wrote a famous editorial denouncing them: "What's the Matter with Kansas?" White's piece was reprinted and widely distributed by Republicans backing William McKinley for president against Bryan. The editorial vaulted White to national prominence, and he later became a friend and adviser to presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt. As White saw matters in 1896, Kansas desperately needed new investment capital from the Northeast, and the Populist agitation was scaring it away. How valid is his argument? Were the Populists not simply the victims of agricultural distress, but in some way also contributors to it?

Today the Kansas Department of Agriculture sent out a statement which indicates that Kansas has gained less than two thousand people in the past year. There are about two hundred and twenty-five thousand families in this state, and there were ten thousand babies born in Kansas, and yet so many people have left the state that the natural increase is cut down to less than two thousand net.

This has been going on for eight years.

If there had been a high brick wall around the state eight years ago, and not a soul had been admitted or permitted to leave, Kansas would be a half million souls better off than she is today. And yet the nation has increased in population. In five years ten million people have been added to the national population, yet instead of gaining a share of this--say, half a million--Kansas has apparently been a plague spot and, in the very garden of the world, has lost population by ten thousands every year.

Not only has she lost population, but she has lost money. Every moneyed man in the state who could get out without loss has gone. Every month in every community sees someone who has a little money pack up and leave the state. This has been going on for eight years. Money has been drained out all the time. In towns where ten years ago there were three or four or half a dozen money-lending concerns, stimulating industry by furnishing capital, there is now none, or one or two that are looking after the interests and principal already outstanding.

No one brings any money into Kansas any more. What community knows over one or two men who have moved in with more than $5,000 in the past three years? And what community cannot count half a score of men in that time who have left, taking all the money they could scrape together?

Yet the nation has grown rich; other states have increased in population and wealth--other neighboring states. Missouri has gained over two million, while Kansas has been losing half a million. Nebraska has gained in wealth and population while Kansas has gone downhill. Colorado has gained every way, while Kansas has lost every way since 1888.

What's the matter with Kansas?

There is no substantial city in the state. Every big town save one has lost in population. Yet Kansas City, Omaha, Lincoln, St. Louis, Denver, Colorado Springs, Sedalia, the cities of the Dakotas, St. Paul and Minneapolis and Des Moines--all cities and towns in the West--have steadily grown.

Take up the government blue book and you will see that Kansas is virtually off the map. Two or three little scrubby consular places in yellow-fever-stricken communities that do not aggregate ten thousand dollars a year is all the recognition that Kansas has. Nebraska draws about one hundred thousand dollars; little old North Dakota draws about fifty thousand dollars; Oklahoma doubles Kansas; Missouri leaves her a thousand miles behind; Colorado is almost seven times greater than Kansas--the whole west is ahead of Kansas.

Take it by any standard you please, Kansas is not in it.

Go east and you hear them laugh at Kansas; go west and they sneer at her; go south and they "cuss" her; go north and they have forgotten her. Go into any crowd of intelligent people gathered anywhere on the globe, and you will find the Kansas man on the defensive. The newspaper columns and magazines once devoted to praise of her, to boastful facts and startling figures concerning her resources, are now filled with cartoons, jibes and Pefferian* speeches. Kansas just naturally isn't in it. She has traded places with Arkansas and Timbuctoo.

What's the matter with Kansas?

We all know; yet here we are at it again. We have an old mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor. We have another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that "the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner"; we are running him for Chief Justice, so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the state. We have raked the old ash heap of failure in the state and found an old human hoop skirt who has failed as a businessman, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run him for Congressman-at-Large. He will help the looks of the Kansas delegation at Washington. Then we have discovered a kid without a law practice and have decided to run him for Attorney General. Then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed.

Oh, this is a state to be proud of! We are a people who can hold up our heads! What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are "just ordinary clodhoppers, but they know more in a minute about finance than John Sherman"; we need more men who are "posted," who can bellow about the crime of '73,** who hate prosperity, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street. We have had a few of them--some hundred fifty thousand--but we need more.

We need several thousand gibbering idiots to scream about the "Great Red Dragon" of Lombard Street. We don't need population, we don't need wealth, we don't need well-dressed men on the streets, we don't need cities on the fertile prairies; you bet we don't! What we are after is the money power. Because we have become poorer and ornerier and meaner than a spavined, distempered mule, we, the people of Kansas, propose to kick; we don't care to build up, we wish to tear down.

"There are two ideas of government," said our noble Bryan at Chicago. "There are those who believe that if you legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, this prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class and rest upon them."

That's the stuff! Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors and tell the debtors who borrowed the money five years ago when money "per capita" was greater than it is now, that the contraction of currency gives him a right to repudiate.

Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can't pay his debts, on the altar, and bow down and worship him. Let the state ideal be high. What we need is not the respect of our fellow men, but the chance to get something for nothing.

Oh, yes, Kansas is a great state. Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars; and every industry but farming paralyzed, and that crippled, because its products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work who can afford to buy them. Let's don't stop this year. Let's drive all the decent, self-respecting men out of the state. Let's keep the old clodhoppers who know it all. Let's encourage the man who is "posted." He can talk, and what we need is not mill hands to eat our meat, nor factory hands to eat our wheat, nor cities to oppress the farmer by consuming his butter and eggs and chickens and produce. What Kansas needs is men who can talk, who have large leisure to argue the currency question while their wives wait at home for that nickel's worth of bluing.

What's the matter with Kansas?

Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing her wealth, population and standing. She has got her statesmen, and the money power is afraid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have an overproduction. But that doesn't matter. Kansas never did believe in diversified crops. Kansas is all right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Kansas. "Every prospect pleases and only man is vile."

*William A. Peffer was a notoriously long-winded Populist senator from Kansas.

**"The crime of '73" refers to the de-monetization of silver in 1873, a development loudly lamented by the pro-inflation Populists.

Emporia Gazette, August 15, 1896.
The fence-erecting white men inevitably clashed with the wide-roaming Indians of the plains. As land greed undermined ethical standards, many settlers acted as though the Indians had no more rights than the buffalo, which were also ruthlessly slaughtered. The seemingly endless frontier wars ended finally when the Native Americans, cooped up in human zoos called reservations, were forced to adopt in part the economic life of their conquerors. The honest farmer and the fraudulent speculator were now free to open the Far West under the Homestead Act of 1862--the United States' first big giveaway program. Much of the settlement occurred in areas with only scanty rainfall; and when crops failed, or when overproduction came, the farmer was trapped. Agitation for relief vented itself most spectacularly in 1892, when the Populist party waged a colorful campaign for the presidency under General James B. Weaver. Although he carried six western states, he ran well behind the second-place Republicans as the Democrats again swept Grover Cleveland to victory.