By Keli Holt,
In recent issues, this column has examined America in the era of Reconstruction: Four years of brutal war (1861-1865) changed Americans’ relationship to and expectations of their federal government. Today, you’ll see how the government would use many of its newfound powers in the American West.
Before the war, the entire federal workforce, excluding the postal service, was composed of 6,000 people, and the army consisted of only 16,000 men. Most of them were stationed in the West, where they were enforcing treaties with Native Nations.
Many of the Indigenous peoples had been forcibly evicted from the Southeast, with a few Nations coming from the Northwest Territory (the states of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin) and resettling on the American Plains. This forced the removal of Nations like the Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw to name a few, and drastically changed life on the Plains. Called “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma) by the government, such forced migration was supposed to be a permanent solution, a way to separate Native peoples from land-hungry settlers, mineral-seeking miners, and railroad developers.
However, the Plains are arid and have difficulty sustaining large concentrations of people. As new Nations and more settlers arrived, either passing through or permanently resettled, competition for hunting grounds, farming lands and water increased. Further, the adoption of the horse, introduced by the gold-seeking Spanish coming up from Central America in the 16th century, had already revolutionized life in the Southwest and the Plains by greatly expanding the range of peaceful and warlike Nations. The introduction of guns also increased violence by raiding parties of both Native Nations and the Hispanic and American settlers in the Plains and the Southwest. In the 1830s, the U.S. Army Dragoons were founded and stationed in remote outposts on the Plains to keep a watchful eye on all this activity.
In 1846, an expansionist-minded American president, James K. Polk, instigated a war with Mexico (independent from Spain since 1821) with the goal of seizing California. Polk sent “The Army of the West” under command of Stephen Kearny, father of the American cavalry, to claim all the land between “Indian Territory” and the Pacific. This included the modern states of New Mexico, Arizona and California. American expansionists dreamed of opening the Pacific trade to places like India and China and wanted to build a transcontinental railroad through New Mexico to the Pacific ports. Washington, D.C., also feared that Britain and Tsarist Russia had designs on the Pacific Coast.
Since obtaining independence from Spain, which had forbid all foreign trade, Mexico had happily opened up trade with America. The Santa Fe Trail was blazed in the 1820s and ‘30s as adventurous Americans, often called Mountain Men, “jumped off” from St. Louis, Mo., to seek their fortunes in the exotic Rocky Mountains. Now Kearny traversed this same route, arriving in August 1846 in Santa Fe, which the local Mexican authorities had abandoned. There, they raised the American flag over the Palace of the Governors, and Kearny promised the local Hispanic population that American rule would be based on law, freedom of religion, and order. He even committed America to protecting the locals from the yearly raiding parties of the powerful Navajo who had been locked in a centuries’ old conflict of raiding, reprisal, and slave taking with the New Mexicans. America, with little information, thus inherited these seemingly perpetual wars between Native Nations and settlers over the limited resources of an arid land.
By 1848, Mexico was forced to cede almost half of its territory to America in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and Polk met his goal of adding California – which became a state in 1850 after gold was struck – and the territory of New Mexico, which included Arizona.
While politicians in D.C. argued over whether these new places ought to be slave or free ultimately helped spark the Civil War, the U.S. Army founded more remote outposts, stretching now from “Indian Territory” all the way to California. The tiny 16,000-men U.S. Army, however, was largely powerless to do much but watch as Native Nations and local settlers continued on with their raids and reprisals.
However, the Civil War changed everything. Flush with its new powers to tax, conscript, and build transcontinental infrastructure, Washington, D.C. was about to flood the West with more men, modern guns, settlers and developers. To many in Washington, the way to heal the nation after four years of Civil War in which 620,000 men perished was to physically link the entire continent. To do that, the U.S. had to control all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It now had the power to do so.
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