world of industry and corporations to talk about the Wild Wild West. Spoiler Alert: You

You have died of dysentery. And in the process, we’re going to explore

how all of us, even those of us who are vegan or eat sustainably-produced food benefit

from massive agrobusiness that has its roots in the Wild Wild West.

The West still looms large in American mythology as the home of cowboys and gunslingers and

houses of ill repute and freedom from pesky government interference, but in fact--

It was probably not as wild as we’ve been told. Ugh, Mr. Green, why can’t America

live up to its myths just once? Because this is America, Me from the Past,

home to Hollywood and Gatsby and Honey Boo Boo. We are literally in the mythmaking business.

intro So, before the Hollywood western, the myth

of the Frontier probably found its best expression in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lecture,

“the Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

Turner argued that the West was responsible for key characteristics of American culture:

beliefs in individualism, political democracy, and economic mobility. Like, for 18th and

19th century Americans, the western frontier represented the opportunity to start over,

and possibly to strike it rich by dint of one’s own individual effort, even back when

the West was, like, Ohio.[1] In this mythology, the west was a magnet for

restless young men who lit out for the uncorrupted, unoccupied, untamed territories to seek their

fortune. But, in reality, most western settlers went not as individuals but as members of

a family or as part of an immigrant group. And they weren’t filling up unoccupied space

either because most of that territory was home to American Indians.

Also, in addition to Easterners and migrants from Europe, the West was settled by Chinese

people and by Mexican migrant laborers and former slaves. Plus, there were plenty of

Mexicans living there already who became Americans with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

And the whole west as “a place of rugged individualism and independence” turns out

to be an oversimplification. I mean, the federal government, after all, had to pass the law

that spurred homesteading, then had to clear out American Indians already living there,

and had to sponsor the railroads that allowed the West to grow in the first place.

About as individualistic as the government buying Walden Pond for Henry David Thoreau.

What’s that? It’s a state park now? The government owns it? Well, there you go.

Now, railroads didn’t create the desire to settle the west but they did make it possible

for people who wanted to live out west to do so, for two reasons. First, without railroads

there would be no way to bring crops or other goods to market.

I mean, I guess you could dig a canal across Kansas, but, if you’ve ever been to Kansas

that is not a tantalizing proposition. Second, railroads made life in the west profitable

and livable because they brought the goods that people needed such as tools for planting

and sowing, shoes for wearing, books for putting on your shelf and pretending to have read.

Railroads allowed settlers to stay connected with the modernity that was becoming the hallmark

of the industrialized world in the 19th century. Now, we saw last week that the Federal government

played a key role in financing the transcontinental railroad, but state governments got into the

act too, often to their financial detriment. In fact, so many states nearly went bankrupt

financing railroads that most states now have constitutional requirements that they balance

their budgets. But perhaps the central way that the Federal

government supported the railroads, and western settlement and investment in general, was

by leading military expeditions against American Indians, rounding them up on ever-smaller

reservations, and destroying their culture. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

There was an economic as well as a racial imperative to move the Native Americans off

their land: white people wanted it. Initially it was needed to set down railroad tracks,

and then for farming, but eventually it was also exploited for minerals like gold and

iron and other stuff that makes industry work. I mean, would you really want a territory

called the Badlands unless it had valuable minerals?

Early western settlement, of the Oregon Trail kind, did not result in huge conflicts with

Native Americans, but by the 1850s, a steady stream of settlers kicked off increasingly

bloody conflicts that lasted pretty much until 1890.

Even though the fighting started before the Civil War, the end of the “war between the

states” meant a new, more violent phase in the warring between American Indians and

whites. General Philip H. “Little Phil” Sheridan set out to destroy the Indians’

way of life, burning villages and killing their horses and especially the buffalo that

was the basis of the plains tribes’ existence. There were about 30 million buffalo in the

U.S. in 1800; by 1886 the Smithsonian Institute had difficulty finding 25 “good specimens.”[2]

In addition to violent resistance, some Indians turned to a spiritual movement to try to preserve

their traditional way of life. Around 1890 the Ghost Dance movement arose in and around

South Dakota. Ghost Dancers believed that if they gathered together to dance and engage

in religious rituals, eventually the white man would disappear and the buffalo would

return, and with them the Indians’ traditional customs. But even though a combined force

of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors completely destroyed George Custer’s force of 250 cavalrymen

at Little Bighorn in 1876, and Geronimo took years to subdue in the Southwest, western

Native Americans were all defeated by 1890, and the majority were moved to reservations.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. Boy, this Wild West episode sure is turning out to be loads of

fun! It’s just like the Will Smith movie! Alright, Stan, this is about to get even more

depressing, so let’s look at, like, some pretty mountains and western landscapes and

stuff, while I deliver this next bit. So in 1871 the U.S. government ended the treaty

system that had since the American Revolution treated Native American land as if they were

independent nations. And then with the Dawes Act of 1887, the lands set aside for the Indians

were allotted to individual families rather than to tribes. Indians who “adopted the

habits of civilized life,” which in this case meant becoming small scale individualistic

Jeffersonian farmers, would be granted citizenship and there were supposed to be some protections

to prevent their land from falling out of Native American possession. But, these protections

were not particularly protective and much of the Indian land was purchased either by

white settlers or by speculators. After the passage of the Dawes Act “Indians lost 86

million of the 138 million acres of land in their possession.” [3]

Oh boy, it’s time for the Mystery Document. The rules here are simple.

I guess the author of the Mystery Document. And then you get to see me get shocked when

I’m wrong. Alright.

I have seen the Great Father Chief the Next Great Chief the Commissioner Chief; the Law

Chief; and many other law chiefs and they all say they are my friends, and that I shall

have justice, but while all their mouths talk right I do not understand why nothing is done

for my people. I have heard talk and talk but nothing is done (…) 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. (…) Good words will not give 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.

I mean that could be almost any American Indian leader.

This is totally unfair, Stan. All I really know about this is that the Great Father Chief

is the President. I mean it could be any of a dozen people.

How bout if I say the name in 10 seconds I don’t get punished?

Aaaand start. Sitting Bull Crazy Horse Geronimo Chief Big Foot um Keokuk Chief Oshkosh Chief

Joseph Ch-OH YES YES SUCK IT STAN SUCK IT! And now let us move from tragedy to tragedy.

So if you’re thinking that it couldn’t get worse for the Native Americans: it did.

After killing off the buffalo, taking their land and forcing Indians onto reservations,

the Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted a policy that amounted to cultural genocide.

It set up boarding schools, the most famous of which was in Carlisle, PA, where Indian

children were forcefully removed from their families to be civilized. This meant teaching

them English, taking away their clothes, their names, and their family connections.

The idea put succinctly, was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”

Now, the U.S. wasn’t the only nation busy subjugating its indigenous inhabitants and

putting them on reservations in the late 19th century. Like, something similar was happening

in South Africa, in Chile, and even to First Peoples in Canada.

And you’re usually so good, Canada. Although the slower pace of western settlement meant

that there was much less bloodshed, so, another point to Canada.

And as bad as the American boarding school policy was, at least it was short lived compared

with Australia’s policy of removing Aboriginal children from families and placing them with

white foster families, which lasted until the 1970s.

Alright, Stan, we need to cheer this episode up. Let’s talk about cowboys! The Marlboro

Man riding the range, herding cows and smoking, solitary in the saddle, alone in his emphysema.

Surely that is the actual West, the men and women but mostly men who stood apart from

the industrializing country as the last of Jefferson’s rugged individuals.

But, no. Once again, we have the railroad to thank for our image of the cowboy. Like,

those massive cattle drives of millions of cows across open range Texas? Yeah, they ended

at towns like Abilene, and Wichita, and Dodge City--because that’s where the railheads

were. Without railroads, cowboys would have just

driven their cattle in endless circles. And without industrial meat processing, there

wouldn’t have been a market for all that beef.

And it was a lot of beef. You know what I’m talking about. I’m actually talking about

beef. By the mid 1880s the days of open range ranching

were coming to an end as ranchers began to enclose more and more land and set up their

businesses closer to, you guessed it, railroad stations.

There are also quite a few things about western farming that just fly in the face of the mythical

Jeffersonian yeoman farmer ideal. Firstly, this type of agricultural work was a family

affair; many women bore huge burdens on western farms, as can be seen in this excerpt from

a farm woman in Arizona: “Get up, turn out my chickens, draw a pail

of water … make a fire, put potatoes to cook, brush and sweep half inch of dust off

floor, feed three litters of chickens, then mix biscuits, get breakfast, milk, besides

work in the house and this morning had to go half mile after calves.”

These family-run farms were increasingly oriented towards production of wheat and corn for national

and even international markets rather than trying to eke out subsistence.

Farmers in Kansas found themselves competing with farmers in Australia and Argentina, and

this international competition pushed prices lower and lower.

Secondly, the Great Plains, while remarkably productive agriculturally, wouldn’t be nearly

as good for producing crops without massive irrigation projects.

Much of the water needed for plains agriculture comes a massive underground lake, the Oglala

Aquifer. Don’t worry, by the way, the Aquifer is

fed by a magic and permanent H20 factory in the core of the earth that you can learn about

in Hank’s show, Crash Course Chemistr--What’s that? It’s going dry. MY GOD THIS IS A DEPRESSING

EPISODE. Anyway, large-scale irrigation projects necessitate

big capital investments and therefore large, consolidated agricultural enterprises that

start to look more like agri-business than family farms.

I mean, by 1900, California was home to giant commercial farms reliant on irrigation and

chemical fertilizers. Some of them were owned, not by families, but by big corporations like

the Southern Pacific Railroad. And they were worked by migrant farm laborers

from China, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico. As Henry George, a critic of late 19th century

corporate capitalism, wrote “California is not a country of farms, but … of plantations

and estates.”[4] When studying American history, it’s really

easy to get caught up in the excitement of industrial capitalism with its robber barons,

and new technologies, and fancy cities because that world looks very familiar to us, probably

because it’s the one in which we live. After all, if I was running a farm like that

Arizona woman I talked about earlier, there’s no way I could be making these videos because

I’d be chasing my calves. I don’t even know what a litter of chickens

is. Is it four chickens? Twelve? Six? It’s probably twelve because eggs do come in dozens.

The massive agricultural surplus contemporary farms create, and the efficient transportation

network that gets that surplus to me quickly, makes everything else possible--from YouTube

to Chevy Volts. And no matter who you are, you benefit from

the products that result from that massive surplus. That’s why we’re watching YouTube

right now. Or watching Crash Course on DVD, available for pre-order now.

Look at that beautiful box set of DVDs that would not be possible without a massive agricultural

surplus. So, agriculture and animal husbandry did change

a lot in late 19th century America as we came to embrace the market driven ethos that we

either celebrate or decry these days. And in the end, the Wild West ends up looking

a lot more like industrial capitalism than like a Larry McMurtry novel.

The Wild West, like the rest of the industrialized world, was incentivized to increase productivity

and was shaped by an increasingly international economic system.

And it’s worth remembering that even though we think of the Oregon Trail and the Wild

West being part of the same thing, in fact, they were separated by the most important

event in American history: the Civil War. I know that ain’t the mythologizing you’ll

find in Tombstone, but it is true. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith

Danko. The associate producer of the show is Danica Johnson. The show is written by

my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Halse Rojas, and myself. And our

graphics team is Thought Café. Every week, there’s a new caption for the