Posted: Thursday, April 18, 2024
Author: Cody Richardson, History Enthusiast
Since the 16th century, the American West has created its own legacy forged from legends with unparalleled grandeur and an unmistakable image. Mountain men and fur trappers such as Jim Bridger and Hugh Glass followed in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, paving the way for the mass migration of settlers seeking the hope for a better future in the untamed frontier. Soon after, the Oregon Trail would be etched by the determination of homesteaders and ore miners. Waterways gave way to railways, which soon transformed into roadways. People were making their way to the Wild West in droves, and boom town settlements slowly transformed into thriving metropolises and bustling cities. To some, the way of the American western frontier seemed to change in the blink of an eye. But was this change for the better?
The American West's flagship stories of change
Stories of Western American history have been told countless times in movies, documentaries, songs, and books. Some of these stories are more well-known than others. The culling of the great bison herds is often referred to when discussing native American Indian culture. In a mere 59 years, the American bison herds went from an estimated 40 million in 1830 to just 541 individuals in 1889. The U.S. Government was put in charge of culling vast herds of American Bison to prevent collisions with the newly acquired transcontinental railroad while it was crossing the great plains. By the late 1870s, bison hide prices averaged $2.50 per hide, and some hide collection outfitters could make upwards of $13,000 in a season, an equivalent purchasing power to about $304,000 today.
The famous photo below depicts the “bison skull mountain”. This photo was taken around 1892 in a railyard in Kansas City. The bison skulls had been collected and shipped from the western states to be crushed down and turned into fertilizer. This illustrates the magnitude of the American bison hunting efforts that nearly led to their extinction.
The last buffalo hunt
Chief Sitting Bull of the Lakota tribe may have left his greatest legacy at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where he and 1,800 other Lakota and Cheyenne native American Indians defeated General George Armstrong Custer. What may be less known about Chief Sitting Bull is his participation in what was believed to be the last known true buffalo hunt by native Americans. On an October evening in 1883, after hearing word of a large bison herd 10,000 strong approaching the Standing Rock Indian compound, Chief Sitting Bull and several other elders and warriors held a pipe sharing ceremony to pray and bless the upcoming bison hunt. The next morning was met with cheers, yelling, and excitement as the beginning of the last great hunt commenced. The Lakota warriors of the Standing Rock compound rode to discover only a mere 1,200 bison were all to be found. The last bison hunt, an event that used to take weeks or even months to fully achieve, saw its final finish in less than two days.
Although no written Lakota record of the last hunt has been known to exist, William T. Hornady, a Smithsonian naturalist and taxidermist, recorded the events after interviewing several white hunters who were present at the time of the hunt. William Hornady would move on to become one of the worlds largest bison conservationists and advocates until his death in 1937.
The Grapes of Wrath, … A high school trauma
There is nary a past or present high schooler that perceived John Steinbecks award winning masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath”, with any appreciation or affection. Being required to read this great novel at some point post middle school, most students would question how any author could ramble on about dirt the way Steinbeck could. However, the truth being the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, less than a decade after World War I (one of the deadliest world wars to date), would be one of the most devastating time periods for America and the whole world in the 20th century.
The financial collapse of the Great Depression put most middle- and lower-class families into bankruptcy and financial ruin. The American Midwest was brutally hit when the Dust Bowl also took effect, causing severe droughts, crop damage, and agricultural turmoil. Many midwestern farming families were forced to leave their properties into foreclosure and travel west for better opportunities. This sparked another mass migration westward, one that would give rise to an almost cool geographical feature of the West… Route 66.
The famous and much-loved tourist destination of Route 66 gained its popularity by being one of the heaviest travel highways of the Dust Bowl migrants. Spanning from Chicago to Southern California, migrating Midwesterners jumped on Route 66 at various points all en route to the promise of a chicken in every pot.
The Yearn of the 20th Century: the fastest 100 years in history
Black Gold
The discovery of oil, some might say, is one of the most groundbreaking discoveries of mankind. Natural gas wells have been found in Asia dating back to as early as 347 AD. Moby Dick, the iconic American tale of the Essex’s ill-fated pursuit of whale oil, depicts the intense demand for the sacred liquid along America’s Eastern coast in the early 1800s.. Russian, European, and American oil discoveries throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, along with the coinciding of the Industrial Revolution, jumpstarted the age of iron production and machinery development. The railroads delivered an enormous amount of newly found mobility into the western frontier, but what came next would shake the furthest reaches of Western America… the automobile.
Locomotion
Different ideas and methods of overland transportation have been in development and evolving at different paces all over the world for centuries. In 1886, Carl Benz may have been the pioneer of what we think of as the modern era vehicle when he patented his infamous 3-wheeled gas-powered “Benz Patent Motorcar”. Household names such as Gottleib Daimler and Henry Ford would soon follow suit with the mass production of automobiles throughout the turn of the century. So, what did this mean for the American West?
Motorcars in the untamed west
The motorcar revolution made the furthest reaches of the American West now more within reach than ever. With the expansion of the highway systems and availability of affordable transportation peaking in the 1950s and 1960s, the western states were seeing more tourism and adventure seekers than ever. Families were now piling into their showroom fresh Buick and Oldsmobile station wagons to see the untamed west.. Popular destinations for family road trips included Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park, the scenic coastal Highway 1, the Grand Canyon, and Disneyland after its grand opening on July 17th, 1955.
Motorcars… good or bad for the West’s National Parks and wildlife?
The creation of Yellowstone in 1872 was not just to experience the unique geological thermals that make up the volcanic caldera. The park was also filled with an abundance of charismatic megafauna. Around the start of the 1890s, hotels started to be built around the park and with the presence of the hotels came an abundance of trash. Trash dumps inside the park were on the rise and bears used them for forage opportunities regularly. Visitors started to congregate around the dump sites for a guaranteed look at bears. Bears started to learn quickly that all the visitors could offer a source of food from the roadside.
By the 1930s, bears were habituated to people feeding scraps out of the windows of their vehicles. These roadside feedings often resulted in some rather unwanted close calls, with bears being a little too brazen. By the end of the 1960s, confrontations with bears and humans due to roadside picnic offerings reached an average of 48 incidents per year, and the image of bears feasting from the side of a car window was a more recognizable site than Old Faithful geyser. After two fatalities in Glacier National Park caused by grizzly bears two years before, the National Park Service started to regulate the roadside feedings and closed the garbage dumps in 1969.
Resource realization: 1900’s – present
The westward expansion of the United States took a heavy toll on wildlife, natural resources, American Indians, and their culture. The exponential increase of settlers into foreign lands that had been, for the most part, unsettled for several hundred years depleted resources enough to make it noticeable. Naturalists and conservationists such as Aldo Leopold, George Ord, and Theodore Roosevelt seemed to be at the forefront of the fight to preserve these resources for future generations.
An unorthodox precious commodity
With natural resources being “inexhaustible” throughout the 1800’s, by the turn of the 20th century, scientists and conservationists were beginning to show dire concern about species of wildlife that may be forced to extinction by the hands of mankind. Some of the most recognizable of the species, such as the bison, bears, and the mighty beaver, seemed to show on the radar the most often. However, a certain group of wildlife may have been hit the hardest without a second thought,… the forests and trees.
The sudden explosion of settlements in the West during the 1800s and into the early 1900s sparked a catastrophic frenzy of the need for timber. Houses and buildings were being erected without question. Timber mills were being established next to large waterways for the ease of timber extraction. Wood was being used in almost every household, cabin, saloon, and miners camp for the main source of heat. Timber was almost as precious a commodity as gold and silver.
The War of 1910… not your traditional kind of war.
With timber and wood products being in such high demand, the summer of 1910 brought upon a terror that no one could have expected. The Big Burn, or the Devil’s Broom Fire, was a wildfire that swept throughout the Northern Rockies, spanning three U.S. states (including Canada), and burning more than 3 million acres of wilderness in as little as two days. The perfect storm of temperature highs, hurricane force winds, and drought conditions brewed on August 20th and 21st in 1910, which caused what is still believed to be the largest wildfire in U.S. history. The Big Burn fire started its chaos on the far eastern edge of Washington and engulfed almost all of the northern Idaho panhandle, reaching well into western Montana and even stretching across the border into southern British Columbia.
The Big Burn raged so intensely and so quickly that entire towns were engulfed by the flames. The towns of Kellogg and Wallace, Idaho, were partially burned, whereas Grand Forks, Idaho was declared a total loss. An estimated 87 people lost their lives in the Big Burn incident, most of the victims being firefighters. President Taft ordered a state of emergency and 4,000 military troops were sent to aid in the catastrophe, including the famous Buffalo Soldiers. It was reported that the smoke from the Big Burn made its way as far east as Waterton, New York, and as far south as Denver, Colorado.
Those two perilous days of hellfire brought the idea that wildfires were one thing that the Forest Service cannot take lightly. With the fire suppression program only 5 years old at the time of the Big Burn, wildland firefighting tactics and techniques were still in their infancy. The Big Burn was the initial incident that sparked the realization that wildfire is yet just one more thing that could cripple the American West’s economy and infrastructure.
The dynamic journey of the continued expansion of the American West, from the near extinction of the bison to the industrial advancements and conservation efforts of the 20th century, has caused the region to continuously reinvent itself, often at great costs. The turn of the 21st century continues to test the western united states as battles for natural resources are waged in the name of conservation and agriculture. As the ever-growing human presence keeps shaping the lands of the West, the future may begin to see more contests with resources, one another, and even Mother Nature herself.
Stay with us for our final part 3 where we look at the turn of the 21st centuries most recent events and what kind of impact the last 200 years may have on the future of the American West.
