MAKING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO Boulder © 2016 by University Press of Colorado Published by University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 2o6C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America SAVA , The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of W- The Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University. oo This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). ISBN: 978-1-60732-395-2 (cloth) ISBN: 978-1-60732-396-9 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pierce, Jason (Jason Eric) Making the white man's West : whiteness and the creation of the American West / by Jason E. Pierce. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-60732-395-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-1-60732-396-9 (ebook) 1. West (U.S.)-Race relations-History. 2. Whites-West (U.S.)-History. 3. Whites-Race identity-West (U.S.)-History. 4. British Americans-West (U.S.)-History. 5. Racism-West (U.S.)-History. 6. Cultural pluralism-West (U.S.)-History. 7. Frontier and pioneer life-West (U.S.) 8. West (U.S.)-History-19th century. 9. West (U.S.)-History-20th century. I. Title. F596.2.P54 2016 305.800978-dc23 2015005246 25 24 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photograph: Charles Fletcher Lummis dancing with a member of the Del Valle family. Courtesy, Braun Research Library Collection, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. Por my loving and patient Mondie, my ebullient boys, and my teachers for whom this is a small payment on a large debt.  CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments A Note on Terminology ix xix xxiii Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 3 PART I: FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 z "For Its Incorporation in Our Union": The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 29 2 A Climate of Failure or One "Unrivaled, Perhaps, in the World": Fear and Health in the West 3 "The Ablest and Most Valuable Fly Rapidly Westward": Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 51 65 vii Viii CONTENTS 4 Indians Not Immigrants: Charles Fletcher Lummis, Frank Bird Linderman, and the Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 95 PART II: CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST 5 The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 123 6 "Our Climate and Soil Is Completely Adapted to Their Customs": Whiteness, Railroad Promotion, and the Settlement of the Great Plains 151 7 Unwelcome Saints: Whiteness, Mormons, and the Limits of Success 179 8 Enforcing the White Man's West through Violence in Texas, California, and Beyond 209 Conclusion: The Limits and Limitations of Whiteness 247 Bibliography 263 Index 281 PREFACE The trans-Mississippi West seemed destined to foster and shelter the white race. Concretions of myth and reality built up a society in which whites occu- pied the pinnacle, exercising power and control over non-white peoples. Myth and reality became inseparable, each supporting the other. The resulting society appeared as a refuge where Anglo-Americans could exist apart from a changing nation, a nation increasingly inhabited by non-Anglo and poten- tially incompatible immigrants. The overwhelmingly white population in certain areas of the West (the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains) reified the ideology of a white-dominated West, while the mythology obscured the presence of Indians, Hispanics, and Asians in California and the Southwest. The resulting society appeared, therefore, as a homogeneous population of Anglo-American whites, and this became the white man's West. The purpose of this work, then, is to look at how the idea of the West as a white racial refuge and the settlement of the region by Anglo-Americans interacted to cre- ate a region dominated by white Americans. Together, the continuing settle- ment of supposedly desirable Anglo-Americans and intellectual justifications ix X PREFACE underlying and supporting this settlement formed something of a feedback loop. The myth supported the reality, and reality supported the myth. Beginning in the 1840s, white Americans increasingly saw opportunity in the West, finding a sense of mission in expansion to the ocean, a belief encapsulated in the term Manifest Destiny (and the bane of students in introductory courses in US history). Accomplishing this conquest fell to the rugged, individualistic white settler, the homespun hero of a new American nation. In The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, for example, celebrated white frontiersmen, "the restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged frontier farmers [who] by dint of grim tenacity overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred years before Saxon and Angle had overcome and displaced Cymric and Gaelic Celts." Driven by instinct and desire, these intrepid settlers fought to claim a new continent. "They warred and settled," he continued, "from the high hill-valleys of the French Broad and the Upper Cumberland to the half-tropical basin of the Rio Grande, and to where the Golden Gate lets through the long-heaving waters of the Pacific."' Roosevelt argued that these men, while inheritors of a Germanic-English ancestry, stood as representatives of a new people. "It is well," he warned, "always to remem- ber that at the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as name; the word American already had more than a merely geographic signification."2 A continent tamed, the native population defeated, and American institutions rooted in new soil all marked the legacy of the white man's West. Roosevelt saw in this process a clear demonstration of the continuing march of Anglo civilization. Just as the Saxons and Angles had conquered the ancient Celts, their descendants wrested control of North America from inferior Indians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen. These lesser groups, in particular American Indians, played merely the foil to the heroic frontiersman. Indeed, Roosevelt's use of racialized terms like blood signified his view that race played the key role in determining the suc- cess of these new 'Americans," a group he saw as having a very narrow racial and ethnic composition. Roosevelt's ideas on race and American superiority were remarkable only in their conformity to the common view of the day: the West had been settled by tough, individualistic, freedom-loving Anglo- Americans. This mythology, and the society it helped create and justify, soon came to seem natural and self-evident. Had not these brave whites tamed and settled the Wild West after all? Preface xi While historians and novelists could celebrate a white man's West, the real- ity proved more problematic. Non-whites had played important roles in the settlement of the region, roles that largely went unnoticed for decades. The West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included the largest popula- tions of Hispanics, American Indians, and Asians in the nation-hardly the racial monolith celebrated in the imagination. Yet there nevertheless existed kernels of truth in the idea of a white man's West. The presence of those racial and ethnic groups had indeed been obscured and their positions in society marginalized. In various ways, religion, political values, economic motives, and violence helped carve out areas of the West where whites com- posed the vast majority of the population (as in the Dakotas) or presided over non-white groups through political control and intimidation, as in California. Through these mechanisms, whites came to control the West, fashioning it into something that approximated the white man's West of the imagination. In the twentieth-first-century West, the legacy of a society dominated by whites remains powerful, an insistent echo that somehow refuses to die. At issue is the question of who controls the region. As the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick asked, "Who [is] a legitimate Westerner, and who [has] a right to share in the benefits of the region?"3 When white Americans con- quered the West, they instituted a process of control based around racial identity that forced the region's many minority groups to cling to the periph- eries of power, society, and even space, as in the case of Indian reservations.4 Despite its long history of racial diversity, many promoters, developers, and dreamers touted the West as the ideal location for a society of Anglo- Saxon whites. Blessedly free of undesirable immigrants-those Eastern and Southern European hordes, descending upon the Eastern Seaboard in the thousands-the Anglo-American could find refuge and respect in the West. This dream of a white refuge never fully died. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Arizona's new immigration bill serves as one recent example of the battle over control of the West. Senate Bill 1070, signed into law by Arizona governor Jan Brewer in April 2010, was seen as the strictest immigration law in the country.' It mandated that immigrants carry documentation showing their status and allowed police officers to detain and arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. Governor Brewer and other supporters of the bill argued it would not be used to single out Hispanics. Critics, including President Barack Obama, denounced the law as X11 PREFACE targeting not only illegal aliens but also legal residents of Hispanic descent. From Los Angeles, Roger M. Mahoney, a cardinal in the Catholic Church, compared the bill's requirements for people to show papers to "Nazism." The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund called the act an effort in "racial demagoguery," "cowardly," and "tantamount to a declara- tion of secession."6 Clearly, legislators designed the law to target Hispanics, and some legal residents will likely be detained, if only briefly, by law enforcement offi- cials. The law, however, raises deeper questions and exposes underlying racial tensions in the American West. Mexicans had long lived in Arizona and the rest of the Southwest. They did not come to the United States; the United States came to them with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. In the decades following the acquisition of the Southwest, the border remained permeable, crossed and re-crossed by those in search of opportunity. Nevertheless, many white Americans have never been com- pletely at peace with the Hispanic presence in the United States. Part of the reason for this uneasiness, beyond simple racism, is that Anglo-Americans never envisioned the West as an ordinary place. In thousands of novels, movies, and cigarette advertisements, the West had long been the cruci- ble of American desires and dreams, and its swaggering heroes had always been white. As whites began their settlement of the West in the 1840s and 1850s, they saw the region as the nation's last chance to create a white racial utopia. Such a dream seemed tangible, even in the racially diverse West, since American Indians and Asians were denied citizenship and power, and even Hispanics, though technically citizens, often found themselves marginalized. The East, in contrast, witnessed an influx of Southern and Eastern European immi- grants in the late nineteenth century, immigrants whose ethnicity, culture, and language made them suspect but who, nevertheless, could be natu- ralized as citizens since, as Europeans, they belonged to the white races although such categorization had long been contested. To be sure, practical economic considerations-such basic things as the location of valuable min- erals or access to fertile farmland-provided a strong motivation for settle- ment, but when envisioning their new cities and towns, westerners imagined them filled with desirable citizens. In the minds of nineteenth-century white Americans, a desirable citizen was, like themselves, white. Preface xiii Racial schizophrenia, therefore, characterized the West, in reality diverse but in mythology a white refuge. The region's wide open spaces, attitudes toward privacy, and supposed status as white man's country attracted extremist groups like the Aryan Nations, anti-government right-wing groups like the Freemen, and extremists like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a left- wing terrorist.' Richard G. Butler founded the Aryan Nations in 1974, pur- chasing a 21-acre "compound" in Hayden Lake, Idaho, that would become the headquarters for the avowedly racist organization.' He envisioned the creation of a "Northwest Territorial Imperative," a whites' only homeland to include the states of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming. Drawing-consciously or not-from the old racial Aryanism and Social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, Butler declared, 'Aryans are Nordic in their blood . . . North Idaho is a natural place for the white man to live."9 Indeed, when the allegedly racist Los Angeles homicide detective Mark Furhman, at the center of the O. J. Simpson trial, relocated from Los Angeles to Sandpoint, Idaho, his choice of destination seemed appropriate.0 While contemporary extremist groups sought out the region for its alleged fitness for their ideals, another powerful institution grappled with the legacy of its own exclusionary past. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from the time of its founding until 1978, denied the priesthood to black men (all white men in good standing could be priests) on the basis of blacks hav- ing been saddled with "the Mark of Cain." As the Civil Rights movement advanced and Americans became more accepting of African American equal- ity, the doctrines of the Mormon church seemed increasingly anachronistic. The doctrine also proved problematic in efforts to win converts in the Third World, regions of the world where the church saw tremendous growth. Thus, on June 9, 1978, Spencer Kimball, the head of the church, announced that he had received a revelation from God opening the priesthood to all males "without regard for race or color."" Kimball also promised the opening of missions in predominately black areas of the United States as well as Africa.'2 Millions of people from all over the world received the message and converted. Addressing the church's past perhaps, the official website states, "There are estimated to be between 350,000 and 500,000 members of the Church with African heritage."3 The church, however, has struggled to change its image as predominately white. In response to the misconception that all Mormons are white, the church's website, for example, assures viewers xiV PREFACE of their inclusiveness on its "Frequently Asked Questions" section, noting, "There are no race or color restrictions as to who can join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are also no race or color restrictions as to who can have the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints."4 In perhaps the final arbiter of relevance, Google's search engine ranks "Are All Mormons White" behind only 'Are All Mormons Rich" and ahead of polygamists and Republicans-despite their best efforts, therefore, Mormons still have some work to do in addressing their past. Arizona's immigration law, the presence of white supremacist groups in the Pacific Northwest, and the Mormon church's genuine efforts to wrestle with its past are just some of the echoes of an older vision of the Anglo- American West as a domain for whites. Behind these recent events are older ideas and beliefs that shaped, in ways both successful and unsuccessful, the white man's West. Before launching into the overall discussion of the role whiteness played in defining the West, it is important to wrestle with a few definitions of some major issues. The first is determining the "West" for the purpose of this study. Scholars have long debated the difference between the West and the "frontier" as a process, the former a physical location and the latter an ever-moving pro- cess of change.Just as important and no less confusing, scholars have pointed out the myriad differences in environment, ethnic composition, and culture. No less a historian than Frederick Jackson Turner argued that there were four subregions of the West: the Prairie states, the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Slope, and the Southwest. Each of these represented very distinctive natural and human environments. More recently, David M. Wrobel, Michael C. Steiner, and their contributors to Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity struggled to divine the boundaries of the West. Unable to effectively locate the region, they decided to "present the West in all its regional diver- sity by focusing on many of the Wests that constitute the larger whole."5 This study takes a broad view of the role whiteness played in the intellec- tual and physical creation of the trans-Mississippi West, including chapters on railroad settlement programs in Minnesota and the Dakotas, efforts to define whiteness among the Mormons in Utah, and attempts to square the beneficent climate of the Southwest with the racial history of Anglos, Aryans, and other descendants of Northern European settlers. Each of these places, to be sure, showcased different environmental and cultural characteristics, Preface xv but each played a smaller role in a larger story of the Anglo-American set- tlement and transformation of the trans-Mississippi West in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the various promoters and creators of whiteness in the West ignored the larger issues and focused more on issues closer to their subregion. Promoters in California, for example, spent a great deal of time explaining how climate would allow whites to develop a level of culture and innovation unprecedented in world history. Promoters in colder climates, like the Dakotas, instead focused on the similarities between the ancestral climates of newcomers-Norwegians, Germans, and Swedes-and the land they offered for sale. Comparatively few, therefore, focused on the West as a larger region, and none seemed to view the West as homogeneous. From our perspective, however, viewing the larger trans-Mississippi West through the lens of whiteness reveals fascinating patterns. In places like North Dakota, for example, where Northern European whites formed the vast majority of the population, whiteness came to be celebrated as self-evident. In eth- nically diverse places like the Southwest, promoters, in the view of scholars like William Deverell, literally whitewashed the non-Anglo past, creating a white-dominated society with just enough of a non-white presence to lend a sense of exoticism. Finally, despite the environmental differences, the trans-Mississippi West as a whole came to be settled by Anglo-Americans in the decades between the 1840s and 189os. This meant that the cultural influences shaping this set- tlement, including the promotion of whiteness as the standard of belonging, were extended throughout the region at roughly the same time. Whiteness provided the basis for meting out privilege and control; falling on the wrong side of the line meant falling into a secondary status. These subregional dif- ferences certainly influenced both the perception and reification of white- ness, but only by studying the West as a larger region can we ascertain the full scope of the process of making the white man's West. Like defining the West, defining whiteness at first seems an easy task. A white person is, most obviously, a person who appears to be white. Indeed, this seemingly obvious fact informed legal decisions. In cases about racial identity and therefore fitness for citizenship, the courts often deferred to the "man on the street" definition of whiteness. In other words, if an average man walking down the street saw an individual as white, then that person could legally claim membership in the white race. If this sounds subjective, XV1 PREFACE it was. Peoples of mixed parentage fell between categories like black and white, as did various other ethnic groups. At times some ethnic groups, like the Irish in the nineteenth century and Italians at the end of that century, found their whiteness contested. Living in a nation that separated peoples into either white or non-white categories, these newcomers struggled with being in-between. Not surprisingly, immigrants quickly realized the benefits whiteness conferred and tried hard to claim it for themselves. In time, most European ethnic groups succeeded and soon came to be considered as white as their Anglo-American neighbors.16 Racial identity, therefore, remained largely a social construction, shaped, defined, and contested by those claiming whiteness and those arbitrating it. As such, it could also be contradictory. A group could be seen as non-white in one locale and then be perceived as white in another, as Linda Gordon's inter- esting study of Irish-Catholic orphans in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction has demonstrated. The historian Ariela J. Gross, meanwhile, has argued that defining "race" meant hitting a constantly moving target. Americans could use the term to describe the supposedly "grand divisions of mankind" (the Caucasian race or the African race) but also to describe smaller groupings like the "Italian" races or "Celtic" races.17 This work, building off of previous whiteness studies, looks at the role whiteness played in setting the West apart as the most desirable region of the country and in defining who controlled what was truly the country's most diverse region. Most westerners, certainly the boosters and opinion shapers featured here, used a narrow definition of whiteness to exclude others. They focused their efforts on appealing to a supposedly declining Anglo-American, a person whose ancestry could be traced to England or the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. This left other groups, like the Irish, Italians, and other, more recent immigrants, beyond whiteness; but, of course, this proved to be the easiest boundary to cross and more and more European ethnic groups crossed it, at least in part. These groups, nevertheless, could be seen as threat- ening the domination of Anglo-Americans, and thus it was with no small measure of relief for whiteness promoters like Frank Bird Linderman that comparatively few of these groups lived in the West, excepting perhaps in the mining districts of the Rockies. Indeed, for Linderman, those polluted, immigrant-ridden mining towns stood for everything he despised in modern America and were in marked contrast to the idyllic world of Anglo-American Preface xvii settlers and friendly Indians. Similarly, Hispanics in the Southwest, although legally classified as whites, generally found themselves excluded as beyond the limits of whiteness. African Americans, American Indians, and Asians, of course, could not aspire to whiteness. Promoters of whiteness could then proclaim the region as a refuge from a changing population in the late nine- teenth century. The East, filled with suspect recent immigrants, represented a fallen civilization, but the West remained the true white man's homeland white, of course, in this most limited sense. Barred from contesting their whiteness (unlike those eastern immigrants), American Indians, Asians, and Hispanics lent the region a veneer of exoticism that masked the reality of Anglo domination. NOTES 1. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: The Spread of the English- Speaking Peoples (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 41. 2. Ibid., 34. 3. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 349. 4. Indeed, sometimes marginalizing Indians was not enough, as promoters often left reservations completely off of maps in an effort not to alarm potential settlers. See David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 34. 5. Randal C. Archibold, 'Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration," New York Times, April 24, 2010. 6. "MALDEF Condemns Arizona Governor," Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, http: / /maldef.org/news/releases/maldef condemns_az_ governor_042310 / (accessed May 17, 2010). 7. The deep causes of these disparate movements are examined in Richard White, "The Current Weirdness in the West," Western Historical Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 4-16. While the violence White discusses has declined in the last twenty years, the underlining tension, if anything, has become more palpable. 8. The Aryan Nations, "The History of the Aryan Nations," http:/ /aryan-nations .org/?q=node/5 (accessed December 20, 2011). 9. Evelyn A. Schlatter, Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 64-68. XViii PREFACE Io. See Fox Butterfield, "Behind the Badge," New York Times, March 2, 1996, http: / /www.nytimes.com /books /97/ 03 / 23 / reviews / fuhrman-profile.html (accessed December 20, 2011). 11. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 325. 12. Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 196-97. 13. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Mormon Church Demograph- ics," http: / /www.mormonbeliefs.org/mormonbeliefs /mormon-beliefs-culture / mormon-church-demographics (accessed December 20, 2011). 14. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Frequently Asked Questions," http:/ /mormon.org/faq/#Race (accessed December 15, 2011). 15. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds., Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 9, 14. 16. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), shows the racialization of the "new immigrants" to America and how they gradually were able to claim whiteness and its benefits. 17. Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ix. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A book project produces a litany of debts, most of which I can never repay, but the many people who provided assistance deserve at least a note of thanks. This project began as a dissertation at the University of Arkansas under Elliott West. Dr. West's advice, encouragement, and insight helped make this a better book. I had long admired his work from afar, but now that I know him, I have grown to admire his compassion for his students, his high standards, as well as his dedication to his craft, patience, and good humor. He embodies, I think, all the great qualities an educator and intellectual should possess, and it was a great pleasure to work with him. The University of Arkansas was a great place to study for five years, and I would like to express my deep gratitude for being the first Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the history department. I hope I can repay the invest- ment. Doctors Charles Robinson, Patrick Williams, and Jeannie Whayne served on my committee and provided insightful comments that strength- ened the final version of my dissertation. Dr. Whayne in particular has been a tremendous mentor. xix XX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Here at Angelo State University, I benefited tremendously from the sup- port of the history department. In particular, I would like to single out the nearly legendary Dr. Arnoldo de Le6n for graciously reading the complete draft of my manuscript and for suggesting many more active verbs. Angelo State also awarded me a Summer Research Fellowship that enabled me to spend two weeks studying at the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. I thank Kim Walters of the Braun Research Library, at the Southwest Museum and Autry National Center, for assistance on Charles Fletcher Lummis. I am grateful for the research grant the Autry National Center pro- vided me as the Visiting Summer Scholar in 2006. I would also like to thank the staffs at the Denver Public Library's Western History Collection and History Colorado for help with the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway. Other archivists who gave gen- erously of their time and expertise include Greg Ames at the Saint Louis Mercantile Library, Peter Blodgett at the Huntington Library, and David Whittaker and the staff at the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University. Mark Carroll and James Leiker provided excellent comments at the Mid- America Conference on History and the Western History Association Con- ference, respectively. In addition, several eminent historians kindly answered emails that suddenly appeared in their in-boxes; among them were Sherry L. Smith, Jan Shipps, Quintard Taylor, Carlos Schwantes, and Elizabeth Schlatter. For assistance with photographs, I thank Scott Rook at the Oregon Historical Society, Marilyn Van Sickle at the Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Kellyn Younggren at the Mansfield Library, University of Montana, and Sarah Hatfield for permission to use photographs of her fasci- nating ancestor Frank Bird Linderman. My thanks also to Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, who believed in this project very early on and was willing to offer me an advanced contract based solely on its potential. Thanks to his enthusiasm, I knew I had something worthwhile on my hands. Jessica d'Arbonne, the press's acquiring editor, has also been a friendly and helpful voice of advice and support throughout the development and production of this work. Cheryl Carnahan did a terrific job of editing the manuscript and correcting some of my more awkward literary efforts. Acknowledgments xxi I would like to thank my parents, Marilyn Owings and Mark Pierce, for help- ing me in various ways (not just financially) over the years. My dad's work ethic is an inspiration to me, and my mother has long taught me to explore the world as only a mother can. Both allowed their children to chart their own course in the world. My mother and my sister, Claire Bloodsworth, also put their English degrees to good use by agreeing to read a draft of this man- uscript, and they both provided useful insight. My wife, Mondie, has found herself hopping around the nation like an "army wife," but she has stayed with me and helped me follow my dream. Meeting her has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and I cannot imag- ine my life without her. My sons, Cyrus and Darius, have shown me that the world is always fascinating to those who stop to see it. Together they make sure I stay away from my work enough to remain grounded.  A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY Throughout this work I employ the terms Anglo-Saxon, Anglo, and white. These terms are somewhat imprecise because they describe arbitrary and contested categories. Anglo-Saxon referred to Germanic tribes that migrated to the British Isles in the first millennia AD and drove out occupying Celtic tribes. Americans, however, used the term to refer to people of English ancestry. This helped differentiate early white-skinned Americans, who migrated from England, from later groups including the Germans and Irish, the first immigrant groups to come in large numbers in the decades after the revolution. The term endured throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century as a way to separate "real" white Americans from the supposedly inferior immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who were coming to America in great numbers. Claiming Anglo-Saxon ancestry, therefore, provided a shorthand definition for "real" American citizenship. Out West, however, the Saxon often disappeared, and the term Anglo came into wide use to separate Hispanics from non-Hispanics. Following this tra- dition, I try to employ Anglo-American to describe white-skinned Americans xxiii XX1V A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY of Northern European ancestry, even if the term is imperfect. In general, Anglo-Americans over the course of the nineteenth century came to see a close affinity with other Northern Europeans, Germans, and so on, and often Anglo came to mean any non-Hispanic white person. The most contested and troublesome category is white. White is a racial category, an amalgam of European ethnicities into a generic and arbitrary single "race." White or Caucasian differs from black or African, Asian, and American Indian. It also, as used by the US Census Bureau today, includes Hispanics who claim a European ancestry. The inclusion of Hispanics, many of whom have at least some American Indian ancestry, came about with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which offered citizenship to former cit- izens of Mexico. Since citizenship at the time required that one be white, Hispanics came to be considered white by the fact that they allegedly had Spanish ancestors. As in the case of the new Americans created with the 1848 treaty, claiming whiteness also proved advantageous since it conveyed citi- zenship and thus the full protection of law, but, despite the letter of the law, the bulk of Hispanic peoples were treated as inferior, second-class citizens and were informally segregated, especially in Texas. The nation's first immi- gration law in 1792 formally codified whiteness as a condition of citizenship. Not until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the defi- nition of citizenship expand beyond the category of white. Yet, and here is where the issue of racial and ethnic identity becomes con- fusing but also very interesting, white Americans, especially in the West, could use all of these terms interchangeably. When it suited them, writers like Charles Fletcher Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman could embrace Anglo-Saxonism to attempt to build a wall between old-stock Americans and new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe whose values and beliefs, they argued, did not fit with those of people already living here. Anglo, meanwhile, endured as a handy way to distinguish between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in the Southwest. The generic category of white, further, effectively locked out American Indians, Asians, and African Americans from inclusion in society. European ethnic groups, however, pushed to be included in this category, as scholars like David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobsen, and Noel Ignatiev have argued. In the West (as elsewhere in the country), Greeks, Armenians, and other borderline groups fought, often in court, to be included in the category. While I endeavor to define my terms as precisely A Note on Terminology xxv as possible, the terms themselves are ambiguous. It also goes without say- ing that I employ white American or Anglo-American to discuss the views of the dominant racial group (even though the formulation can be a bit clunky and repetitive). Using white and American interchangeably, as Toni Morrison and others have shown, makes everyone else invisible and makes white uni- versal and ubiquitous but also invisible.' This is not my intention, but there can be little doubt that Anglo-Americans viewed themselves as the standard by which others were to be judged, and therefore describing them in these terms has utility. Finally, I use American Indian to describe all Indian peoples in a generic sense (since they often were lumped together as such by whites) when they are described as such, but I prefer to use tribal or group names as much as possible. Similarly, while I use Asian, I endeavor to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese. For Hispanics, when possible, I employ the narrower terms Californio for Hispanic Californians and Tejano for Hispanic Texans. These terms appear to be commonly used, especially the latter, although the most common term appears to have been Mexican or Mexican American. The latter I use as a synonym for Tejano to vary the writing and also because it does seem to have been used; the former, since it refers to a citizen of the nation of Mexico, I try to employ only in that narrower sense. All these terms can be a bit confusing, but the confusion again comes from the imprecise and constructed nature of these categories since race and eth- nicity really have no biological basis. Yet copious amounts of ink and blood were spilled to make these amorphous notions tangible. In the end, the power inside these definitions enabled Anglo-Americans to claim and possess a continent. Whiteness and the closely related concept of white supremacy (the latter essentially an applied form of whiteness) proved tools more pow- erful than guns in the conquest of the West and the creation of the white man's West. NOTE 1. See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992).  MAKING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST  INTRODUCTION Whiteness and the Making of the American West In Los Angeles, the pugnacious editor Charles Fletcher Lummis declared, "Our 'foreign element' is ... a few thousand industrious Chinamen and perhaps 500 native Californians who do not speak English. The ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigners, which infests and largely controls Eastern cities, is almost unknown here. Poverty and illiteracy do not exist as classes."' California and the West, Lummis argued, offered Americans a last chance to create a perfect society. Lummis's utopian vision of the West imagined small, orderly cities, productive mines and farms, and a population dominated by Anglo-Americans with enough Hispanic, American Indian, and Asian ele- ments to be exotic. At the same time, eastern residents-old-stock Americans like Lummis himself-feared losing control of eastern cities to Southern and Eastern European immigrants who, unlike Asians and most Indian peoples, could vote and therefore wield power. Lummis intentionally used the term infestation to link these immigrants to vermin. Thankfully, he believed, the threat of un-American immigrants existed back East and far from his bucolic land of sunshine (the title, incidentally, of the magazine he edited). DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.cooo 3 4 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST -.~ L.LI eA FIGURE 0.1. Settler's Day Parade, San Angelo, Texas. Parades like this celebrated the Anglo conquest of Texas. Former Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier John W. Long observed the 1910 version of this parade. Sharing his thoughts with the San Angelo Standard Times correspondent, he reflected, "I glory in the knowledge that West Texas will always be what we fought for and what the Lord intended it to be-a white man's country." Courtesy, Tom Green County Historical Society Collection, West Texas Collection, Angelo State University, San Angelo, TX. In 1910, a decade and a half after Lummis's pronouncement, residents of San Angelo, Texas, gathered to celebrate and lament the receding of Texas's heroic age. The parade of aged settlers marching down crowd-lined streets moved a correspondent for the San Angelo Standard Times to a paroxysm of nostalgia: "The old boys, a surviving remnant of the Old Guard, lined up today and with stride as nimble as that of youth and with step as elastic as that of boyhood's halcyon days, fell in line and proudly marched in grand parade." The paper continued, "The parade was in every way characteristic of the 'Wild and Wooly West.' To make the event all the more typical of early day[s,] pistol shots and cowboy yells rang out as the procession marched down Chadbourne Street." Behind the geriatric pioneers came the police, a military band, assorted ranchers and stockmen, and members of the Ku Klux Klan.2 It was in every way the epitome of a small-town celebration. Too infirm to participate, another pioneer, John W. Long, stood off to the side watching the procession. The reporter observed, "Few of the great Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West multitudes who witnessed Monday's parade of Old Timers were cognizant of the fact that there stood in their midst one . . . of the fathers of Texas."3 Long claimed to have served as a Texas Ranger under Sul Ross at the 186o "battle" of Pease River, the attack in which Cynthia Ann Parker, the white woman who was the mother of the Comanche leader Quanah Parker, was "redeemed" from a life among the Comanches-an event whose importance to Texas was surpassed in magnitude only by the Alamo and the Civil War.4 Scarcely a year later Long, like many young Texans, found himself fighting for the Confederacy. Reflecting on his career, Long told the journalist, "I fought for years with the rangers and pioneers to make this a white man's country and fought four years to keep the nigger from being as good as a white man. In the first I won out; in the second I lost, but I glory in the knowl- edge that West Texas will always be what we fought for and what the Lord intended it to be-a white man's country."5 Charles Fletcher Lummis, a relatively egalitarian defender of Indian and Hispanic rights, and John Long, the aged Texas Ranger, had little in common. Both, however, articulated a vision of the West as a white man's country. Long, in his self-mythologizing view of his past, cleared out hostile Indians, thereby bringing civilization to a savage land, and fought against efforts to end slavery and make blacks the equal of whites. He and his fel- low Texans had indeed been successful in the elimination of Indian peoples from the state through a campaign of conquest and violence historian Gary Clayton Anderson has described as "ethnic cleansing."6 His melancholy over the status of African Americans at first seems unwarranted; after all, in 1910 African Americans occupied subservient roles in the Jim Crow South, as any of the dozens of segregated buildings in San Angelo illustrated. Perhaps his lamentation came from the fact that without slavery, the boundary between the races could no longer be drawn with so fine a hand. Texas, however, had certainly become a white man's country. Lummis meanwhile sought a more racially diverse and colorful West, but even in his vision Anglo-Saxon whites (rather than native peoples or non-Anglo immigrants) would control the region. This book examines how people like Lummis and Long projected a vision onto the trans-Mississippi West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries as a white racial utopia and how to varying degrees that vision became a reality. This process entailed several steps. In part one, "From Dumping 6 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST Ground to Refuge: Imagining the White Man's West," I argue that early visi- tors struggled to understand the region, much of which seemed so different from anything in the American experience. Some visitors feared that Anglo- Americans would degenerate into savages in the region or, alternatively, that the temperate climate of the Southwest would lead them into torpidity and sloth, similar to the supposed state of American Indian peoples and Hispanics. Yet as expansion continued, visitors and settlers concluded that, in fact, the climate of the Southwest in particular would free Anglo-Americans from the centuries-old struggle with nature, enabling them to turn their efforts toward more productive enterprises. This intellectual transformation of the West from savage and inhospitable to a seeming paradise marked an import- ant, if somewhat intangible, aspect of the creation of the white man's West. Yet the West remained the most racially diverse section of the country as large populations of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asian peoples made their home in the region. This diversity seemed in marked contradiction to the idea of a region reserved for Anglo-Americans, but whiteness advo- cates in the last third of the nineteenth century came to a much different conclusion. These groups wielded little political power. Asians could not claim citizenship and thus could not challenge Anglo-American control, and Hispanics and Indian peoples mostly saw their influence marginalized, the latter segregated on reservations and the former, though citizens, unable to assert political influence in most areas. Posing little threat to Anglo control, they could be celebrated as part of what made the West unique. As the histo- rian Elliott West has observed, these groups went from being people of color to being "people of local color."7 Romanticized versions of their cultures helped forge a unique regional identity and came to be held up as models by those who feared the encroachment of an alienating industrial society. In particular, writers like Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman and artists like Linderman's friend Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington celebrated American Indian culture and lamented the conquest of the West and the loss of the authentic "first" Americans who inhabited it.' Even Hispanics and Asians could sometimes be held up as adding variety to the western cul- tural landscape-San Francisco's Chinatown, for example, became a popular tourist destination. This fetishistic fascination with non-Anglos but simul- taneous denial of their political and often economic power enabled these writers and intellectuals to hold the West up as superior to the East, a place Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West supposedly in the grips of an immigrant invasion of largely inferior peoples. Thus Linderman, for example, championed the preservation of American Indian culture while denigrating recent immigrants to the United States, and together Lummis and Linderman could argue that Anglo-Americans retained far greater control in the West than in the immigrant-infested East. From the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 to the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, visitors, boosters, and intellectuals had successfully reinvented the West, transforming it from an alien and dangerous world of possible racial degeneration into a homeland for powerful but increas- ingly alarmed Anglo-Americans. The land itself did not change markedly, its mountains, plains, and deserts still remained, but it underwent an intellectual reinvention that remade inhospitable into idyllic. Part 2, "Creating and Defending the White Man's West," looks at efforts to apply the emerging belief in the West as having a special destiny for Anglo- Americans into reality. Developers and promoters consciously worked to organize and fashion a society composed of and dominated by Anglo- Americans and desirable immigrants from Northern Europe, who, though not Anglo, were nevertheless "white" and compatible. In the turbulent 1850s, this meant restricting the extension of slavery but also limiting the number of free blacks in new states like Oregon and California. Both of these far west- ern states successfully prevented slavery, but they also attempted, ultimately with less success, to forbid the settlement of free African Americans. These campaigns, however, demonstrate early attempts to create an almost entirely white society and to avoid the nettlesome racial issue of the 1840s and 1850s that slowly pushed the nation toward war. Forbidding slavery would preclude threats to free labor, and preventing the settlement of African Americans would ensure the continued domination of the allegedly superior race. Promoting whiteness also came about in less overt but more successful ways. Railroads, eager to find settlers for the lands along their lines, advertised heavily to Northern Europeans, ignoring newly freed African Americans in the 1870s and after who seemed interested in relocating to land on the Great Plains. Railroad companies desired these European settlers (most notably the Mennonites) because they considered them to be honest, hard-working, experienced with agriculture, and, perhaps most important, white. Their success in places like Minnesota and the Dakotas transformed these regions, leaving behind orderly farms and an almost completely white population. 8 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST Similarly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon church, recruited heavily among Northern Europeans. Missionaries spread out across Europe but soon found Catholic-dominated Southern Europe, an area without the tradition of Protestantism, unsuited to their efforts. This meant that Northern Europeans comprised the vast majority of converts making their way to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. At the same time, Pacific Islanders began to convert to Mormonism in large numbers, but these converts would remain in the Pacific rather than make the long, expensive journey to Utah. Northern European whites, therefore, composed the pop- ulation of the Mormon's new Zion. However, because of their fringe reli- gious beliefs, mainstream white Americans often attacked the Mormons and in some cases attempted to strip them of their whiteness, arguing that any person who submitted to Mormon authority, regardless of national ancestry, could not be truly white. Nevertheless, Mormons would continue to defend both their whiteness and their status as patriotic citizens of the United States, and in time both would no longer be contested. The trans-Mississippi West, therefore, in many ways did come to reflect the idea of a white man's West, in practice if not in law. Following the period of conquest and settlement, thousands of square miles from Utah to Minnesota fell under the control of Anglo-Americans and Northern Europeans as the former haunts of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Utes became farms and ranches. Even in the more racially diverse Southwest, white Americans came to dom- inate virtually all aspects of society. Yet tens of thousands of non-whites also made their homes in the West. Promoters like Lummis and Linderman could celebrate their continued pres- ence, but presence did not connote power, and controlling these groups and keeping them in a subordinate status became paramount. Should Hispanics, African Americans, American Indians, or Asians push back (and they did) against their consignment to secondary status, Anglo-Americans had one final tool they could use to keep them in their place: violence. Across the West, Indians made new lives for themselves on often dismal reservations or existed, as in California, in a kind of peripheral twilight, deprived of rights, land, and dignity. Violence had been loosed upon them to wrest control of their territory and would continue to be used as necessary, especially in California, to control them. Hispanic Californios and Tejanos, meanwhile, saw their landholdings stripped from them and their range of Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 9 opportunities compressed until they dwelled in a subservient and semi- segregated status. Hispanics and African Americans-particularly in Texas also sometimes became the targets of vigilante violence. Even in New Mexico, where Hispanics remained the majority, their status and influence declined with the arrival of Anglo-Americans. The Chinese faced some of the harshest treatment, becoming targets of mob violence and the subjects of blatantly discriminatory legislation. Violence, therefore, helped ensure that the West remained simultaneously the most diverse section in the nation and yet almost totally controlled by one particular ethnic group: Anglo- Americans and other acceptable whites. This book examines how the trans-Mississippi West, in ways both tangible and intangible, came to be seen as the white man's West, a region dedicated to a narrowly defined Anglo-American and Northern European dominance and supposedly free of the allegedly unpleasant characteristics of an emerg- ing, less ethnically homogeneous nation. Why, though, did this particular region of the nation become so closely identified with one racial group, espe- cially given its actual diversity? Several factors influenced this development. First, in the last half of the nineteenth century, Northeast cities like New York and Boston emerged as the primary points of entry for immigrants, and the crowded neighborhoods these newcomers occupied became symbols of the negative consequences of industrialization. Eugenicists and race scien- tists warned of the dangers these immigrants posed, especially their amaz- ing fecundity. Some old-stock Americans even compared these immigrants to invasive flora and fauna-all bent on aggressively squeezing out "natives" and transforming the nation.' Meanwhile, racial issues could not be over- looked in the South; indeed, they were as obvious as black and white. The numbers of African Americans in the South, quite simply, meant that no one could mistake the region as overwhelming white. That, of course, did not prevent whites from enacting Jim Crow legislation in an effort to protect white privilege and supremacy. These characteristics, therefore, precluded the East and the South from consideration as refuges for whites. The West, however, offered an ideal place. Lacking the obvious racial binary of black and white, the more diverse region, somewhat ironically, made overlooking racial concerns easier.'0 Indeed, the most obvious non-white peoples in the West, American Indians, had been forced onto reservations (literally pushed to the margins of society) at the same time Reconstruction IO INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST in the South became contested and an ever-growing number of immigrants entered America from Southern and Eastern Europe. With Indian peoples supposedly rapidly disappearing, as artists and race scientists alleged, the West beckoned as an open and largely uninhabited country. As Elliott West has shown, the 1870s became a seminal decade in the formation of American racial ideas, and in many ways the decade marked the limits of citizenship with the imposition of segregation in the South, the defeat of Indian peoples in the West, and the denial of citizenship to the Chinese." While these efforts effectively circumscribed the position of African Americans, Asians, and Indian peoples in society, they nevertheless left open the question of the compatibility of new stock immigrants. Indeed, by the early 1900s it appeared to some Anglo-Americans that the East might be eth- nically and racially irredeemable, leaving only the West as a possible place of refuge. Promoters grasped the significance of these issues, often portray- ing areas with high populations of Anglo and Northern European whites as "wonderlands of whiteness," places like North Dakota and Wyoming with overwhelming white populations. Meanwhile, according to the historian David Wrobel, boosters in more racially diverse areas, like California, pro- moted their landscapes as "wonderlands for whiteness . . . where cultural diversity was nothing more than an attractive background to the main stage where a narrative of white economic and social opportunity and dominance played out."2 Space and time, therefore, conspired to make the West appear perfectly suited to white settlement; "wonderlands of whiteness" tempted with their seeming abundance and "wonderlands for whiteness" promised destiny brought to fruition. A few decades earlier, the West had appeared as anything but ideal for whites, but interpretations had clearly changed as events themselves had changed. Finally, mythology also played a role. From the moment the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the frontier, always just out there to the west, seemed redolent with possibility. To be sure, it could be a scary and danger- ous place, but if one possessed strength, intellect, fearlessness, and individ- ualism (all soon considered "American" traits), then one could be success- ful in this New World." The frontier, historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued, brought out the best in the American character. The fron- tier created American exceptionalism, Turner declared in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," an essay that was both paean and Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West II dirge, both a celebration of the American character and a warning about its future.4 By 1890 the frontier had vanished into memory, but the West remained, persisting as the place where American desires could find room enough to roam. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that the West came to be identified with such a grandiose vision as the white man's West, for the region had always been as much an idea, a belief, as a physical place; if it fostered the characteristics that forged Englishmen into Americans, then it stood to reason that it offered the best locale for preserving those values in the face of a changing world. Efforts to somehow cultivate and nurture whiteness, however, were not new. The belief that America had a special destiny as a white nation, in fact, predated the founding of the United States and remained salient in the years after the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin, in 1751, celebrated the ties between England and the colonies but warned of threats to America, both economic and, more important, racial. The British colonies offered an opportunity, he argued, to create a white sister nation to Great Britain, a sister that would in time grow to be larger and more powerful. This would only come to pass, however, if the crown put measures in place to assure the preserva- tion of the Anglo majority. Franklin worried about the proliferation of white Englishmen. He noted, "The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers [sic]) wholly so." Though clearly supe- rior to other peoples, whites felt threatened by the much greater numbers of dark peoples. Yet the leaders of Britain and the colonies took no action to address the danger posed by massive immigration of non-white peoples into the colonies. Slavery posed a particularly troubling problem, as it threatened to unleash African peoples upon the allegedly temperate and fertile North American continent, a situation that would invariably lead to a dramatic population increase. "Why," Franklin asked, "increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by exclud- ing all Blacks and Tawneys [sic], of increasing the lovely White and Red?" Slavery, he argued, was artificially importing thousands of inferior blacks into America. This would inevitably "darken its people.""5 Franklin, like Thomas Jefferson, felt ambivalent about the presence of American Indians. While clearly "tawney" and thus inferior, Native Americans could perhaps be redeemed through civilizing efforts. Franklin harbored no such optimism 12 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST for Africans. The British colonies in North America could be a biracial nation, composed of the "lovely white and red." Franklin defined the white race, however, in much narrower terms than society does today. He did not even consider most Europeans, with but a few exceptions, white. "In Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased," he sighed. Thus even Swedish and German immigrants, particularly in Franklin's Pennsylvania, presented a dilemma. Foreshadowing centuries of anti-immigrationist rhetoric, Franklin wrote, "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens?" These immigrants would "shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them." They would further remain separate and "never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."16 Such alien people, with different customs, language, and features, would undermine the harmony of the colonies. Franklin's views point to a fundamental and slippery problem when defin- ing racial differences. Put simply, looking white did not always make one white. Franklin's beliefs on race expose some of the fundamental problems with studying the unstable and ever-changing landscape of race. Race is not a biological reality; it is a social construction, and, as such, it can change and be refashioned to suit the needs of an individual or a group.7 Franklin, like generations of Americans after him, made distinctions not just in race but also in what we today call "whiteness." For Franklin, the Germans seemed irredeemably foreign and non-white, but later generations considered these newcomers among the most desirable of the immigrant groups. Membership in the white race, therefore, often rested on one's per- spective, location, and time. Whiteness scholars have argued that there have been at least three enlargements of whiteness, when previously non-white groups came to be considered white and therefore full members of soci- ety, beginning with the Germans early in the republic's history, Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, and Eastern and Southern Europeans and Hispanics by the twentieth century.8 Scholars like David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, writing in the 1990s, were the first to argue that eth- nic groups like the Irish had to work to prove their whiteness, and to gain that Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 13 preferred status, they rejected alliances with free African Americans despite their similar social class." Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans, Jacobsen argues, employed terms like Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Hebrew, Slav, Alpine, Mediterranean, or Nordic to describe the various races of white people and not ethnic differences. They created "a system of 'difference' by which one might be both white and racially distinct from other whites."20 While certainly not as rigid a distinction as that between black and white, the perception of these "white races" influenced the status and treatment of these peoples in the United States. Anglo-Americans embraced Germanic and Scandinavian peoples because they worked hard, tended to have fair complexions, and often belonged to various Protestant religious denominations. The Irish Celtic race, however, supposedly lacked the self-control and intelligence to be white-at least until the late nineteenth century. Southern Europeans and Jews (the Hebrews, Slavs, and Mediterranean peoples) tended to have darker complexions and large families, and they belonged to the Catholic Church or, in the case of Jews, practiced Judaism. Their cultures, religions, skin tones, and physiognomies made them suspect. In the trans-Mississippi West, settled at the end of the nineteenth century, many of these issues of acceptance also played out. Elliott Robert Barkan, in his 2007 synthesis of immigration in the American West, writes, "For a number of peoples in the American West the quest for whiteness was largely irrelevant-that is, it was scarcely a hurdle to be surmounted (notably for Canadians and Scandinavians)." For other groups, especially ethnic groups like the Greeks and Armenians, whiteness proved elusive for a long time. Barkan traces how many of these ethnic groups "gradually met sufficient cri- teria to be regarded as whites, however fluid and inconsistent those standards were. In the West many ethnic groups went from non-whiteness to 'pro- bationary whiteness' to full incorporation."2 Similarly, uncertainty attached to the status of Hispanics in the West, despite their being officially consid- ered citizens and therefore white.22 Westerners, though, typically considered Hispanics a non-white group-despite their legal status as white citizens. Linda Gordon recounts an obscure incident in Arizona that illustrates the conditional and contested meanings of race in the West. Gordon follows the story of the adoption of several Irish orphans by Hispanic Catholic families in Arizona. Eager to find the orphans homes, church leaders in New York happily sent them to fellow Catholics in the far-off Arizona Territory. Arizona 14 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST white women, appalled that Irish children (considered white in Arizona) could be placed in non-white homes, demanded that the children be relo- cated to Anglo homes. At the behest of these white women, a male vigilante group forcibly removed the Irish children and found them new homes with Anglo families. Being white could, in effect, depend on where one lived.23 Attaining whiteness proved critical to success in America because it con- ferred both citizenship and the right to own property. The nation's first nat- uralization act, passed by Congress in 1790, limited citizenship to "white persons"-a requirement that continued until 1952 (with the exception of African Americans after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and some Indian peoples under the 1889 Dawes Act).24 Such a limitation made sense to American leaders, who held reservations about granting rights to groups they considered incapable of making the difficult decisions needed to maintain the new republic. Whiteness also brought privileges beyond free- dom and citizenship, as in ownership of property. Being free meant being an independent property owner. Slaves, conversely, could never rise above being property, and American Indian peoples typically did not own and use prop- erty in the same way as white Americans and subsequently lost their lands to whites.2' Neither group, therefore, could be expected to become citizens. Americans, to be sure, arrived at these views with a great deal of influ- ence from racial scientists in Europe and the United States. Early racial the- orists, like Carolus Linnaeus and his disciple, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, harbored relatively egalitarian views of the differences between the races of humans and argued that racial differences were really only skin deep and resulted from environmental differences, but by the early nineteenth century their views were increasingly challenged.26 Linnaeus, who created the system to order and name various species of plants and animals that remains influ- ential today, struggled with the classification of humanity, but by the 1758 edition of System of Nature he had identified four major types of humanity (and two fictitious ones: homo ferus, a species of wild humans incapable of speech, and homo monstruosus, which included "freaks" such as giants, dwarfs, and eunuchs). He named the four races of humanity Americanus, Europeus, Asiaticus, and Afer, corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, respectively. In doing so, he merely classified humanity by geography.27 Blumenbach modified his hero's classification and inadvertently created the science of white supremacy.28 The German scientist offered five categories Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 15 of mankind instead of four: Caucasian, American Indian, Oriental, Malay, and African. He rejected racial differences as merely adaptations to climate, reasoning that all humans had roughly the same intellectual capabilities. Jettisoning race as a marker of difference, however, forced him to develop another way of classifying humanity. He chose the rather subjective criterion of beauty. Not surprisingly, he decided that Europeans stood at the pinnacle of beauty, and the most perfect specimens, he felt, came from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia. These most beautiful of all people he named Caucasian, a name that became a synonym for white.29 Together, his five races of man formed a pyramid. As the most beautiful-though equal in all other mental and physical aspects-Caucasians occupied the apex. American Indians and the Malays occupied the level below Caucasians, and Orientals and Africans formed the base of the pyramid. Blumenbach deduced that the most attrac- tive people would be found at the place of mankind's emergence, and other groups, over time, moved away and eventually changed physically to adapt to new climates. Thus, Blumenbach provided a strong argument for mono- genesis, the scientific theory that mankind had a single place of origin. He intended this pyramid to show the distance from the origin of humanity, with the most beautiful Caucasians signifying the ideal of human beauty and the Malay and American Indians next in his hierarchy of beauty. Orientals and Africans, he concluded, represented the least attractive peoples. Blumenbach was thinking only of "beauty," but it did not take much imagination to see the European view of man's racial hierarchy laid out in his orderly pyramid.30 Likely unaware of the ramifications of his system, Blumenbach had provided an intellectual justification for European conquest and imperialism. Blumenbach's monogenesis found a home in the United States, as did his argument that environmental change accounted for racial differences. The Reverend Dr. Samuel Stanhope Smith became the leading proponent of the theory in the United States, reaching his views largely independent from Blumenbach.3' Smith wore his religious and scholarly titles comfortably, but as the divergence between science and religion widened in the early nine- teenth century, the Presbyterian minister, professor of moral philosophy, and president of the forerunner of Princeton University found himself increas- ingly at odds with both religious scholars (who disliked the questions science asked) and scientists who mocked literal interpretations of the Bible. Smith believed both camps were mistaken and asserted that rational, scientific 16 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST inquiry could elucidate the unity of man, a unity that was explicit in the Bible. His Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, published in 1787 and reprinted in an expanded form in 181o, became an early and respected American ethnological treatise. He argued that mankind had been created by God in one place, most likely the Middle East where the earliest civilizations could be found. Over time, groups of people expanded and colonized other environments. This colonization of markedly different environments in turn led to the creation of distinct races. A change in cli- mate, therefore, could rapidly alter an individual, and these acquired traits would be inherited by the individual's children. As proof Smith offered the then widely known case of Henry Moss, a black man who had slowly turned white (quite likely from the skin disease vitiligo). The beneficent climate of North America-so different from the sun-baked world of Africa-appeared to be curing Moss of his blackness. Benjamin Rush, America's preeminent medical mind of the day and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, also saw Moss's case as a possible cure for the problem of blacks in America and therefore a solution to one of the nation's most troublesome issues.32 Smith endorsed monogenesis in part because it fit with the origin story in Genesis. Yet it also spoke to especially nettlesome questions for the young republic, offering hope that lesser peoples could be improved and one day be integrated into the nation.33 Given enough time, perhaps African American slaves and American Indians could be improved through changes in environment and assimilation into American culture. Missionaries, espe- cially those to the Indians of the West, predicated their efforts on the idea that Christianization and education could transform the savage into a civ- ilized person.34 However, if inferior races could be improved through changes in envi- ronment and exposure to civilization, then the opposite could also be true. Monogenesis held out the unpleasant possibility that whites could degener- ate when placed in inappropriate environments or in close contact with infe- rior peoples-both of which would invariably happen in the trans-Mississippi West. Western expansion could therefore lead the individual into a state of savagery and the race into degeneracy. Smith noted, for example, that poor whites in the South already approached the dark hue of the native Cherokee Indians: "Compare these [poor white] men with their British ancestors, and the change which has already passed upon them, will afford the strongest Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 17 ground to conclude that, if they were thrown, like our native indians [sic], into a state of absolute savagism, they would, in no great length of time, be perfectly marked with the same complexion."35 Environment, he argued, explained this. The sun and bilious gases from stagnant water changed peo- ple's complexions and even body types. Over time, whites could atrophy and decline. There existed hope, however. In a footnote Smith addressed the issue of white degeneration and concluded, "The arts of civilization may be expected, in a considerable degree, to correct the effects of the climate.-"36 Indians, with no knowledge of civilization, faced the fury of the elements and had inevitably become savages, but whites, with their technology and intelligence, would fare better. Or so he hoped. The negative possibilities of monogenesis forced Americans to remain vig- ilant if they hoped to keep racial degeneration from destroying the nation. As the first explorers made their way back from the Louisiana Territory in the years after 1803, their reports spoke of a brutal and harsh environment, a place of savage mountains and vast deserts, a place, in short, that would surely change settlers, and probably not for the better. Fortunately, for a young nation with imperial designs on the territory west of the Mississippi River, a new racial theory emerged in the 1840s (just as Americans began the manifesting of their destiny), a theory that prom- ised to soothe concerns about degeneration. The monogenetic views of Blumenbach and Samuel Stanhope Smith faded before the rising view of polygenesis, which promised to cement the wall between the races and pro- vide a modicum of comfort for people worried about the effects of westward expansion on whites. Polygeneticists believed God had created the races of man separately and had endowed them with innate and immutable charac- teristics that could not be changed by climate.37 This new theory found favor with an array of American intellectuals, includ- ing scientists like the world-famous naturalist Louis Agassiz, Samuel George Morton (America's preeminent ethnologist), the renowned Egyptologist George Gliddon, archaeologist Ephraim G. Squier, and Josiah Nott, a southern physician and racial theorist. Together they formed the 'American school" of anthropology and dedicated themselves to the idea that the races of human- ity had evolved separately. This idea found an eager lay audience among slaveholders and those eager to see the young republic expand to the Pacific. Polygenesis, by asserting that inferior races had developed separately and could 18 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST not therefore improve, justified slavery as the best possible situation for blacks and the removal or eradication of Indians. It also promised that whites could settle in any climate or environment without fear of racial degeneration. Agassiz, a Swiss 6migr6 whose arrival in the United States instantly gave American science credibility, quickly became the nation's most prominent proponent of polygenesis, a belief he adopted after coming into contact with American slaves.38 In an 1850 article in the Christian Examiner, he outlined his support for the polygenic theory. He argued that the creation story in the book of Genesis referred only to whites; other peoples had been created separately. Further, he rejected the idea that climate accounted for racial dif- ferences, noting, "These races [of man,] with all their diversity, may be traced through parts of the world which, in a physical point of view, are most sim- ilar, and similar branches occur over tracts of land the physical constitution of which differs to the utmost."39 American Indians provided an example of both climatic diversity and racial consistency: "Over the whole continent of America . . . all the numerous tribes of Indians have the same physical char- acter."40 From Canada to South America, through a variety of different cli- mates, American Indians appeared to be the same. Thus, Agassiz concluded, climate could not account for racial differences. Since God created the races of mankind separately and endowed them with inherent and immutable characteristics, it would be cruel, the Harvard professor warned, to encourage the lesser races to think of themselves as capa- ble of improving to the level of the superior white race. Far better to "foster those dispositions that are eminently marked in them, rather than ... treating them on terms of equality," he concluded." Slaves should, in short, remain slaves as nature intended. Agassiz admitted that science needed more study to prove the relative worth of each of the races, but he reminded readers that another renowned scientist, Samuel George Morton, had done much to prove the superiority of whites. An avid collector of human skulls, Morton believed the size of the brain- case, or cranium, directly reflected the intelligence of the individual and the individual's race. Through exhaustive (if heavily biased) research on cranial volume, he came to the conclusion in his Crania Americana, published in 1839, and in Crania Aegyptiaca, in 1844, that Native Americans and Africans did not match the cranial capacity and therefore the intelligence of whites.42 Josiah Nott, an Alabama physician, helped popularize Morton's ideas while also Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 19 making a name for himself as a leading racial theorist and an articulate and intelligent proponent of slavery.43 Much more than an apologist for the South and its "peculiar institution," his ideas placed him very much in the main- stream of American and European thought on race. He wrote, "Nations and races, like individuals, have each an especial destiny: some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. And such has ever been the history of mankind. No two distinctly-marked races can dwell together on equal terms."44 Slavery benefited blacks, for as lesser creatures they needed the regimentation and control it imposed, and, he argued, freeing them would place the superior race outnumbered in many parts of the South-in the hands of an inferior race. More than folly, such a plan amounted to race suicide. Nott also justified westward expansion by arguing that Anglo-Saxon whites had a duty to take these lands and write the next chapter in the westward march of Caucasians. Nott observed: Some races, moreover, appear destined to live and prosper for a time, until the destroying race comes, which is to exterminate and supplant them. Observe how the aborigines of America are fading away before the exotic races of Europe. Those groups of races heretofore comprehended under the generic term Caucasian, have in all ages been the rulers; and it requires no prophet's eye to see that they are destined eventually to conquer and hold every foot of the globe where climate does not interpose an impenetrable barrier. No philanthropy, no legislation, no missionary labors, can change this law: it is written in man's nature by the hand of his Creator.45 Here, he asserted, lay immutable natural laws governing white supremacy, and little could change this destiny of conquest, though even Nott hedged a bit, noting that Native Americans might still thrive in climates inappropriate to the white race.46 These beliefs and ideas, the cultural baggage carried by any society, informed Americans' views and justified their conquest, and they willingly toted them along with the rest of their baggage into the West. Some of this baggage, aptly captured in John O'Sullivan's phrase Manifest Destiny, foretold God's plan for Americans to "overspread and possess the whole of the continent."47 God sanctioned this conquest and blessed the success of America's divine mission, but God had an ally in science. Race science claimed the inherent superiority of Anglo-Americans and the inevitability 20 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST of their conquest over lesser peoples, an argument that buttressed the divine mandate in Manifest Destiny. Filtering the new environments of the West its vast plains, high mountains, and desiccated deserts-and the people who lived in them through their own biases and perceptions, they struggled to comprehend these seemingly strange landscapes and peoples, but racial sci- ence seemed to offer solace in the face of uncertainty. As Americans ven- tured into the West, they wore their beliefs in Manifest Destiny and their own racial superiority like armor, but like all armor it covered up their own uncertainty and vulnerability. Would the academic arguments of polygenesis stand up to the West? Anglo-Americans, after all, would inevitably come into contact with suppos- edly inferior Indian and Hispanic peoples and unfamiliar climates that dif- fered markedly from the East Coast or the ancestral homeland of Europe. Would white racial vigor triumph, or would racial degeneration and sav- agery overwhelm these newcomers, leaving them as weak and impotent as the Spaniards in the Spanish empire had allegedly become? If there existed a chance of degeneration, then could the West, on the other hand, be used as a kind of racial dumping ground, a place where freed African Americans and eastern American Indian peoples could be relegated to racially cleanse the nation? All of these seemed like possibilities as Americans stood on the shore of the Mississippi and looked west into the Louisiana Territory.48 It was here that Americans first glimpsed the racial potential of the West. Would it be a dumping ground, an American Siberia, where the least desirable and compatible groups could be forever consigned to the margins of the nation, or would the region offer white Americans a never-ending frontier? It was here that the story of the white man's West began. NOTES 1. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "Los Angeles: Metropolis of the Southwest," Land of Sunshine 3, no. 1 (June 1895): 43-48; quote on 46. 2. "Parade Characteristic of Wild and Wooly West," San Angelo Standard Times, October 4, 1910. 3. Ibid. Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 21 4. For more on this minor battle but major event, see Paul H. Carlson and Tom Crum, Myth, Memory, and Massacre: The Pease River Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2010). 5. "He Fought for a White Man's Country," San Angelo Standard Times, October 5, 1910. I am indebted to Matthew Johnston, an MA student in the Angelo State University history department, for finding this extraordinary quote. 6. See Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). 7. Elliott West, "Reconstructing Race," in The Essential West: Collected Essays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 100-126, quote on p. 117. 8. On Russell and Remington's work, see Richard W. Etulain, Re-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 52-68. 9. This interesting comparison is discussed in Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 2006). 1o. An interesting group of essays wrestles with this issue. See Stephanie Cole and Alison Parker, eds., Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004). 11. West's most recent discussion of these themes appears in West, "Recon- structing Race," 100-126. 12. David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 176. 13. On the scary aspects of wilderness, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). For the West as a land of promise and desire, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 14. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 31-60. 15. Benjamin Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind," in Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1961), 4:234. 16. Ibid.; italics in original. 17. The most recent effort to trace the development of whiteness theory, and a very helpful synthesis, is Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 18. Ibid., especially chapters 9, 14, and 26. 22 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST 19. Some of the more important works on whiteness theory are David R. Roedi- ger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 20. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 6; italics in original. 21. Elliott Robert Barkan, From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 6-13. For the story of Anglo and Hispanic interactions, see David J. Weber, ed., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican-Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973; reprint, 2003); David J. Weber, ed., New Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979); Arnoldo De Le6n, Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848-1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Arnoldo De Le6n, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Mark M. Carroll, Home- steads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860 (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, 2001). David M. Emmons traces the history of the Irish in Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). 22. Numerous works have addressed the status of Hispanics in the United States. For more on their generally poor treatment, see De Le6n, They Called Them Greas- ers. For the political debates over ethnicity and citizenship, see David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995). 23. Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 24. Ian Haney L6pez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1. 25. Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1709-91. 26. On the origins of racial science, see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Sci- entific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Thomas P. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 54-83; Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 23 of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 116-57; Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancients [sic] Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 63-96; Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview, 1993); Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus Jr., eds., Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). 27. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 66, 401-12; Gossett, Race, 35; Jahoda, Images of Savages, 40-41; Graves, The Emperor's New Clothes, 38-39. Not everyone believes that Linnaeus was as color-blind as Gould asserts. See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2, 17. 28. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 401-12; Graves, The Emperor's New Clothes, 40. 29. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 401-12; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 47-48; Painter, History of White People, 72-90. 30. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 401-12; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 47-48. 31. A concise biographical account of Smith's life and work, including his knowl- edge of Blumenbach, is found in the introduction by Winthrop D. Jordan in Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), vii-liii. Also see Gossett, Race, 39-41; Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 3-23. 32. On Rush and the problem of including African Americans in American soci- ety, see Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 28-35. 33. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), viii. 34. For the early period of US Indian policy and early missionary efforts, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790-1834 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vol. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman (Norman: University of Okla- homa Press, 1991). For general discussions of reformers' efforts to "civilize" Indian peoples after 1865, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977); 24 INTRODUCTION: WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WEST Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 203-26. 35. Smith, Essay on the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, 44. It is interesting that poor whites have often been considered racially inferior; see, for example, Painter, History of White People, 256-77; Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 36. Smith, Essay on the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, 45. 37. Discussions of polygenic versus monogenic origins are found in Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Them- selves and Their Land (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002), 235-36; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 44-45; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 71-74; Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 1-15; Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 22-28; Gossett, Race, 44-51, 58-67; Graves, The Emperor's New Clothes, 37-52; Smedley, Race in North America, 234-43. 38. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 74-82; Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 100-109. 39. Louis Agassiz, "The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races," Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 123. 40. Ibid., 126. 41. Ibid., 144. 42. Reginald Horsman discusses Morton's influence in Race and Manifest Destiny, 125-27, and Stephen J. Gould exposes the flaws in Morton's work in The Mismeasure of Man, 82-104. 43. Josiah Nott's life is analyzed in depth in Reginald Horsman,Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). Nott's importance is also covered in Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 101-2; Valencius, Health of the Country, 234-35; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 129-57. 44. J[osiah] C[lark] Nott and Geo[rge] R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnolog- ical Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadel- phia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1855), 79. 45. Ibid. 46. On the supposed extinction of inferior peoples, see Brantlinger, Dark Van- ishings; Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982). 47. Quoted in Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 73. Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 25 48. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550- 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), discusses the aborted attempts at establishing colonies for freedmen in the West. See especially pp. 546-69. On the creation of Indian Territory, see James P. Ronda, "'We Have a Country: Race, Geography, and the Invention of Indian Territory," in Michael A. Morrison and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Race and the Early Republic (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 159-76.  PART I FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, I803-I924  I "FOR ITS INCORPORATION IN OUR UNION" The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion With the stroke of a pen, the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory from France and doubled the size of the nation in 1803. While many Americans, filled with an insatiable hunger for land, obviously wanted to set- tle the new territory as rapidly as possible, a few worried about the influence of such massive territorial growth on the nation, fearing that democracy could not flourish in such a large expanse. They worried as well about the influence of expansion on America's dominant white race. Going west into territory held by Indians and the weak but still large Spanish empire meant coming into contact with groups Americans considered inferior. Expansion could therefore undermine democracy and even white racial superiority, for beneath the surface of the young nation, racial tensions strained its unity. Would going west inevitably weaken settlers, and, if so, could the land be put to better use? Perhaps this new territory could instead be used to racially cleanse the nation and solve some of the pressing racial issues that threatened its survival. It could be used to segregate and relegate free African Americans and eastern Indians to the periphery of the American empire, and DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.coo1 29 30 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 these groups could in turn act as a buffer zone against "savage" Indians and the crumbling, racially impure Spanish empire. Before seeing the West as a white man's refuge, therefore, there existed an opposite vision of the West as a dumping ground for incompatible and incongruent members of society. President Thomas Jefferson, aware of his critics' reservations about Loui- siana, used his third annual message to Congress, in October 1803, to answer them and outline an ambitious vision of expansion for the nation. While his message meandered through a variety of foreign and domestic issues, Jefferson focused on explaining the importance of the recently acquired Louisiana Territory and the related issue of negotiating with Indians for their land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, an area still sparsely populated by white settlers. Settlers would come, and the Indians would have to give way. Of course, Jefferson purchased Louisiana to secure access to the Mississippi River for Ohio Valley farmers, but he saw much more of value in the acqui- sition of the vast territory. He remarked on "the fertility of the country, its climate and extent." Its cultivation would "promise in due season important aids to our treasury," and its vast size would provide "an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide-spread field for the blessings of freedom and equal laws."' The future, Jefferson believed, lay in the West. While his administra- tion had done its part to negotiate the treaty, only the US Senate could ratify it. Deferring to congressional authority, he hoped lawmakers would soon act to provide the necessary measures for the quick and efficient "incorporation in our Union" of the Louisiana Territory.2 Some Americans had balked at the price and at the possible threat such dramatic expansion portended for democracy in the new republic. Nevertheless, the Senate quickly ratified the treaty by a vote of twenty-four to seven.3 During his second inaugural address in March 1805, the president again outlined a vision for the Louisiana Territory. He acknowledged that "the acquisition of Louisiana has been disapproved by some" on the grounds that a larger republic would be unwieldy, but, he asked, "is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children, than by strangers of another family?"4 Jefferson's federalist opponents questioned the benefits of acquiring this new territory and its current inhabitants. The text of the treaty, however, stipulated that the residents of French Louisiana would "be incorporated in The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 31 the Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible according to the principles of the federal Constitution to the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States." Further, the United States would guarantee "the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the Religion which they profess."5 The treaty, therefore, required that these people be accorded the same rights as citizens in America's original thirteen states. The pro-federalist Gazette of the United States warned, "Two Spaniards from New-Orleans [would have] the same influence in the Senate with two Senators from Virginia, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts." The Gazette doubted if such people "with their ignorance of our constitution, language, manners and habits [were] qualified" for citizenship.6 The federalist Gouverneur Morris complained, "I always thought that, when we should acquire Canada and Louisiana it would be proper to govern them as provinces, and allow them no voice in our councils."7 In a January 1804 letter, Morris again argued that the denizens of Louisiana lacked the qualifications for citizenship: "The stip- ulation [in the treaty] to admit the inhabitants into our nation will prove inju- rious to this country" and to democracy, since they would be easily swayed by those seeking to create a dictatorship or a monarchy. In the end, Morris declared, "No man without the support of at least one thousand American bayonets can duly restrain the inhabitants of that region."8 Implicit in these statements was a belief in the inferiority of Louisiana's residents. These peo- ples, indeed many of whom were of mixed race and ethnicity, could be too easily swayed and led by power-hungry tyrants, detractors asserted. Further, such degraded peoples could not comprehend the complexities and nuances of the American system and thus made fit pawns for would-be tyrants and demagogues. Fears of such "mobocracy" had long simmered in the nation, but acquiring Louisiana added a racial and ethnic dimension to these con- cerns. Surely, as the United States expanded, participation could only be extended to Anglo-American Protestants, with lesser peoples controlled as imperial subjects. Bestowing citizenship and whiteness-since the two were inextricably linked-on these peoples seemed too high a price for the land, in Morris's view. Morris's criticism, as he conceded, mattered little, and in time new states would be carved from the region and admitted on equal footing with the rest of the nation. Before new states could be added to either Louisiana or the 32 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 lands immediately east of the Mississippi, though, something had to be done about the presence of Indians. Thomas Jefferson, in his second inaugural address, argued, "Humanity enjoins us to teach them [the Indians] agricul- ture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of mind and morals."9 Civilization for Jefferson meant giving up the ways of the hunter and becoming farmers. Converting Indians to farming and then getting access to their supposedly excess lands had been an ongoing strategy of Jefferson's administration. In a confidential message to Congress on the western lands, written in January 1803, Jefferson argued that the gov- ernment should encourage Indians to become farmers rather than hunt- ers "and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them ... the extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms and of increasing their domestic comforts."0 Here, then, was Jefferson's iron hand of imperialism wrapped in kid gloves. Better to convince the Indians to willingly give up their land instead of taking it, but, regardless, the result would be the same. The president's western policy encouraged settlement by whites while simultaneously, as he saw it, helping the Indians adapt to the realities of the modern world. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory later in 1803 opened up another possibility: moving Indians from the Ohio River Valley and the Southeast to some location west of the Mississippi. Despite his interest in and appreciation of Indians and their cultures, when Jefferson looked West he did not see the frontier filled with Indians but instead envisioned an opportunity to realize his dream of an agrarian, utopian society of independent Anglo-American farmers. The moral and hardworking farmer metaphorically stood in sharp contrast to the Indian or even the rough-and-tumble frontiersman." Settled rather than transient, the pioneer farmer represented civilization itself. The farmer, in reality and also mythology, would help remake the West, planting crops where previously only wilderness existed. This, in the historian Henry Nash Smith's estimation, evoked a myth that had deeper meaning and resonance with Americans than the frontier as a violent land of Indians and frontiers- men. The settling of the garden epitomized a "collective representation, a poetic idea ... that defined the promise of American life" and encapsulated a The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 33 variety of meanings, including "fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth."2 Jefferson, in his 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia, argued that the yeoman farmer personified the most moral and desirable figure for the settlement of the West and the perpetuation of democracy. Crowded Europe needed manufacturing to feed its population, but wage labor in fac- tories led to the loss of freedom and the destruction of democracy because "dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." Worse, it would only be a matter of time before the same conditions applied to the United States.3 Agriculture, however, promoted morality and virtue, traits that were essen- tial to democracy. He wrote, "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. . . Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon [sic] of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." Americans should not worry about becoming manufacturers, for they could import all they needed from Europe: "While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff."4 As a lawmaker, Jefferson sought to bring his vision of a West of white yeoman farmers to reality long before he acquired Louisiana. Only by some- how extending the frontier could Jefferson keep the dreaded distaffs at bay. During the Articles of Confederation government in the 178os, he authored a plan for western expansion that he hoped would prevent both the spread of slavery and the presence of powerful, titled aristocrats, creating the yeoman republic of which he dreamed. Jefferson, in his 1784 "Plan for the Temporary Government of the Western Territory," wrote that the "respective govern- ments [of new states] shall be in republican forms, and shall admit no person to be a citizen who holds any hereditary title," and "after the year 18oo of the Christian era there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States."'5 Thus, he envisioned a free, white yeoman society in the West. In white male landowners, Jefferson and others felt, lay the keys to the perpetuation of democracy. The Northwest Ordinance, based in part on Jefferson's plan for the western territory, became law in 1787, remaining even after the US Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson's ban on slavery north of the Ohio River also remained a part of it and would in time become a significant border between freedom and slavery.6 34 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 These motivations compelled Jefferson to acquire the Louisiana Territory because as long as future generations of Americans had enough land, America could remain a nation of free, landholding democrats. In his first inaugural address he wrote that Americans possessed "a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation."17 In an 18o1 letter to James Monroe, however, he imagined a time in the near future when America's rapid population growth would inevitably result in the United States expanding "to cover the whole northern, if not southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface."18 His euphemistic "blot and mixture" were references to miscegenation and the presence of non-white peoples, respectively. Despite being a prominent slave owner, he imagined a time when a continental nation would also be a homogeneous nation, a white nation. Here, then, from Jefferson's formidable pen appeared what is likely the earliest articulation of the white man's West. The historian Winthrop Jordan observes that, for Jefferson, 'America's destiny was white."9 How that destiny could be achieved given the large populations of African Americans and Indians already in the nation appeared problematic-it was one thing to think of a distant time a thousand generations in the future but quite another to plan for settlement in the trans-Appalachian and, later, trans-Mississippi West. Jefferson, like his nation, felt conflicted about the role of Indians in American society, but expansion had continued apace without question-or at least until it met the Mississippi River. Jefferson's dream of a West occupied by yeoman farmers seemed to evapo- rate in light of early assessments on the region. Zebulon Montgomery Pike's report of his 1805-7 expedition across the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Mexico painted a bleak portrait of the land beyond the Mississippi River. While the lower Missouri River would "admit of a numerous, extensive, and compact population," farther West it would "be only possible to introduce a limited population." Aridity was the problem. Of the Great Plains he wrote, "But here a barren soil, parched and dried up for eight months in the year, presents neither moisture nor nutrition sufficient to nourish the timber. These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as cele- brated as the sandy deserts of Africa." He crossed a desert "of many leagues," populated by undulating waves of ever-changing sand dunes "on which not The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 35 a speck of vegetable matter existed." Hoping to salvage some semblance of optimism, Pike opined, "From these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States, viz.: The restriction of our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the Union." It would prove an impossible task, Pike implied, to govern a continental nation. Here, then, was a natural limit to western expansion, the spread of agriculture, and the spread of American society: "Our citizens . . . will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the west to the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi [Rivers], while they leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country."20 Like Pike, Stephen Harriman Long asserted that a desert environment dominated this new territory. To describe it, he coined the term "Great American Desert," tempering Americans' enthusiasm to settle the lands beyond the Mississippi.2' Long wrote of a vast sandy desert along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. He noted that the region seemed prone to violent thunderstorms and large hailstones. Inhospitable fluctuations in tem- perature promised to stymie human habitation. Long observed that the tem- perature increased by fifty degrees between sunrise and the hottest part of the day. "These rapid alternations of heat and cold," he concluded, "must be supposed to mark a climate little favourable to health."22 Pike's and Long's warnings about the Great Plains seemed to preclude any hope that the area could support traditional Anglo-American agrarian settle- ment. This seemed, as Pike suggested, to hem in the United States. As the historian William Goetzmann observes, Pike and Long did not offer entirely wrong information. Given the technology of the early nineteenth century, "The Southwestern plains were unfit for widespread settlement." Lacking communication and transportation infrastructure, irrigation, and dryland farming techniques, the Great Plains were ill-suited to agriculture and there- fore to civilization as Americans saw it.23 Pike and Long, however, concerned themselves with the suitability of the Great Plains not only to agriculture but more generally to Anglo- American settlement, for agriculture was the handmaiden of American civ- ilization. If agriculture could not thrive on the plains, then neither could Americans. Both explorers and other early visitors to the West returned with dire warnings about the dangers of potential settlement there. Should Anglo-Americans be foolish enough to venture into North America's heart 36 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 of darkness, they could expect to degenerate into half-civilized, semi-no- madic bandits. The image of the Great American Desert lodged in the American con- sciousness. Visitors from the East, touring the West, invariably described the Great Plains as a trackless wasteland for hundreds of miles, populated by savage Indians and desperadoes forced from the more civilized lands of the American frontier and the Spanish empire.24 Washington Irving, among the first writers with a distinctively American voice and arguably its most famous man of letters, saw little to recommend in the plains, concluding that no good could come from owning such a place. Only recently returned from a long sojourn in Europe, he set out on a tour of America in 1832. The writer soon met Henry Leavitt Ellsworth on a Lake Erie steamer. Ellsworth, a gov- ernment official bound for the newly created Indian Territory, convinced Irving and his two European companions to join the expedition as gentleman explorers. They agreed and soon lit out for the frontier.25 The Ellsworth party arrived at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory in early October 1832. On October To they made their way to the trading post and Osage Indian agency a few miles from the fort.2' There, Irving encountered the frontier in microcosm. He was not impressed: "Besides these [Creek and Osage Indians] there was a sprinkling of trappers, hunters, half breeds, creoles, negroes of every hue; and all that other rabble rout of nondescript beings that keep about the frontiers, between civilized and savage life, as those equivocal birds the bats, hover about the confines of light and dark- ness."27 His metaphor spoke of boundaries between light and darkness, civili- zation and savagery, good and evil. The bat's strange position as a creature of neither daylight nor darkness symbolized the mixed races he saw. His "non- descript beings," neither black, white, nor Indian, seemed the manifestation of one of America's darkest fears. The mixture of races and cultures portended potential dangers for whites, of course, but also for Indians. Thus it was with pleasure that Irving described the Osage as still wild and romantic, "like so many noble bronze figures" dressed in "their simple Indian garb" and practicing "the habits of the hunter and warrior.1"28 Irving viewed his mixed-race cook and jack-of-all-trades, Antoine or "Tonish," however, as far less noble or romantic. Over the course of the jour- ney Antoine would prove his worth time and again (once by swimming across The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 37 FIGURE I.I. The writer Washington Irving, touring Indian Territory in the 1830s, warned that western expansion could lead to white racial decay. He worried that the vast spaces of the West could never truly be settled by Anglo-Americans and would instead be populated only by bloodthirsty Indians and outlaws. Within a decade, how- ever, his uninhabitable plains would become the center of a continental nation. Photo by Matthew Brady, ca. 1855. Courtesy, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. the Arkansas River, a rope clenched in his teeth, while towing the rather effete writer in a makeshift raft), but Irving refused to see him as anything other than a "braggart and a liar of the first water."-2 Applying his experience 38 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 with Tonish to all French Creole trappers in the West, he concluded that they came dangerously close to degenerating into savages. In his work Astoria, he described such trappers as having "separated almost entirely from civilized life ... [becoming] so accustomed to the freedom of the forest and the prairie that they look back with repugnance upon the restraints of civilization.5"30 Francis Parkman, who toured the Great Plains in 1847, agreed with much of Irving's assessment. He described a group of trappers he encountered on the Platte River as "uncouth" and "half-savage," and their faces "looked out from beneath the hoods of their white capotes with a bad and brutish expression, as if their owners might be willing agents of any villainy. And such in fact is the character of many of these men."3 Contact with the wil- derness could have a corrosive effect on civilization, making savages out of civilized people.32 To writers like Irving and Parkman, separation from civilization and giving in to the base desire to mix with inferior peoples led to racial degeneration. Savagery and miscegenation flourished in conducive natural environments, and the western frontier was just such a place. Americans regarded trees as indi- cators of a soil's fertility and suitability for agriculture. The plains lacked trees and therefore the civilizing influence of agriculture. Thus, savagery thrived on the Great Plains.33 Irving wrote that the barren wasteland of the far West "apparently defies cultivation, and the habitation of civilized life . . . it is to be feared that a great part of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the oceans or the deserts of Arabia; and like them be subject to the depredations of the marauder."34 The western frontier was even more dangerous than Arabia because men from civilized societies lived alongside savages, and in time a "mongrel" society like the one near Fort Gibson would emerge that alloyed the ferocity of the Indian with the supe- rior intellect of the civilized Anglo-American-a volatile combination. Irving wrote: "Here may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in geology, the amalgamation of the 'debris' and 'abrasions' of former races, civ- ilized and savage; the remains of broken and almost extinguished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish and American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every class and country, yearly ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness."35 Americans could, he felt, easily sink to the level of the inferior peoples around them, victims of miscegenation and uncultivable environments. Most other The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 39 visitors to the plains endorsed the prevailing notion of aridity and its atten- dant savagery. Even as late as 1857, US Army lieutenant Governeur K. Warren could report that Anglo-American settlement in Nebraska had reached the 97th parallel, the limit of agriculture and civilized settlement. These settlers "are, as it were, upon the shore of a sea, up to which population and agricul- ture may advance, and no further," he claimed.36 Irving's and Parkman's belief in the rapid degeneration of whites in the West reflected the dominant cultural belief in the contingency of race. According to the best scientists of the day, it was alarmingly easy for whites to become less white. Given Samuel Stanhope Smith's analysis of race and environment, the Great American Desert seemed to indeed present a formidable impediment to the spread of civilization. The belief in the West as hostile to white settlement played into the larger debate on race and ethnicity in the early republic. Certainly, the Indians and half-civilized people of the plains threatened democracy and perhaps even the stabil- ity of the nation itself. Writers like Irving and Parkman readily warned of the dangers of an American version of the warlike Tartars and Bedouins attacking isolated outposts.37 But such external threats comprised just one of the myriad racial challenges facing the nation. Anomalous and undesir- able racial groups already lived inside the boundaries of the United States. These complex racial questions vexed the young nation, but the West offered a possible solution. If sending Anglo-American settlers into the West would undermine democ- racy and compromise the racial purity of the nation, what, then, to do with the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase? Some advocated using the region as a kind of racial dumping ground and thereby racially cleanse the United States east of the Mississippi. The two most anomalous groups in the nation, and therefore the most likely candidates for removal, were American Indians and free African Americans. The Cherokee and other semi-civilized Indians could be moved west of the Mississippi where, their alleged defenders argued, they would have time enough to adapt to the ways of the white man's world and give up title to their lands in the East. The Jefferson administration first minted this idea, and it remained in circulation throughout the ensuing decades. Similarly, free blacks, occupying a strange borderland between slaves and free whites, could be evacuated to the West. Together, these groups could provide a buffer against the savage and warlike Indians farther west. 40 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 Removing "civilized" Indians and free blacks seemed acceptable since Americans considered neither group capable of participating in American democracy. Indeed, the law excluded both groups from citizenship on the grounds that their instincts and base passions enslaved them. Democracy required rational thought and self-control, characteristics that neither Indians nor free blacks could supposedly possess. Without these traits, neither group could attain an understanding of republicanism or civic virtue.38 Similarly, the legal system extended true citizenship only to white men (and not even all white men at first), while African American slaves occupied the lowest rung of the social order.39 American leaders felt it vital to exclude African Americans (both the free and the enslaved) and American Indians for the good of the nation's survival. Blacks and Indians had been denied real participation in society, but even their continued presence in the nation remained a lingering problem. Removal might offer a practical solution, and the open lands of the Louisiana Territory beckoned with possibility. The desire to colonize freed slaves somewhere outside the country appeared earlier than Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, but his work attracted the most attention to the scheme in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson argued that young blacks should be "colonized to such a place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, etc. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength." To make up for the loss of their labor, America could "send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal num- ber of white inhabitants."40 Jefferson, as an advocate of white settlement of the West, preferred to send these freed slaves out of the country, but others thought a destination closer to the United States would be more practical. Following the publication of Jefferson's Notes, several others offered pro- posals for colonization as a solution to the vexing question of how best to end slavery and prevent miscegenation. In 1788 "Othello," supposedly a free black from Baltimore, asserted that slaves should be freed and sent to a ter- ritory in the West.4' In 1795 an anonymous New Hampshire writer argued in Tyrannical Libertymen that "a portion of our new territory be assigned for the purpose [of colonization]; and let the great body of negroes be sent to colo- nize it." The author imagined "a large province of black freemen, industrious The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 41 and well regulated," who could develop some section of the West, provide revenue and strength to the nation, and act as a place where Christianized blacks could be recruited to spread "light, liberty, and benevolence" to the darkest corners of Africa.42 By regulated, he no doubt meant controlled by laws but also through means that would smother the base passions and dark desires blacks supposedly harbored. Thomas Branagan, a prolific anti-slavery writer, similarly felt that ending slavery and removing free blacks represented the best solution to the race question. Branagan asserted in Serious Remonstrances that slaves would even- tually rise up and claim their natural rights as human beings. This would happen, he felt, at the most inopportune moment, most likely during a war with a foreign nation. Ending slavery peacefully was far better, he felt, than fighting both a foreign invader and a slave insurrection. While some had advocated the forced removal of free blacks, Branagan instead proposed a plan "for the accommodation of the blacks" that offered land as an incentive. Branagan claimed, "I would ... joyfully embrace [such an incentive] myself and consider it as the most advantageous circumstance of my life to have the offer made me."43 This advantageous offer would "allow them [blacks] a certain number of acres of land for a new settlement. . . Thus many an hon- est family would be provided for comfortably."44 Branagan admitted that the South would not agree to his scheme (at least not for some time), but morally it fell to the North to do so as the right thing: "We have like true Christians and patriots, relinquished our ill-gotten slaves [in the North]; we have made them free virtually, but not politically; let us then from motives of generosity, as well as self-preservation, make them free and happy in every sense of the word, in a republic of their own."45 All the plan required, he asserted, was a few hundred thousand acres of land in the Louisiana Territory that "will not be worth a cent to [our] government this five hundred years."46 In a foot- note he added, "The new state might be established upwards of 2000 miles from our population. It is asserted that the most distant part of Louisiana is farther from us than some parts of Europe."47 In essence, northerners (and perhaps someday southerners) could exculpate themselves for the sin of slav- ery, strengthen the frontier by sending settlers to the West, and spatially seg- regate free blacks thousands of miles away. Even Jefferson entertained the idea of sending freed slaves to the Louisiana Territory (although he preferred locations in Africa or the Caribbean, since 42 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 he dreamed about settling the Louisiana Purchase lands with white settlers). In a late 1803 letter to Virginia governor John Page, the president wrote, "The acquisition of Louisiana may also procure the opportunity" to colonize blacks outside of the eastern United States.48 He warned, however, that such decisions ultimately rested with Congress. The hope for a mass manumission and relocation of freed slaves proved chimeric. By 18o6, several factors had doomed the idea of a black territory in Louisiana. The growing crisis with European powers, for example, focused the nation's attention on international matters. The official end of the African slave trade, as specified in the US Constitution, and a temporarily flagging interest in abolition stopped the momentum for some sort of black expatriation-although in time colonization would return and see the creation of Liberia in 1822 under the auspices of the American Colonization Society.49 Yet as hope for colonizing blacks in the trans-Mississippi West faded, the colonization of eastern American Indians became more likely. The creation of Indian Territory, as historian James P. Ronda has argued, rested on "a set of assumptions about race and geography, national sovereignty and cultural identity." Once again, Jefferson figured prominently in the early debate over the Louisiana Territory and its settlement. Certainly, he felt that much of the land should be dedicated to his white yeoman farmers, but within such a massive amount of land some territory could be set aside for Indians as "a means of tempting all our Indians on the East side of the Mississippi to move West," he explained in a letter to General Horatio Gates. This territory would give Indians time to fully assimilate into American society and allow their former lands to be opened to white settlement.50 Jefferson never acted on the idea, but it remained in circulation throughout the early 18oos. President James Monroe made Indian removal a priority of his adminis- tration. In 1817 the Committee on Public Lands endorsed the creation of an Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The current state of frontier development, with its uneven pattern of white and Indian settlement, bene- fited neither group, the authors of the committee's report argued, because it exposed whites to savagery and Indians to the worst attributes of American culture, including alcohol consumption. Better, then, to move the Indians into a clearly delineated space. In the words of Ronda, the committee pro- posed "a geography of race, a geography that promised a sovereign solution to the Republic's 'Indian Problem.' "51 The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 43 John Quincy Adams's administration also sought a way to relocate Indians, but it was under AndrewJackson that Indian removal began in earnest. Elected in 1828, the new president had a long and checkered association with Indian peoples, having fought alongside them and often simultaneously against them, most notably at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. That battle and the subsequent Battle of New Orleans in 1815 catapulted the Tennessean to national prominence, and following a protracted and circuitous journey he ascended to the presidency in 1828. Jackson announced his interest in Indian removal in his first State of the Union Address in December 1829, calling on Congress to enact legislation to remove eastern Indians. Hugh Lawson White in the US Senate and John Bell in the US House (both Tenneesseans) chaired their respective Committees on Indian Affairs and shepherded the bills through both chambers. Despite substantial opposition and close votes in both houses of Congress, the removal bill passed. Jackson immediately signed it on May 28, 1830.52 Jackson claimed that "no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself" toward Indian peoples, but a "benevolent policy" of Indian removal provided the best of all possible solutions to the Indian question, enabling "them to pursue happiness in their own way, and under their own rude insti- tutions." With Indians situated beyond the Mississippi River, a "civilized population [can instead be given] large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters."53 In other words, drawing on Jefferson's humanitarian argument, removal would allow Indians the freedom to adapt at their own pace, and their former lands could be opened to settlement by productive white farmers. By 1833 Jackson had abandoned the pretense of removal as chiefly a humanitarian policy, emphasizing instead the Indians' innate inferi- ority to whites as justification to spatially segregate them forever. In his 1833 message to Congress the president singled out recalcitrant members of the last remaining southern tribes (most likely the Cherokee and Creeks) and hoped they "will realize the necessity of emigration and speedily resort to it." He declared that these Indians possessed "neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire for improvement which are essen- tial to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race . . . they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear."54 The 1836 Report on the Committee of Indian Affairs similarly insisted on the Indians' irredeemable inferiority to 44 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 whites. Celebrating the "successful" implementation of Indian removal, the report exclaimed that Indians "are on the outside of us, and in a place which will ever remain an outside."55 Jackson and his supporters could congratulate themselves on having finally solved the vexing "Indian problem," but not everyone believed the problem had really been solved. Washington Irving observed that the pol- icy of removal, which he had seen firsthand in his tour of Oklahoma, only added more people to "this singular and heterogeneous cloud of wild pop- ulation." Even worse, the removed tribes "consider themselves expatriated beings, wrongfully exiled from their hereditary homes, and the sepulchers of their fathers, and [they] cherish a deep and abiding animosity against the race that has dispossessed them."56 Irving warned that the removed Indians felt betrayed by the United States and their jaundiced view of America would likely color encounters with other Indian peoples. Irving's negative assess- ment of Indian relocation, however, did not seem to matter. The point, after all, was that the eastern Indians no longer inhabited the eastern woodlands, and it mattered little if they sank to an even lower state of savagery on the isolated plains-or so the proponents of removal argued. Imagining Indian Territory as remote from the rest of the nation, as being outside and Indians therefore as un-white outsiders, politicians in the 1830s felt they had solved one of the nation's most pressing issues. Once only socially and politically marginalized, Indian peoples were now spatially mar- ginalized as well, literally on the outside looking in. Jackson, in his 1830 mes- sage to Congress, had stated that Indian removal would "relieve the whole State of Mississippi, and the western part of Alabama, of Indian occupancy," but it could accurately be said that this relief extended to the nation as well.57 Yet politicians had not solved the other pressing racial issue-the presence of African Americans and the issue of slavery. As government agents removed Indians from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, planters increasingly replaced them with slaves as King Cotton became rooted in the southern economy. Indian removal, therefore, created a vacuum soon filled by slaves, further entrenching slavery in the American South and propelling the nation toward civil war. Indians, whose lands were the only things Americans coveted, were easy to separate, but the spread of labor-intensive cotton agriculture made controlling blacks more important and emancipation less likely. Indeed, the development of the American capitalist economy required The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 45 their labor. In the North this labor could be provided by immigrants, but in the South the "bio-power" required to make cotton profitable came from the muscles of slaves. Capitalism "would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production," as Michel Foucault observed, and in few places was that insertion more obvious and more important than in the American South. Southern society existed only if institutions of power and control "ensured the maintenance of production relations."58 Put simply, American development required both the Indians' land and the bodies of slaves, making the former expendable and the latter essential. For more than three decades American policymakers saw the West as a racial dumping ground, an American Siberia where unwanted Indian peo- ples could be relocated and forgotten, but renewed expansion smothered this conceit. Little more than a decade after the removal of many eastern Indians to Indian Territory, the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of the Southwest following the Mexican-American War, and the discovery of gold in California put Indian Territory at the heart of a now continental nation. The periphery, stubbornly, would not remain peripheral. By the late 1840s, Indian Territory and the surrounding Great Plains occu- pied the center of the country. However, the region still had an image, created in part by Pike and Long, as a desert, and subsequent travelers agreed with these early judgments. Thomas Fitzpatrick, a mountain man turned Indian agent, wrote in 1853 that the heart of the country loomed as "a great and dis- connecting wilderness" separating the East from the Pacific Coast. Between the Mississippi River and California, therefore, lay an arid, vast hole dividing the fecund coasts.59 "That hole," according to Elliott West, "began suddenly to fill on July 6, 1858, the day a party of thirteen prospectors found gold dust in a small creek flowing from the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.-"60 Their small discovery set off a frenzied race to the Rockies. As tens of thousands of prospectors hurtled across the plains, the image of the center, of plains and mountains, began to change. Miners washed gold from nascent towns like Central City and Idaho Springs in the Colorado Rockies, proving the land to be literally valuable and giving credence to those who believed in America's place as God's new chosen nation. To feed these miners, farmers began to cultivate along the rivers that poured from the mountains, apparently drowning the memory of the Great American 46 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 Desert. To the east, farmers spilled out beyond Missouri into neighboring Kansas and Nebraska. Town boosters and railroads began to extol the virtues of the plains as uncommonly suited to agriculture. Transformed from desert into garden and finally into heartland, the hollow center had been filled. Yet some fears remained. What of the racial degeneration Irving had warned of in the 1830s, and what would happen to Anglo-Americans and oth- ers of Northern European ancestry when they settled in the unquestionably warmer and drier West? Certainly, a new generation of scientists like Aggasiz doubted the environmental determinism of monogenesis, offering polygen- esis as an inoculation against fears of degeneration. It was one thing to talk of the immutable nature of race from the safety of eastern universities but quite another to head to the West and apply theory to practice. With more than a little trepidation, settlers set off into the unknown. NOTES 1. Thomas Jefferson, "Third Annual Message," October 17, 1803, in Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson, Containing His Major Writings, Published and Unpublished, Except His Letters (New York: Tudor, 1943), 401. 2. Ibid. 3. Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 306. 4. "Treaty between the United States of America and the French Republic." The full text of the treaty is available at Yale University's Avalon Project, http:/ / avalon.law.yale.edu/i9th-century /louisi.asp (accessed July 12, 2012). 5. Ibid. 6. Quoted in Kukla, Wilderness So Immense, 308. 7. Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), 3:198. 8. Gouverneur Morris to John Dayton, January 7, 1804, in ibid., 202. 9. Thomas Jefferson, "Second Inaugural Address," March 4, 1805, in The Com- plete Jefferson, 412. 1o. Thomas Jefferson, "Confidential Message Recommending a Western Explor- ing Expedition," January 18, 1803, in The Complete Jefferson, 398. 11. Henry Nash Smith recounts the agrarian myth in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 123-262. 12. Ibid., 123. The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 47 13. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Complete Jefferson, 678-79. 14. Ibid. 15. Thomas Jefferson, "Plan for the Temporary Government of the Western Territory," in The Complete Jefferson, 237. 16. See Donald W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800-1867, vol. 2: The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on Soo Years of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 432-35, 450. 17. Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," March 1801, in The Complete Jefferson, 384. 18. Quoted in Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 547. 19. Ibid. 20. Zebulon Montgomery Pike, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, to Headwaters of the Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the Years 1805-6-7, Elliott Coues, ed. (New York: P. P. Harper, 1895), 2:524-25. 21. Walter Prescott Webb, Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 147. 22. Stephen Harriman Long, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 2:314. 23. William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 62. 24. Smith, Virgin Land, 174-79. 25. John Francis McDermott provides an excellent description of the meeting and preparation for the trip in his introduction to Washington Irving, The Western Journals of Washington Irving, John Francis McDermott, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), 3-66. 26. Ibid., 111-12; and in the published account Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, in Three Western Narratives (New York: Library of America, 2004), 20-22. 27. Irving, Tour on the Prairies, in Three Western Narratives, 20-22. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 15. 30. Irving, Astoria, in Three Western Narratives, 275. 31. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905), 64. 32. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1967), 27-30; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 120-22; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology 48 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Smith, Virgin Land, especially chapter 5. 33. Smith, Virgin Land, 175. 34. Irving, Astoria, 359. 35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Smith, Virgin Land, 178. 37. Ibid., 176-77. 38. Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 12. 39. The classic discussion of the relationship between white freedom and black slavery is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 40. Quoted in Jordan, White over Black, 546. 41. Ibid. 42. Anonymous, Tyrannical Libertymen: A Discourse upon Negro Slavery in the United States (Hanover, NH: Eagle Office, 1795), 10. 43. Thomas Branagan, Serious Remonstrances: Addressed to the Citizens of the North- ern States, and Their Representatives (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1805), 17-18. 44. Ibid., 18. 45. Ibid., 23-34. 46. Ibid., 22. 47. Ibid. 48. Thomas Jefferson to Governor John Page, Washington, DC, December 23, 1803, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, eds. (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 19:138. 49. Jordan, White over Black, 565. 50. James P. Ronda, "'We Have a Country': Race, Geography and the Invention of Indian Territory," in Michael A. Morrison and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Race and the Early Republic: Racial Consciousness and Nation-Buildings in the Early Republic (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 159-75. 51. Ibid., 161. 52. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford, St. Martins, 2005), 121-23. 53. Andrew Jackson, "Second Annual Message," December 6, 1830, in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. US Congress (New York, 1896-99), 10:1082-86. 54. Andrew Jackson, "Fifth Annual Message," December 3, 1833, in Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 10:1252. 55. Quoted in Ronda, "We Have a Country," 164. The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 49 56. Irving, Astoria, 359. 57. Jackson, "Second Annual Message." 58. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 1:140-41. 59. Elliott West, "Golden Dreams," in The Essential West: Collected Essays (Nor- man: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 47. 60. Ibid., 44.  2 A CLIMATE OF FAILURE OR ONE "UNRIVALED, PERHAPS, IN THE WORLD" Fear and Health in the West While early observations of the Great Plains by Zebulon Montgomery Pike, Stephen Harriman Long, and Washington Irving painted the vast grasslands as an awesome barrier to white civilization, in time other travelers would begin to assess the far West more positively. These reports, in turn, began to transform American conceptions of the West as a wasteland and dump- ing ground for the nation's unwanted peoples. The descriptions of a harsh, trackless wilderness soon gave way to glowing accounts of sunny, warm regions. American sailors, for example, involved in the hide trade with far distant California, remarked on the beauty and potential of the region. They marveled at the temperate climate with its mild winters and cool summers. There existed, however, a danger implicit in the sun and fair climate of California and the Southwest, for too much good weather could harm indi- viduals as much as inhospitable climates and savagery. Americans saw themselves as descendants of the hardy races of Northern Europe. Their work ethnic-considered a hallmark of alleged Anglo-Saxon superiority-emerged from an age-old, relentless battle with a harsh and DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.co02 51 52 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 unforgiving Mother Nature. In struggle lay the key for tempering Northern Europeans into the fittest, strongest people on the planet, but this domina- tion could only be renewed by constant competition with nature, and the Southwest was simply too warm. A salubrious climate could be detrimental to racial vigor, and indeed, early Anglo-American visitors saw proof of the dangers of a pleasant climate in the allegedly lazy Indians and Hispanics of California and the Southwest. This belief justified American conquest, but would not the same fate befall the vigorous, expansionistic Americans? Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast, which recounted his expe- riences as a sailor engaged in the hide trade between the East and California from 1834 to 1836, ranks among the earliest works to argue that good climates could hurt white American racial vigor. He noted that California possessed tremendous natural resources, fertile soil, a temperate climate, vast plains for grazing, little disease, and numerous great ports. "In the hands of an enterprising people," he declared, "what a country this might be. .. Yet how long would a people remain so, in such a country? The Americans . . . and Englishmen [who live in California] . . . are indeed more industrious and effective than the Spaniards; yet their children are brought up Spaniards, in every respect, and if the 'California fever' (laziness) spares the first genera- tion, it always attacks the second."' Dana consciously equated laziness with an endemic disease. What wor- ried him and others was the prospect that inferiority might be contagious. Despite the fact that he was merely a sailor, Dana's Harvard education and manners enabled him to mix with the highest stratum of Mexican California. Among the many important Southern Californians he met was Don Juan Bandini, whom he described as a prime example of the kind of "decayed gen- tleman" he had often seen in California. Dana described Bandini as slim, del- icate, and highly articulate, a nobleman characteristically "ambitious at heart, and impotent in act."2 Masculinity, for Dana and the legions of Americans who followed him, meant action, strength, and competitiveness, not decay and impotence-the latter the opposite of virility, a chief attribute of the vigorous man. The Southwest's pleasant climate, Dana believed, created such infirmities. Only by struggling against a harsh, unrelenting nature could men avoid growing weak and effeminate. The mild climate of the Southwest seemed to make the ancient struggle between man and nature obsolete, and comfort invariably came at the expense of racial vigor. Fear and Health in the West 53 Hispanic women, although widely praised for their beauty, also suffered from evident racial degeneration. If Anglo-Americans considered ideal women to be chaste, modest, and virtuous, then Mexican women repre- sented the opposite. Dana summed up the views of many when he wrote, "The women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course, is none the best." Marital indiscretions nonetheless occurred rarely since husbands and other male family members stood ready with "a few inches of cold steel [to] punish ... an unwary man."3 The beauty of California women still struck Dana when he returned to the Golden State in 1859. Upon getting reacquainted with Don Juan Bandini and his wife, Dona Refugio, Dana still found the lady quite stunning, perhaps because of "the preserving quality of the California climate."4 Dana and other early adventurers in the West certainly had reason for con- cern given their understanding of race at the time, but the emerging racial science of polygenesis seemed to offer a panacea to racial fears. Polygenesis argued that the races of humanity had been created in different locations and been endowed with innate and immutable characteristics. Anglo-Americans, as white-skinned Europeans, unquestionably occupied the pinnacle of human development, and their whiteness could not be fundamentally altered (except perhaps through miscegenation or residence in the most extreme cli- mates). Africans, created as supposedly docile and stupid creatures, seemed destined to serve as slaves, and American Indian peoples, with their alleged savagery and inability to adapt to change, appeared doomed to vanish before the superior race, as in the oft-used simile "like snow melting before the sun." In addition to justifying slavery and expansion, polygenesis promised that whites could colonize any environment without fear of degenerating. During his 1859 visit to California, Richard Henry Dana marveled at the essential differences in the races-a marked change for a man who had once warned about the dangers of California's climate. After leaving San Francisco, he headed for China. While crossing the Pacific he met a Chinese family with a newborn. Dana wrote, "Travelling as I do gives one a strong notion as to the differences of races. The differences seem almost of the essence and ineradicable-not to speak of the original unity, but of the pres- ent state of things. Mixtures of races seem doomed to extinction. There is a Chinese infant on board, born in Cal., but its little eyes are as Chinese, from the moment they were opened as any 'oldest inhabitant.'"' Climate, as in the 54 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 case of the Chinese infant, did not change the baby into something else, he noted with almost palpable relief. Yet Dana did not endorse all aspects of polygenesis and remained a believer in the original unity of the human family. He did concur with polygeneti- cists that mixed races faced inevitable extinction. "I do not," he continued, "believe the Kanakas [Hawaiians] can . . . increase and maintain themselves long as an equal race with the whites, or that a mixed race will multiply at all. These facts, and even that most striking one respecting the intermarriage of mulattoes, do not disprove the orig. unity, nor relieve the difficulties in the theory of orig[inal] diversity."6 Polygenesis had provided a salve to those worried about whites sinking to the levels of the savage races, but it did not entirely relieve the fear that whites could degenerate to a degree at least from climates like that of the American West. Had this not, in fact, happened in Latin America? Even poly- geneticists agreed that certain races should avoid climates foreign to them. The racial theorist and leading polygeneticist Josiah Nott wrote that whites were "destined eventually to conquer and hold every foot of the globe where climate does not interpose an impenetrable barrier."7 But climate did pose barriers that could undermine white racial vigor. Scientists uniformly con- sidered hot and humid climates dangerous to whites while convinced that peoples of African descent possessed unique adaptations to such climates. As the historian Conevery Bolton Valencius noted, "Black immunity to [tropical diseases like malaria], real and perceived, was a powerful argument for white Americans about the rightness of black servitude."8 Slaves belonged in the South, working in the heat of muggy cotton fields or rice paddies. This was not cruel, slaveholders argued. It was natural. While polygenesis opened the door for possible Anglo-American settle- ment of the West, most experts agreed that already weak members of soci- ety could benefit from the West's salubrious climates. The chronically ill, especially those suffering from pulmonary ailments like tuberculosis, could find hope in the region.9 The perception of the West as a healthy region developed slowly over the first half of the nineteenth century. Early explorers to the West made infre- quent references to the region's healthfulness, although they did not report many diseases either. Stephen Long, for example, noted that among the Omaha Indians, the "catalogue of diseases, and morbid affections, is infinitely Fear and Health in the West 55 less extensive than that of civilized men." Common ailments like rheuma- tism, gout, jaundice, and phthisis (tuberculosis) did not occur among them, he claimed.'0 Long did not feel optimistic about the prospects of western settlement, and he asserted that the temperature fluctuations in Colorado's Rocky Mountains would not promote good health, though he believed the dry air would be better than that in the humid Mississippi Valley." John C. Fr6mont conversely observed in 1842, "The climate [on the plains] has been found very favorable to the restoration of health, particularly in cases of con- sumption," a fact he attributed not to the climate (as most observers did) but rather to the presence of sagebrush and other "aromatic plants."2 Spurred by more favorable reports, like those of Fr6mont, the belief that the West offered a genial, healthy landscape had begun to take hold in the American consciousness by the 1840s. Josiah Gregg, an American trader, for example, marveled at the "salubrity of climate [in] . . . New Mexico. Nowhere-not even under the much boasted Sicilian skies[-]can a purer or a more wholesome atmosphere be found. Bilious diseases-the great scourge of the valley of the Mississippi-are here almost unknown." Except for epidemics of typhoid and smallpox, "New Mexico has experienced very little disease of a febrile character; so that as great a degree of longevity is attained there, perhaps, as in any other portion of the habitable world."3 Susan Shelby Magoffin, a young bride whose husband, like Gregg, partici- pated in the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe, found the Great Plains not "very beneficial to my health so far," an impression exacerbated by a miscar- riage she suffered at Bent's Fort.'4 New Mexico, however, proved markedly better, and in her diary for September lo, 1846 she wrote, "The air is fine and healthy; indeed the only redeeming quality of this part of New Mexico is its perfectly pure atmosphere, not the damp unhealthy dews of the States."" California similarly developed a reputation for healthfulness. Mrs. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (better known by her nom de plume "Dame Shirley") accompanied her physician husband to the California goldfields in 1851. Shirley's husband selected the mining camp Rich Bar "as the terminus of his health-seeking journey, not only on account of the extreme purity of the atmosphere, but because there were more than a thousand people there already, and but one physician, and as his strength increased, he might find in that vicinity a favorable opening for the practice of his profession, which, as the health of his purse was almost as feeble as that of his body, was not a 56 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 bad idea."16 Upon leaving the mining camps fourteen months later, Shirley boasted to her sister of the physical and mental changes resulting from the experience. "I took kindly to this existence, which to you seems so sordid and mean," she wrote. In California she "gained an unwonted strength in what seemed to you such unfavorable surroundings. You would hardly rec- ognize the feeble and half-dying invalid ... in the person of your now per- fectly healthy sister."17 Walter Colton, writing in the 185os about his experiences a decade earlier, also boasted of California's healthfulness. He claimed, "The fecundity of Californians is remarkable and must be attributed in no small degree to the effects of climate. It is no uncommon sight to find from fourteen to eighteen children at the same table, with their mother at the head." One Monterey woman, he asserted, had twenty-two surviving children. Indeed, California's climate seemed so salubrious that once transportation improved, Colton predicted, "The day is not distant when a trip to California will be regarded rather as a diversion than a serious undertaking. It will be quite worth the while to come out here merely to enjoy the climate for a few months. It is unrivaled, perhaps, in the world."8 Following the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental rail- road, people did flock to California for the climate. The state's international reputation as a gigantic sanitarium encouraged often extravagant claims. Norman Bridge, a physician specializing in pulmonary ailments, noted that even California could not cure everyone. He wrote in Charles Fletcher Lummis's promotional magazine Land of Sunshine, "There has been no exag- geration about the climate of Southern California. One who recovers from pulmonary tuberculosis is excusable for some enthusiasm about the climate; while he who fails to recover will hardly be loud in his praises. "19 California, Bridge continued, could make the weak strong, and cured invalids could live fulfilling and productive lives, but for advanced cases, he cautioned, it extended little hope. The naturalist John Muir, writing in the late 1870s, held a largely pessimis- tic opinion of California's reputation for healthfulness. Invalids "come here only to die, and surely it is better to die comfortably at home . . . It is indeed pitiful to see so many invalids, already on the verge of the grave, making a painful way to quack climates, hoping to change age to youth, and the dark- ening twilight of their day to morning. No such health-fountain has been Fear and Health in the West 57 found, and this climate, fine as it is, seems, like most others, to be adapted for well people only."20 Muir, however, found some places in the West healthy not only for the body but also for the soul. "The summer climate of the fir and pine woods of the Sierra Nevada would," he wrote, "be found infinitely more reviving [than sanitariums]; but because these woods have not been advertised like patent medicines, few seem to think of the spicy, vivifying influences that pervade their fountain freshness and beauty."2 Reflecting on the healing power of wild country, in a letter on Mount Shasta Muir wrote, "The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the moun- tains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon!"22 In the mountains the sick, the weak, the world-weary could all be healed, but California's climate could only do so much. California's main competition in the growing business of health tour- ism came from the mountainous territory of Colorado. The English trav- eler Isabella Bird observed in 1873, "The climate of Colorado is considered the finest in North America, and consumptives, asthmatics, dyspeptics, and sufferers from nervous diseases, are here in hundreds and thousands, either trying the 'camp cure' for three or four months, or settling permanently." So numerous were health seekers, she claimed, that "nine out of every ten [Colorado] settlers were cured invalids."23 Dr. Samuel Edwin Solly, a suppos- edly noted English physician and health seeker, gave a lower but still con- siderable estimate of the number of health seekers as roughly one-third of Colorado's total population. The "one-lung army" totaled perhaps 30,000 in Denver by 1890-a fifth of the city's population.24 Rose Georgina Kingsley, an English friend of Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway (D&RGW) presi- dent William Jackson Palmer, provided a typical endorsement of Colorado's "bracing and healthy" climate. In one case, she explained, a young man she knew "came out in the summer of 1871 apparently dying of consumption, obliged to be moved in an invalid carriage. In the spring of 1872 we wished him good sport as he started on foot for a week's shooting and camping in the mountains!"25 A few years later one observer declared, "The Centennial State, while it is no more a cure-all than the patent nostrums of the period, can indeed afford blessed relief, and life itself, to many a forlorn and despair- ing sufferer."26 58 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 The D&RGW extolled the virtues of the state in its advertising material. Colorado, it claimed, possessed superior health resorts to those of Switzerland and France, and the infirm could easily access them by way of rail lines from the East.27 Manitou Springs, located near Colorado Springs and owned and heavily promoted by the D&RGW, became Colorado's premier health resort. The railroad company charged Dr. Solly with explaining the superiority of Manitou Springs's hot springs pools to those of other famous resorts around the world. Not surprisingly, he found those in Manitou the equal of even the most renowned resorts in Europe. The various springs, with their differing temperatures and chemical content, could treat virtually any ailment know to humanity, including congestion, inflammation, dyspepsia, and nervous and sexual disorders, to name a few. The superiority of Colorado's environment set it apart from Europe's resorts. Its dry, inland location meant that humidity, which Doctor Solly warned endangered consumptives, would not be a problem, and Manitou's sheltered location assured sunny and mild winter weather. Health seek- ers, the doctor advised, should plan on winter as the best time to stay at Manitou Springs, since the winter sun and desiccated air could have the greatest "effect . . . upon the human body." He concluded, "There is prob- ably no climate in the world where out-door life is so thoroughly enjoy- able through every season of the year as that of Manitou."28 Consumptives might not be completely cured, but many would be able to live longer and healthier lives in Colorado. Solly, who had recovered his health in Colorado Springs, used his growing professional reputation to advertise the city to an eager invalid audience.29 The healthy western lifestyle therefore compared quite favorably with the urban East. Tuberculosis, which Dr. Joseph W. Howe called the "scourge of humanity" in 1875, particularly thrived in crowded, unsanitary factories and urban environments.30 Tenements filled with dozens of workers, weakened by long and tiring shifts in close quarters with infected people, made con- tracting TB likely. Samuel Hopkins Adams, in a 1905 McClure's Magazine arti- cle, argued that tuberculosis could be effectively controlled with the creation of large sanitariums, better sanitation methods, and improvements in urban tenement houses. A lack of proper sanitariums meant that "we must either dump the vast majority of our consumptive poor into the contagious wards of our hospitals, send them to the pest-houses, or-this is the common and Fear and Health in the West 59 approved method-let them die in their dark tenements or their wretched dwellings."3 Simply changing one's environment could cure this scourge. "Fresh air, sunlight, and good food will save any case of tuberculosis that has not progressed too far-and nothing else will," Adams explained. These con- ditions readily existed in cities, exclusive of the slums, and therefore, "the sufferer doesn't need to go to Arizona or California. Climate, while it may be an aid in some cases, has much less influence on tuberculosis, except in the later stages, than is generally supposed."32 Adams lamented the plight of the urban poor, forced to live in cramped, infected dwellings, and his article, like those of other Progressives, functioned to goad Americans into action.33 The polluted city was the offspring of industrialization, and poor urban workers kept its factories humming. The laboring poor, though, did not always live isolated from their social betters and could therefore spread tuber- culosis. The railroad provided a technological solution to the problems of urbanization that came with the Industrial Age.34 Great distances, even for the ill, no longer served as obstacles, and people with money and leisure time could easily access places like Santa Fe or Los Angeles, towns that had once sounded distant and exotic. Western promoters never tired of extolling the virtues of their beneficent climate and the lucrative industry it spawned. The healthy West continued to beckon, promising escape for those who could afford the price, but this was merely part of a growing dissatisfaction wealthier Americans felt toward the city. The September 17, 1891, issue of the Nation juxtaposed the alien city against the healing countryside. An article on the new immigration noted that an increasing number of unskilled or unemployed immigrants headed for the nation's ports. Unfortunately, the magazine observed, "[as] the influence of the Teutonic races declines, that of the Latin and Slavic increases" from year to year. Even worse, these immi- grants were predominately male, of the "lowest class," and "not related to us [Anglo-Americans] in race or language." Such immigrants might be appro- priate, the author noted, for "an undeveloped frontier; but the statistics of the reported destination of immigrants show that the bulk of them intend to settle in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts."35 The next article in the magazine noted the increasing numbers of middle- and upper-class people who escaped the cities for quiet country cottages where they could spend the summers. This phenomenon reflected "a growing national love of Nature and her quietudes."36 The juxtaposition of the two articles, while 6o FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 likely coincidental, reflected the tensions of the Gilded Age; and escaping the city, with its immigrants and diseases, became a common pursuit of those with leisure time and money. The West, therefore, seemed an ideal place: free of the smoke, pollution, and lowest class of immigrants and brimming with nature in all her myriad grandeur and quietudes. Railroads and resort owners (often one and the same) promised rejuve- nation to a select few. Railroad fares and the cost of living for months in a resort or sanitarium precluded all but the wealthy from coming. Those with money could get access to peaceful, healthy environments far from the pollution and problems of industrial urban cities. Across the Southwest, rail- roads erected impressive and exclusive sanitariums and hotels. The Southern Pacific Railroad created the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California, in 188o, the first of the West's elaborate resorts. In 1882 the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe answered with the massive Montezuma Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the D&RGW built the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs in 1883 and developed exclusive resorts in Manitou Springs and Glenwood Springs.37 Only wealthy whites could stay in resorts like Manitou Springs that were both racially and class exclusive.38 Disease knew no distinctions of class or race, but treatment regimes certainly did. Colorado, California, and New Mexico might all be blessed with an agree- able climate, but only a few places had the conditions suitable for constructing sanitariums, and Colorado Springs vied to be the best of them all. "An invalid needs not only good climate," Lewis Morris Iddings opined in Scribner's, "but the best of food and many comforts. Roughing it for sick people has been much over-estimated."39 Accompanying Idding's article were drawings of fashionable Colorado Springs "invalids," seemingly in the bloom of health, enjoying outdoor activities and attending evening balls. Iddings noted the civilized nature of the city and its residents: "The residents are Eastern peo- ple of considerable wealth. . . and their scheme of life is intended to take in such means of enjoyment as they have been accustomed to at home. It is Eastern life in a Western environment." Filled with beautiful architecture (the handiwork of an eastern architect forced to relocate for his health), a fledgling university staffed with professors from fine eastern and European schools teaching cultivated but sickly youth ("and thus care is taken not to press them with too much study"), and the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club, Colorado Springs seemed anything but a frontier outpost.40 Fear and Health in the West -.~~~ it*4~ I ~ -- -~~~~~r _ -0~~:~,-A - FIGURE 2.1. Railroads eagerly courted invalids, promising them health and reju- venation in fine resorts throughout the West. While people debated whether the West's climate would be beneficial to Anglo-Americans generally, there was little debate about the vivifying effects of the West's climate on tuberculosis patients and others with debilitating ailments. View of the "Colorado" Hotel and hot springs bathhouse built by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway in Glenwood Springs. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Denver, CO. While the rich could convalesce in style, many young men and women of lesser means also went west to build up their strength and find a place for themselves in the world. Julian Ralph of Denver declared that the Mile-High City's "good taste, good society, and progressiveness" were a result not of its mineral wealth but rather of its invalid population: "It was not [mining and] oil that gave us college-bred men to form a Varsity Club of 120 members, or that insisted upon the decoration of the town with such hotels as ours. The influence of invalids is seen in all this. They are New Yorkers, Bostonians, Philadelphians, New Orleans men, Englishmen-the architects, doctors, 62 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 lawyers, and every sort of professional men being among them."4 Denver welcomed invalids, and it seemed all the better for it. These glowing reports of "bracing air" and ocean breezes, of former invalids risen like Lazarus and strolling under the purple skies of a Pikes Peak sunset, did much to contradict early negative reports of the West that warned of the region's isolation, savage population, and inappropriateness for white settlement. Many early visitors, like Richard Henry Dana, wor- ried that the mild climate represented a greater threat to white racial vigor than did savagery. Polygenesis alleviated some of these fears, but even Josiah Nott hedged when it came to the question of white superiority and climate. Fears remained, however, that racial vigor could not thrive in warm climates. Many easterners, in fact, criticized California and the Southwest as too healthy. Climates that might suit invalids could nevertheless be harmful to the overall racial vigor of the white race. It fell to promoters and western mythmakers in the last third of the nineteenth century to once again defend their region from detractors and convince Anglo-Americans that the region offered all Americans-not just the sick-an opportunity to achieve a level of development unprecedented in human history. NOTES 1. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast and Other Voyages, Thomas Philbrick, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2005), 166. 2. Ibid., 227. 3. Ibid., 165. 4. Ibid., 377. 5. Richard Henry Dana Jr.,Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859-1860, in ibid., 638. 6. Ibid. 7. J[osiah] Nott and Geo[rge] R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadel- phia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1855), 79. 8. Conevery Bolton Valen~ius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002), 237. 9. For a history of tuberculosis, see Thomas Daniel, The Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999). The definitive Fear and Health in the West 63 study of the influence of health on western settlement remains Billy Mack Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 1817-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967). Io. Stephen Harriman Long, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 1:238. 11. Ibid., 314. 12. John C. Fr6mont and Samuel M. Smucker, The Life of ColonelJohn Charles Fremont (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856), 136. 13. Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, Max L. Moorhead, ed. (Norman: Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 105. 14. Susan Shelby Magoffin, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, Stella M. Drumm, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926), 65-68. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. "Dame Shirley to Molly," September 13, 1851, in Thomas C. Russell, ed., The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922), 4-5. 17. "Dame Shirley to Molly," November 21, 1852, in Shirley Letters, 350; italics in original. 18. Walter Colton, Three Years in California (New York: S. A. Rollo, 1859), 27, 181. 19. Norman Bridge, "Common Sense and Climate," Land of Sunshine (May 1895): 104. Bridge continued his discussion of California's place in healing consumptives in the June 1895 issue. 20. John Muir, Steep Trails, William Frederic Bad6, ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 143-44. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 47. 23. Isabella L. Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 41-42. 24. Cited in Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 96-97. 25. Rose Georgina Kingsley, South by West, or, Winter in the Rocky Mountains and Spring in Mexico (London: W. Isbister, 1874), 143. 26. "Vacation Aspects of Colorado," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 60 (March 1880): 544. 27. Passenger Department of the Denver and Rio Grande RR, "The Opinions of the Judge and the Colonel as to the Vast Resources of Colorado.. .." (Denver: Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 1894), 11. 28. Samuel Edwin Solly, Manitou, Colorado, USA: Its Mineral Waters and Climate (St. Louis: J. McKittrick, 1875), 35. 64 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 29. For more on Solly's life and career, see Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 155-59. 30. Quoted in ibid., 124. 31. Samuel Hopkins Adams, "Tuberculosis: The Real Race Suicide," McClure's Magazine 24 (January 1905): 236. 32. Ibid., 248. 33. On cities and the Progressive Era, see Martin Van Melosi, Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980). 34. Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 124. 35. "The New Immigration," the Nation 53 (September 17, 1891): 209-10. 36. "Changes in Summer Migration," the Nation 53 (September 17, 1891): 210-11. 37. Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 151-52. 38. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 3-30. See also Thomas A. Chambers, Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest. In an exception that proves the rule, Janet Valenza mentions a small resort in Marlin, Texas, that had separate bath quarters for African Americans. See Janet Mace Valenza, Taking the Waters in Texas: Springs, Spas, and Fountains of Youth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 131. 39. Lewis Morris Iddings, "Life in the Altitudes: Colorado's Health Plateau," Scribner's Magazine 19 (February 1896): 139. 40. Ibid., 142. 41. Quoted in Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 97. 3 "THE ABLEST AND MOST VALUABLE FLY RAPIDLY WESTWARD" Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 As railroads grafted the West to the nation with iron stitches and sanitariums and luxury hotels for invalids boasted of the region's healthfulness, some critics argued that too much sun and invigorating air, though good for inva- lids, might prove detrimental to the continued domination of the Anglo- Saxon race. This fear had long simmered in the debate between those who favored monogenesis versus proponents of polygenesis, but now the new racial science of Social Darwinism and eugenics reignited the debate. The region could never become the white man's West until these questions of racial degeneration had been laid to rest. In the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana warned against the "disease" of laziness that appeared endemic in California society. His prediction of possible racial decay echoed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Bayard Taylor, a popular travel writer in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, summed up the paradox of racial development and climate, writing: "In regard to climate, we are met by this difficulty, that that which is most enjoyable is not best adapted to the development of the human race." This phenomena DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.co03 65 66 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 existed because "the zone of action and achievement lies between lat[itudes] 35th and 55th North. On either side of this belt we have a superabundance of the benumbing [cold] or relaxing [hot] element."' In extremely cold climates people struggled to survive, and the harsh weather precluded the devel- opment of real civilization; thus groups like the Inuit and the Laplanders never advanced beyond the primitive stages of human development, or so Taylor claimed. In warmer climates nature was too easy on humanity. With nature providing food and a warm and pleasant environment, work did not motivate humankind, and peoples in these warm climates likewise did not advance beyond primitive stages of development. Taylor predicted that an end to the ancient struggle with a harsh and unrelenting nature would lead whites into the inferiority characteristic of the native Hispanics and Indians of the West. White racial vigor, the hallmark of progress, emanated from climates that were neither too hot nor too cold. Northern Europeans, born struggling against an inhospitable climate, had evolved as superior beings to the darker peoples of the world because they had learned to survive through strug- gle. As the fittest, strongest peoples on the planet, they told themselves, it seemed self-evident that they had emerged as the dominant power on the globe. Colonialism closely tied notions of race to imperial conquest, but in the American West, as Taylor suggested, contact with the region's benefi- cent climate might lead to racial degeneration. Underneath the bravado of Manifest Destiny lingered the fear that Anglo-Americans would soon sink to the level of their non-Anglo neighbors.2 It would fall to westerners themselves to argue against the belief in climate- induced racial degeneration, and they, too, would draw on an environmental explanation to justify the superiority of their culture and society. Charles Fletcher Lummis, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, and others argued that under sunny western skies, Anglo-Americans would advance to an unprecedented state in world history. These western boosters, challenging the assumption that they inhabited a frontier society, argued that the West had grown into the most civilized, moral, progressive, advanced, and whitest region of the nation. Freed from the hardships of a repressive eastern or European winter, Anglo-Saxons in the temperate West would achieve a level of comfort and development unprecedented in the history of the world. Far from a place of racial decline, they argued, the West would become a new, ideal homeland Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 67 for the fittest people on the planet, and along the shores of the Pacific would emerge a new empire greater than any that had come before in human history. Bayard Taylor, in 1861, addressed the issue of climate and racial degener- ation. He found native Californians "vastly superior to the Mexicans," with "larger frames, stronger muscle, and a fresh, ruddy complexion."3 Significantly, these people now enjoyed citizenship in the United States. Native Mexicans presented a very different story. Mexico, he explained, while exceedingly fer- tile and pleasant, did not foster racial vigor. In Mexico, he wrote, "under the influence of a perpetual summer, the native race becomes indolent and care- less of the future. Nature does everything for them." Beans emerged from the ground in limitless profusion, and fruits literally fell from the trees into their hands. While appearing "lithe and agile" and utterly free (or at least Taylor thought so), theirs was a pointless existence, which allowed them to "never step out of the blind though contented round which their fathers walked before them."4 As a result, their intellect and racial vigor atrophied. Helen Hunt Jackson, touring California more than forty years after Richard Henry Dana and a decade after Taylor, echoed their opinions. Jackson observed, "Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man-Fate." In the tropics, she explained, "human activities languish; intellect is supine; only the passions, human nature's rank weed-growths, thrive." Colder cli- mates lacked the fecundity of the tropics and held no prospects of appeal for Americans. There existed a few places, however, "Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a few islands, and South California," warm enough to inspire animal and plant productivity without leading to the languishing of intellect.' Jackson became infatuated with Southern California, and her California novel, Ramona, became a national bestseller and the inspiration for a revival of the region's Hispanic and Indian cultures, albeit in a heav- ily romantic way.' Yet even she had doubts about California's suitability for Anglo-Americans. She wrote, "One never escapes from an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any industries or industry [in Southern California]. No winter to be prepared for; no fixed time at which anything must be done or not done at all; the air sunny, balmy, dreamy, seductive, mak- ing the mere being alive in it a pleasure; all sorts of fruits and grains growing a-riot, and taking care of themselves." In such an environment "it is easy to understand the character, or, to speak more accurately, the lack of char- acter, of the old Mexican and Spanish Californians."7 Their life of ease and 68 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 contentment had been replaced by a more productive and ambitious race. She imagined California's Spanish founders "shuddering, even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his [the Yankee's] colonies, his railroads, his crops their whole land humming and buzzing with his industries."8 Yet had the conquerors themselves been conquered? Americans may have taken California, but in the end California might triumph. The laziness of Californios, Hispanic Californians, Jackson warned, could return: One questions also whether, as the generations move on, the atmosphere of life in the sunny empire they lost will not revert more and more to their type, and be less and less of the type they so disliked. Unto the third and fourth generations, perhaps, pulses may keep up the tireless Yankee beat; but sooner or later there is certain to come a slacking, a toning down, and a readjusting of standards and habits by a scale in which money and work will not be the highest values. This is "as sure as that the sun shines," for it is the sun that will bring it about.' Jackson could see racial degeneration resulting from California's pleas- ant climate, but a sense of ambivalence whispered in her work, a belief that something could be said for a life not measured by money and hectic activity. This reevaluation of priorities would be a theme in the work of later defend- ers of California and the West such as Charles Fletcher Lummis. Evidence of this climatic degeneration, as Jackson intimated, supposedly existed among the native peoples of the Southwest. Americans criticized Hispanics and Indians for being lazy because nature did too much for them. Josiah Gregg's influential travelogue, Commerce of the Prairies (first published in 1844), like Dana's work, helped foment attitudes toward Hispanics. New Mexicans, he asserted, were indolent, immoral, fanatical in their religious beliefs, lacking in intelligence "except in artifice [and exhibiting] no profun- dity except for intrigue."0 John Hanson Beadle, writing in the 1870s, agreed with Gregg. "Take [New Mexicans] all in all," Beadle claimed, "they are a strangely polite, lazy, hospitable, lascivious, kind, careless and no account race."" A Rocky Mountain News contributor in Santa Fe concurred: "The Mexican people . . . are a mixture of the Spanish and the old native, or Indian, races and seem to have inherited the vices and bad qualities of each," including ignorance, superstition, laziness, and lack of ambition. Americans, conversely, "with their thrift, intelligence, and progress [are] making a new Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 69 era for New Mexico."2 Anglo-Americans offered remoteness, the domina- tion of the lower classes by the Catholic Church and the wealthy, a lack of democracy and education, and miscegenation as additional explanations for Hispanic inferiority, but climate also played a key role." Climatic degeneration made men cowardly, weak, and effeminate, while women became lascivious, as Dana had asserted when discussing the Bandinis of California, an influential couple he had met during his visit in the 1830s. Many later observers agreed with both assessments. Frederick Law Olmsted admired the Hispanic women he met in Texas and Mexico. He attributed their beauty, at least in part, to the climate. "Their dresses," he wrote with barely restrained glee, "seemed lazily reluctant to cover their plump persons, and their attitudes were always expressive of the influences of a Southern sun upon national manners."4 Being plump signified healthfulness, which Texas provided, and the sun made these women eager to expose more of themselves than American women would have dared. Sexual forwardness resulted from this solar seduction. Hispanic women did not enchant every American man, or at least they did not admit to it in print. Beadle demurred from the perspective of Dana and Olmsted. He wrote, "Barbarous people are never really beautiful; and where women are freest, there most beauty is found." Free from the control of superstitions and a false religion, American women remained the most beautiful. With patriotic zeal he even appropriated Patrick Henry's famous quote, declaring, "Give me an American woman or give me death!"5 A supe- rior culture, Beadle asserted, could only develop from a superior civilization; a debased civilization would inevitably succumb to the environment, and no red-blooded American man should surrender to the temptations of a seduc- tive climate or the flirtatious women who inhabited it. At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Fletcher Lummis, a His- panophile in every sense of the word, came to a much different conclusion. He had long been captivated by the women of the Spanish Southwest (a fact that drew considerable comment from his detractors and apparently with good reason, as his wife accused him of infidelity with several women, including at least one Hispanic woman, during divorce proceedings in 1909). He set out to defend their beauty and morality in the January 1895 issue of Land of Sunshine, the magazine he edited in the late 189os and early 19oos. Lummis described all the women of Spanish America as fair, but the fairest 70 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 could be found on the northern and southern extremes, far from the heat and "African" influences.16 California's Hispanic women, not surprisingly, ranked as his favorites. He wrote, 'As a rule, the facial types of the cooler Spanish-American countries are . . . finer, more spiritual, than those nearer the equator."17 The accompanying illustrations showed that when he wrote "finer" and "more spiritual," he meant whiter. His rhetoric assumed implic- itly that being far away from the heat of the tropics, where Africans thrived, made the women lighter skinned and therefore more Spanish and attractive. Clearly, therefore, the idea that genial climates could lead to racial degen- eration remained in circulation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lummis and other western defenders, however, had a new scientific tool at their disposal, a tool that would enable them to address their critics and lay to rest fears of climatic degeneration: evolutionary theory and its bas- tardized progeny, Social Darwinism and eugenics. These new ideas indelibly shaped the argument over the appropriateness of Anglo settlement in the American West. Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859, marked a dramatic breakthrough in the natural sciences, accounting for the tremendous vari- ation in the world's flora and fauna by postulating that plants and animals gradually adapted to changes in the environment over many millennia. This slow rate of change, over the course of centuries, made the fears of rapid racial degeneration suddenly seem laughable. Evolutionary theory quickly spread beyond a small group of scientists to historians, ethnologists, the newly emerging sociologists, and scores of other thinkers, all applying evolutionary principles to their disciplines and society at large. America in the late nineteenth century latched on to the theory with tremendous enthusiasm for, in the hands of Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, it made sense of a rapidly changing and industrializing nation and justified the continued domination of Anglo-Americans over supposedly inferior and less well-adapted immigrants. According to historian Richard Hofstadter, Americans took to Darwin's theory and its supposed social impli- cations so rapidly that post-bellum America could be called "the Darwinian country. England gave Darwin to the world, but the United States gave to Darwinism an unusually quick and sympathetic reception."8 The theory, moreover, argued against radical social changes and reforms like socialism, communism, and even more modest reforms, because would not social r -J DC .1* - Ia "AL - ' - -4 '1 FIGURE 3.I.Charles Fletcher Lummis loved the Del Valle family, spending a great deal of time with them. No doubt when he celebrated the beauty of Hispanic women, he had the Del Valle girls in mind. Courtesy, Braun Research Library Col- lection, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. 72 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 change, like biological change, be slow, spanning generations? Furthermore, in a system based on competition, the wisest men would naturally be the most powerful and affluent, and the inferior laboring classes would be below them. Both of these observations spoke to a conservative impulse among America's Anglo elite. Herbert Spencer became the most influential thinker to articulate and popularize the social implications of Darwin's theory. Adapting Darwin's ideas, Spencer wrote several volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy in the 186os and 1870s. These essentially summarized the latest scientific findings, not just those relating to Darwinism but also to geology, embryology, physics, and even philosophical meditations like those of Thomas Malthus. Spencer's genius lay in making these varied ideas accessible and applicable to mod- ern society, but Darwin's theory was clearly the focal point of Spencer's sys- tem of human society. Coining the term the survival of the fittest (seven years before Darwin published Origin), he argued that each generation represented the triumph of the best humans over the less-adapted ones. The poor were the least fit to survive, and for the betterment of humanity as a whole the state should not aid the poor in any way. It might seem cruel, he argued, but if the poor "are not sufficiently complete to live," he wrote, "they die, and it is best they should die."19 Social Darwinism should not be blamed for causing American imperialism, but it certainly helped justify it. Americans, after all, had long harbored a sense of mission that had a racial dimension. Just as the supposedly scientifically factual racial Anglo-Saxonism of polygenesis justified the Mexican-American War, Darwin's theory gave late-nineteenth-century racism and imperial expansion a basis in cutting-edge science. Social Darwinism explained war as beneficial. In the hands of imperialistic thinkers, war became not something to be avoided but instead a competition pitting man against man, with the strongest emerging victorious. It fell upon Americans as heirs to the legacy of the Anglo-Saxons to continue the westward expansion of the race.20 In the 188os John Fiske, an acolyte of the pacifistic Spencer, gave a series of lectures celebrating the Anglo-Saxon legacy of Americans and their English cousins. He argued that the democratic legacy of ancient Rome had been carried forward by the hardy Anglo-Saxon and Germanic tribes after the fall of the Roman empire. Anglo-Saxons had a duty to continue the expansion of freedom and democracy. The next step in world history, he argued, was the Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 73 global domination of Anglo-Saxons, which would, perhaps somewhat iron- ically given their supposed martial prowess, usher in an era of worldwide peace. Americans and Englishmen would soon outbreed other, lesser races, transforming the Americas and perhaps even Africa into new Anglo-Saxon strongholds. Fiske's lectures so captivated Americans that more than twenty newspapers published his 1885 lecture on Manifest Destiny. He had lectured in England and before a crowd that included President Rutherford B. Hayes, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and numerous other dignitaries." Aline Gorren, in Anglo-Saxons and Others, also explicitly linked imperialism and industrial acumen to evolutionary theory, arguing that Anglo-Saxons, alone among the white races of the world, seemed suited to industrial devel- opment and imperial expansion. Modern society, with its great factories and mechanized armies, differed markedly from any that had preceded it. This was the new environment of the modern age, and, as with any environmen- tal change, only the strongest and fittest would thrive. Gorren claimed, "The Anglo-Saxons are the only peoples who [are in] perfect accord with the char- acteristic conditions of modern life. They are in absolute harmony with their environment as it is constituted by those conditions. Other peoples . . . are striving to adapt themselves, but they fail in part because their organs are not prepared for the new functions demanded of them."22 A pragmatic philosophy and a desire to work hard enough to procure material comfort separated the Anglo-Saxons from all other races, even the other white peoples of Europe. "Evolution," Gorren noted, "had sanctified the wisdom of their practical view of life. It might be said that one must never again speak slightingly of material instincts, of a like for good food, and good clothes, and a good home ... provided one have the love of action which makes the hard work necessary for the obtaining of these things not too desperately irksome." From this self-interest would come a desire to show the rest of the world how best to live or, in short, how best to be like the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon lifestyle of pragmatism and material comfort would appear "like a revelation directly from on high and which lift[s] up the Anglo-Saxon as a beacon light to humanity."23 Some would see that beacon and change; others would not. The twentieth century, Gorren warned, would "be one fierce fight for self-preservation, in which it is cer- tainly the weakest that will go to the wall, those, that is, whose equip- ment is the least complete for the special business at hand." Evolution had 74 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 dictated that only those best suited to the industrial world would survive. With a flair for understatement he wrote, "It is safe to assume that the Anglo-Saxons will not be of that number, for it has been observed that they are the most perfect."24 Evolutionary theory not only justified white supremacy and imperial expan- sion but also alleviated guilt over conquest. Gorren and others could speak in euphemisms such as "going to the wall," but in practice that meant extinction of the "lesser" races. For support of the view that inferior races would disap- pear, one need not look far. Darwin's theory stressed confrontation and the triumph of the strongest over the weakest. As Hofstadter noted, "Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of [the] Species, which had referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life."25 Darwin, indeed, indulged in the stock racism of his age, writing in The Descent of Man, "The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated." The result would be a greater gap between man and animal as struggle wiped out Africans and Australian Aborigines on the human side and gorillas and other primates on the animal side.26 Extinction discourse, as contemporary scholars have called the belief that "savage" peoples were fated to disappear, issued from racism and imperialism. Often, the phrasing of arguments implied extinction as something natural and therefore unavoidable, not the product of European invasion. Primitive peoples would naturally vanish before the onslaught of European immi- gration. Warfare and disease-the latter mysterious and often attributed to forces beyond human understanding-contributed to the passing of races. Another cause existed as well: savagery would be self-extinguishing. "Savage" practices like infanticide and human sacrifice would lead these races to com- mit "race suicide." The historian Patrick Brantlinger has observed that this notion amounted to "an extreme form of blaming the victim." The wide- spread belief in extinction also created a consensus among Europeans, even those working to save the primitive races, that extinction was inevitable, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that nevertheless ameliorated white guilt. Whites themselves had not caused the precipitous decline in native popula- tions; it had simply resulted from natural Darwinian competition or perhaps the will of a dispassionate God.27 Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 75 Westerners certainly agreed with much of Social Darwinism and the later eugenics movement. Some like Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, even shaped the debate, and there existed distinctive regional varia- tions on these issues in the West. Extinction discourse, for example, assuaged westerners' guilt over the supposed disappearance of American Indians. With the conquest of the West complete by the last third of the nineteenth century, attention could be shifted to the issue of climate and racial degen- eration. Whites had clearly taken up residence in the region, and one day the region would become important and powerful, but the predictions of writers from Richard Henry Dana to Bayard Taylor haunted westerners who worried that their region would produce only an inferior population. To put these ghosts to rest, westerners needed to arrive at a belief that whiteness could thrive in a climate that seemed so alien to anything in the race's past. Charles Fletcher Lummis, for one, brandished Darwinism like a club, strik- ing fiercely at the notion that western expansion would lead to racial decay.28 As editor of the influential magazine Land of Sunshine (later renamed Out West), Lummis argued that California's climate would improve the race and make the state the most powerful in the nation.29 Addressing the issue in his first Land of Sunshine editorial in January 1895, he asserted that the Golden State's development represented not just another chapter in the story of American settlement but rather the beginning of a new era in the history of humanity: "Here for the very first time the Saxon has made himself fully at home in a perfect type of the semi-tropics." Historically, "Our blood has befalled [sic] climes where to keep alive was in itself a reasonably active occu- pation. What will be the human outcome of this radical change[?]" Lummis answered his own rhetorical question, arguing that a new society would emerge superior to both the old, indolent Hispanic one and the vigorous but stodgy society of Lummis's native New England: "Southern California is not only the new Eden of the Saxon home-seeker, but part, and type, of Spanish- America; the scene where American energy has wrought miracles . . . but under the skies of New Spain."30 A year later, in one of many editorials Lummis wrote comparing California to the East, he again defended his adopted state's weather. Referring to him- self in the third person he wrote, "He is not a Southwesterner because he has to be, but because he chooses. He counts it the most important venture his Saxon tribe ever made-this trying on of its first comfortable environment. 76 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 And by so much as he believes in evolution, he believes that in this moth- erly climate the race now foremost in the world will fairly outstrip itself in achievement; and most of all in what is best of all-the joy of life."3 A large portion of the February 1896 issue addressed the question of racial degeneration and California's climate. Lummis charged Charles Dudley Warner, an alleged expert on the relationship between race and climate (though in reality an eastern writer and editor most famous for coauthoring The Gilded Age with Mark Twain), with defending Southern California's cli- mate.32 Warner explained that Anglos did poorly in exceptionally hot climates, such as the Caribbean. Blacks in these climates indeed appeared healthier than whites, he conceded, but the heat and humidity sapped their vigor, leav- ing them lazy and unmotivated. Civilization needed a cooler environment in which to thrive. He wrote, "It is the lesson of experience that the white races thrive best, produce the best results of civilization, in temperate and even in rough climates. Greece, Italy, Spain, furnish no exceptions to this, for in each [a] very appreciable winter prevails." A winter's chill, it seemed, could create civilization, and Anglos excelled in such frigid conditions.33 Warner was essentially arguing that California was nice but, like Italy and Greece, the wellsprings of Western civilization, not too nice. He next addressed the question of environment and racial vigor, asking, "Will the settlers hold their northern vigor and enterprise, or will they fol- low the example of their occupiers, the Spanish Americans?"34 The answer was neither. A healthier climate, Warner argued, would not hurt Anglos, who were strong enough to endure the nicest weather, and they might even benefit from it. Southern California perhaps could become a place "reason- ably prosperous, not without energy, industrially and intellectually, and yet not have the restlessness of some others I know, and not be in a continu- ous exasperating war with nature and with man."35 Lummis, in his editorial for the same issue, succinctly answered those who argued that California threatened the survival of the race. He quipped, "If that gentleman's [i.e., Anglo-Saxon's] . . . stamina is of such poor sort that it will spoil if not kept on ice-then it isn't quite so essential to the world's development as he is inclined to deem it."36 Lummis would spend most of the next thirty years recapitulating his belief in California's destiny. Every issue of the Land of Sunshine/Out West show- cased at least one of Southern California's rapidly growing towns. On the Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 77 surface these articles were simply intended to lure home-seekers and inves- tors, detailing such prosaic things as the number of schools and churches, the size and productivity of farms, and so on; but the subtext behind the black- and-white photos and the narrative of promotion maintained that Southern California merged Anglo-Saxon vigor with the climate of the Mediterranean, creating an area of unprecedented wealth and growth. California's destiny as a great and powerful area seemed assured. Like Lummis, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, a former army surgeon during the wars against the Apache in Arizona and later a promoter of Southern California, believed in the racial destiny of California and the West. Widney felt the West offered the American Anglo-Saxon (or in his terminology the Engle-American) a chance at world domination. While Lummis and Warner argued that whites had never experienced a climate as nice as those of California and the Southwest, Widney argued that the conquest of the West represented a return to the distant past, a time when Aryan horsemen had claimed not the American West but the plains of Asia. In the second volume of his two-volume epic The Race Life of the Aryan Peoples he wrote, "The cow- boy of the Western plains of America is only the cowboy of the uplands of Mid-Asia of three thousand years ago come to life again. His prototype is more than hinted at in the cow songs of the Hymns to the Maruts and in the earlier Avestas, even to the 'round-ups,' lacking only the grim crack of the revolver, but not lacking the grim spirit of battling."37 Unlike Washington Irving, who feared the wild plains, Widney believed losing some of the "set- tled habits" of European life would not lead to savagery but instead would represent a return to Aryan racial destiny: 'As America east of the Mississippi is Europe, only a modified Europe; so America west of the Mississippi is Asia, only a modified Asia."38 Settling the West was not an attempt at settling in a new climate but rather a homecoming. Best of all, Anglo-Americans could have Mexico as well because its high, dry central plateau was not unlike the Asian high plains or California.39 Widney did, however, agree with most observers about the debilitative effects of tropical climates on the Aryan races, ranking climate as the second- most-important influence on racial degeneration behind only miscegenation. Races would remain true to their ancestry as long as they continued to live in climates conducive to them. Canada's cold climate had proven unfavorable to the French, and the Spanish, likewise, had succumbed to racial degeneration 78 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 in the New World. He claimed, "The Spaniard landed south of his normal climatic home . . . to the hot, humid shores of the West Indies . . . the Gulf of Mexico, and. . . the east slope of the Andes." Spain's tropical settlements were therefore capable of breeding malaria and yellow fever but not "the iron- sinewed [conquistadors] of the high dry mesas of Castile and Leon ... who, clad in armor, could toil through the everglades of Florida battling their way on to the banks of the Mississippi, [braving] the marshy plains of tierra caliente with their dread vomito." Instead, miscegenation and climatic degeneration destroyed the race and banished the conquistador to memory. Widney continued, "The half-breed children of these men of storm and stress swung in the hammock under tropical shades, smoking the cigarette, and dreaming away the noonday hours, while men of a sterner breed despoiled them of their patrimony. The life of storm and stress for them did not exist; and the empire their fathers had won in toil and battling slipped unheeded from nerveless hands."40 The Spanish-American War closed, he argued, the final chapter in the story of Spanish racial degeneration, and their defeat at the hands of the racially vigorous Aryan Americans provided a cautionary tale about the limits of imperialism. Environment determined race, and empires that overreached, expanding into climates unfamiliar to their racial past, were destined to fall; but, excepting the tropics, it was America's duty to spread its control over the temperate sections of the globe. He concluded, echoing Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, "The end of it all is the survival of the fittest; and this is Imperialism. And it has been the race law of the world from the beginning."4 Lummis's and Widney's use of Social Darwinism to defend the western climate from its detractors marked only the beginning of their argument. Western intellectuals, keen on using Social Darwinism and eugenics to their advantage, argued that westerners, in fact, collectively constituted the most advanced people on the planet. Anglo-Americans in the late nineteenth cen- tury faced the danger of too much civilization. A beneficent climate would not cause racial degeneration, but life in comfortable cities could. Without a frontier to conquer and battles to win, Anglo-Americans would become weak and effeminate. Indeed, perhaps many had already succumbed to inferiority. Americans might be stronger and more vigorous than Europeans, but they, too, were threatened by comfort and weakness. Colonists to the New World had left behind the insulating civility of Europe to battle with a harsh nature and American Indians. They had been strengthened by the rigors of western Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 79 expansion and settlement, the weak dying and the strong enduring. Out of this struggle with savages and the wilderness, they had become American. This argument meshed well with Social Darwinism and eugenic theory. By the early years of the twentieth century, Anglo-Americans seemed increasingly enamored of eugenics, the science of encouraging desirable (middle-class Anglo-American) citizens to breed while discouraging lesser peoples like immigrants and African Americans from doing so. Leading eugenicists like Charles Benedict Davenport and Stanford's David Starr Jordan found an eager audience in westerners. As the historian Alexandra Minna Stern has argued, eugenics was a national and not just an eastern phenome- non that took hold in the West. She noted that "California performed twenty thousand sterilizations, one-third of the total performed in the country, that Oregon created a state eugenics board in 1917, and that the impact of restric- tive immigration laws designed to shield America from polluting 'germ plasm' reverberated with great intensity along the Mexican border." The West, she asserted, also provided a racial mythology that eugenicists appropriated, a mythology based on an updated version of the "noble westward march of Anglo-Saxons and Nordics."42 Conversely, western proponents declared their region, not the East, the most advanced section of the country. The West, they argued, had become a refuge from the problems of the Gilded Age, a place free of urban slums, machine politics, and "undigestible immigrants." The non-white groups of the West, the Indians, Hispanics, and Chinese, were harmless and romantic unlike the millions of immigrants flooding the nation's eastern ports who threatened to destroy democracy itself through their willingness to vote for political machines. Drawing on Social Darwinism and eugenics, westerners justified the inev- itable settlement of non-Anglo immigrants as well. Those who made it to the West, whether native-born or foreign, represented the best of the best, the bravest, fittest, most energetic examples of humanity. Immigrants to the region would not pose a threat as did those in the East because they were of a better class and much smaller in number. Limits to this belief existed, how- ever. Many westerners were reluctant to admit that the Chinese were equal members of society, and they considered the clannish and odd Mormons inferior to mainstream Americans, despite the fact that their membership was heavily composed of desirable Northern European immigrant groups. 80 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 To convince Americans of the superiority of western society, westerners nevertheless had to confront the dominant view of the region as a frontier. The image of the West as a backward, violent frontier with little civilization and culture had become a well-established stereotype by the middle of the nine- teenth century, but its origins preceded the founding of the United States.43 No less a critic than the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville saw the frontier as a threat to American democracy. Every year, Americans "quit the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean to plunge into the Western wilderness," he observed. These were rootless people, often outcasts in their home states, people filled with greedy desires. They entered a world without laws and authority, with- out family connections and tradition or morality. Still, these inferior peoples could join as equal members of the Union, giving them the right to govern the nation "before they have learned to govern themselves."44 Tocqueville did not simply observe that westerners could not create effective governments on the frontier but also that they could not "govern" or restrain the passions that life on the frontier undoubtedly exposed. The perpetuation of democ- racy, however, required restraining such base passions. Tocqueville's criticism of frontiersmen foreshadowed criticism of recent immigrants, who also sup- posedly lacked the mental acumen necessary for democracy. Nevertheless, other visitors to the frontier echoed Tocqueville's observations. Isabella Bird, an English traveler, wrote to her sister in 1873 describing life on the Colorado frontier as "moral, hard, unloving, unlovely, unrelieved, unbeautified, [and] grinding." Such "discomfort and lack of ease and refine- ment ... seems only possible to people of British stock."45 Worse, Coloradans cared little for organized religion, and taking advantage of "your neighbor in every fashion which is not illegal, is the quality held in the greatest repute.-"46 She assured her sister of her complete safety, despite traveling alone, among such godless heathens, but violence lingered nearby even in her narrative. Bird herself never encountered the worst aspects of western frontier life, perhaps because of the deference even frontiersmen showed to women, especially genteel women like herself. Yet she met at least one man whose reputation for violence preceded him. He was Mountain Jim, her guide up Longs Peak and a notorious trapper with "'Desperado' . . . written in large letters all over him." Mountain Jim was a shocking sight, missing an eye from an encounter with a grizzly bear and dressed in tatters with a large knife and a revolver tucked into his belt. Yet, "as he spoke I forgot both his Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 81 reputation and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentle- man, his accent refined, and his language easy and elegant."47 In a footnote Bird explained that nine months after their tour of Estes Park, someone murdered Mountain Jim: "His life, without doubt, was deeply stained with crimes and vices, and his reputation for ruffianism was a deserved one."48 Still, she had found fears of the harshness of frontier life to be overblown. The writers of a celebratory sketch of Los Angeles (written in 1876 to com- memorate both the American centennial and the approximately first cen- tury of Los Angeles history) admitted that the Anglo influx into Southern California "was not always made up of the more peaceable elements of society. Men of questionable character, men of no character, drifted in." Yet these "sun-tanned," strong, and vigorous men instantly cast off "the long, slumb'rous years of the old Missions and ranchos," bringing progress and commerce to the region, a fair trade for a period of violence.49 Thus even boomers like the trio behind the sketch of Los Angeles could not entirely break with the impression of the West as a rough country, filled with rough people. American popular culture, fromJames Fenimore Cooper onward, had found in the frontier adventure and violence, and dissuading outsiders of the myth of the romantic and adventurous West would prove nearly impossible.50 Not everyone, however, found the frontier and its people uncouth and dangerous. Helen Hunt Jackson, a cultured New England writer, found Colorado to her liking-at least once she got over the shock of the move and the radically different landscape. Forced, like many other invalids, to migrate in search of a curative climate, Helen Hunt (not yet a Jackson) moved to Colorado Springs in 1873. A convert to the West, Jackson spent the last decade of her life celebrating the West and its peoples, including the American Indians, whom she believed the federal government and American civiliza- tion had severely mistreated.5" She adored her new hometown of Colorado Springs, writing numerous essays extolling the beauty of the scenery and the kindness of her neighbors. Western towns might be rough in character and buildings, but there also prevailed a "helpfulness and sympathy . . . born of the hard-pressing needs and the closely-linked common life." This differed from older eastern com- munities, where "people have crystallized into a strong indifference to each other's affairs, which, if [it] were analyzed, would be found to be nine parts selfishness."52 Like other western defenders, she believed the West would be 82 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 different from the East. Surrounded by a benevolent and beautiful natural environment, westerners could lead a purer and more genuine life. In her 1874 essay "Colorado Springs" she declared, "There is to be born of these plains and mountains, all along the great central plateaus of [the] continent, the very best life, both physical and mental, of the coming centuries." Like an echo of antiquity, Colorado would be home to "patriarchal families living with their herds, as patriarchs lived of old on the eastern plains [in the Middle East]." "Of such life, such blood," Jackson continued, "comes culture of a few genera- tions later-a culture all the better because it comes spontaneously and not of effort, is a growth and not a graft." Reinforcing this return to the patriarchs of yesterday and their resurrection in the West, she concluded, "It was in the east that the wise men saw the star; but it was westward to a high mountain, in a lonely place, that the disciples were led for the transfiguration!"53 Comparing Coloradans to the shepherds of the Bible seemed a bit presumptuous, and clearly there was a racial and ethnic element to her observations. The blood, a signifier of racial and ethnic composition, set Coloradans literally apart, and Colorado's altitude put them a mile closer to heaven. In both cases, this made them better (and racially purer) than people in the East. The pioneer farmer as an iconic American figure had already established himself by the nineteenth century, and westerners keenly used the myth of the hardworking and moral farmer to their advantage. William Gilpin, a for- mer Colorado territorial governor and Denver promoter, stressed that west- ern emigrants resembled an orderly, peaceful, and disciplined army planting an "empire in the wilderness by a system of colonization at once perfect and inscrutable." Pushed by the tens of thousands of immigrants from the Old World (themselves the chosen, hardest-working members of their nations, Gilpin claimed), "our own people . . . perpetually move up to recruit and reinforce the pioneers."54 These new pioneers invariably derived from the fittest members of society, and their vigor, Gilpin believed, would create a powerful city at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Joseph Pomeroy Widney claimed to have studied the racial superiority and biological fitness of immigrants to the West, and, like Hunt and Gilpin, he believed westerners were a breed apart. The pioneers, he claimed, were "a people tall, erect, spare, not an ounce of superfluous flesh, full-chested, clean-limbed, head narrow rather than broad, of the dolichocephalous type, features inclined to the aquiline cast, hair straight, eye[s] keen, alert, Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 83 restless." They had descended from the rugged trans-Appalachian frontiers- men, the men "who for generations had served as a bumper between the steadily advancing civilization of the Atlantic coast and the wild Indian who was forced back before it."55 These pioneering sons of pioneers displayed not only great bravery but also admirable intelligence, growing up to be men like George Rogers Clark, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln-esteemed com- pany indeed.56 Conflict and the rigors of the frontier had made these men the proto-typical Americans, while in the East "people [were] influenced and tinged by the constant influx of alien blood." European ideas, values, and even languages constantly molded easterners. The westerner differed because "his blood yearly is becoming more purely America; for he is breed- ing out the inherited types."57 The westerner had no memory of Europe and therefore no compunction to follow its effete values and culture. Charles Benedict Davenport, a leading eugenicist, outlined how migration could strengthen a group or a race, and he used the West as an example. Migrations "have a profound eugenic significance. The most active, ambi- tious, and courageous blood migrates. It migrated to America and has made her what she has become; in America another selection took place in the western migrations, and what this best blood-this creme de la creme-did in the West all the world knows."58 Similarly, a Denver and Rio Grande promotional pamphlet, extolling Colorado's considerable virtues, claimed, "Colorado's people are picked from the best communities in the world, and they come this long distance because here they find the best opportunities for health and wealth, and many are attracted by our superb climate. Colorado is just far enough from the denser settlements of the country not to attract the indolent and the shiftless. . . the intelligence and morality of our people is far above the average."59 Charles Nordhoff, in California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, first pub- lished in the 1870s, predicted greatness for California because its superior population outshone that of eastern cities. New York, according to Nordhoff, deserved credit as the true frontier because there civilized Anglo-Americans came into contact with European immigrants of the basest sort, and the immigrants were clearly winning. "New York receives," Nordhoff wrote, "a constant supply of the rudest, least civilized European populations; that of the immigrants landed at Castle Garden, the neediest, the least thrifty and energetic, and the most vicious remain in New York, while the ablest and 84 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 most valuable fly rapidly westward . . . [where they became members of California's] settled permanent population."60 Even the Chinese, Nordhoff declared, proved more desirable than the teeming masses of immigrants flooding eastern cities because at least they could read their native language and knew their place in society. Nordhoff described meeting an original forty-niner who explained that a kind of nat- ural selection accounted for California's superiority to the East. The pioneer, now a wealthy banker, explained, "When gold was discovered. . . wherever an Eastern family had three or four boys, the ablest, the most energetic one, came hither. Of that great multitude of picked men, again, the weakly broke down under the strain; they died of disease or bad whiskey, or they returned home. The remainder you see here, and you ought not to wonder that they are above your Eastern average in intelligence, energy, and thrift."61 Americans considered intelligence, energy, and thrift the most desirable characteristics, the traits that made America great. These marked the very traits Richard Henry Dana had found lacking in Hispanic Californians, a defi- ciency he attributed to California's climate. Nordhoff's banker saw things differently. He stressed that California's population did not roam because few wanted to return to the East, and they could go no farther west than California. California and the West, therefore, had the best and fittest mem- bers of the Anglo population. Even the region's non-Anglo immigrants sur- passed their countrymen in the East because of their vigor and ambition. All in all, the banker concluded, "We have much less of a frontier population than ... [exists] in New York."62 The positive influence of migration was also described in John Hanson Beadle's The Undeveloped West. California, he declared, would be great because of the influence of the diversity of its population and the influence of migration on improving settlers: "The future Californians will probably be the most inventive race in the world; for only the most resolute settled the country at first, only the most skillful succeeded, and their situation was such as to make invention and contrivance a necessity. Still more will this result from a mixture of races; that state of facts which has made the American what he is, exists tenfold more in California."63 A generation later, David Starr Jordan similarly declared that westward movement had created a superior human being in California. In a 1908 article in Sunset magazine, Jordan declared, "In my judgment the essential source of Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 85 Californianism lies in heredity. The Californian of to-day is of the type of his father of fifty years ago. The Argonauts of '49 were buoyant, self-reliant, ade- quate, reckless, thoroughly individualistic, capable of all adjustments, care- less of conventions, eager to enjoy life and action. And we, their sons, with all admixture of other blood of other temperament are still made in their image. It is blood which tells."64 The winnowing process of migration would seem to have been under- mined by new technologies. The West, following the completion of the trans- continental railroad, could be easily accessed by even the least vigorous. Yet a promoter as gifted as Charles Fletcher Lummis could find a way to perpet- uate the argument put forth by Nordhoff and others. Lummis turned to the free market to explain the West's continued domination by desirable peoples. The West's "transcontinental spaces, the size of fares, the far greater cost of land [were all influential] in determining (by elimination) the extraordinary average of the new California in morals, intelligence, and property. Not only has something attracted a desirable class; something has rather warded the undesirables."65 Western migration demanded a robust physique and a robust bank account, neither of which recent immigrants possessed. Though western boosters desired native-born Americans, they accepted immigrants who settled in the region as somehow superior to their countrymen in the East and more willing to assimilate into American culture. The West, so the argument went, compelled immigrants to rapidly abandon their old national and ethnic identities and become American. No less a voice than FrederickJackson Turner articulated this belief in his famous 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner argued that the rapid assimilation of immigrants into American culture merely illustrated the benevolent power of the frontier. The frontier was the defining feature in American history, a place that provided an outlet for excess population, a home for grassroots democracy, and a fertile land to feed a hungry nation. Turner declared, "The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization." There, at the "meeting point between savagery and civilization," the immigrant, as many worried, did temporarily become a little savage as he traded the "railroad car" for the "birch canoe." Huddled in clearings hewn from the woods by vanishing Indians, following faint Indian trails, and planting Indian corn, the European immigrant slowly became like an Indian, finding the frontier environment "at first too strong for the 86 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 man." This changed, however, as slowly, steadily, the settler pushed back the wilderness and brought forth civilization. By this time, after years of struggle, he had left behind his European background and emerged transfigured as an American.66 Turner, in stark contrast to Washington Irving's early- nineteenth-century analysis, looked back on the era of frontier expansion as the formative experience in American history. Like Widney, Turner believed each successive period of frontier settlement diluted the European influence. The Atlantic Coast settlements acted as "the frontier of Europe," but with each generation "the frontier became more and more American."67 Turner's view, while perhaps partly nostalgia, reflected the fin de siecle transformation in people's attitudes about the West as a place. No longer did the frontier represent something fearful; it now defined the meaning of American. Americans recognized the difficult labor inherent in frontier life, especially farming, and they saw hard work as a desirable trait in immigrants to the West. Americans admired those immigrants because their hard work literally made the desert bloom. In their work ethnic, many western writers declared, immigrants far outmatched native-born Americans. Frederick Law Olmsted, writing in the 1850s, found immigrants in Texas the hardest-working and most able people in the state. The German immigrants in towns like Neu Branfels, he explained, were poor but industrious, and their fortunes improved each year because of their hard work. They lived in small but well-made houses, with neat fields surrounding them that stood in stark contrast to "the patches of corn-stubble, overgrown with crab-grass, which are usually the only gar- dens to be seen adjoining the cabins of the poor whites and slaves."68 This progress, Olmsted asserted, resulted from free labor and a work ethic that made these Germans the equals of the best native-born citizens. In the late 1870s James Rusling similarly witnessed immigrant labor as transformative in Missouri. They elevated the state from the degenerate condition in which it had existed during slavery: 'All along the route, it was plain to be seen, Missouri had suffered sadly from slavery. But the wave of immigration, now that slavery was dead, had already reached her, and we found its healthful currents everywhere overflowing her bottoms and prai- ries." Vigorous and industrious Germans and Yankees inhabited land that had once known only white laziness and black slave labor. The desirability of freedom-loving, hardworking German immigrants was self-evident, Rusling argued: "The sturdy Rhine-men, as true to freedom as in the days of Tacitus, Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 87 were already everywhere planting vineyards, and in the near future were sure of handsome returns from petty farms, that our old time 'Pikes' and 'Border Ruffians' would have starved on."69 He found many of the same character- istics in the German population of Anaheim, California: "Here were some five hundred or more Germans, all industriously engaged, and exhibiting of course their usual sagacity and thrift. They had constructed acequias, and carried the hitherto useless Santa Anna River everywhere-around through their lots, and past every door; they had hedged their little farms with wil- lows, and planted them with vines, orange, lemon, and olive trees; and the once barren plains in summer were now alive with perpetual foliage and verdure." Their settlement resembled "a bit of Germany, dropped down on the Pacific Coast. It has little in common with Los Angelos [sic] the dirty, but the glorious climate and soil, and was an agreeable surprise [in] every way."70 From Texas to Missouri to California, these industrious immigrants trans- formed the landscape, putting down roots and rapidly remade these places into the white man's West. The transformative power of the West and its need for good, hardworking immigrants was the subject of a 1910 article by Herbert Kaufman in the mag- azine Everybody's, titled "Southwestward Ho!" The essay extolled the virtues of immigrant settlement in Texas and Oklahoma. Ideally, Kaufman declared, young Americans would finally turn their backs on the corrupt and evil cities and return to the countryside. Despite being raised in urban enclaves, these young people would unconsciously remember their agrarian ancestral past: "They are Americans, the native-born, the sons and the daughters of pioneer strain, hearkening to the impulse which in another day drove forth their for- bear[s]."71 Yet they did not return in great enough numbers to alleviate the Southwest's "help problem." Kaufman continued: "The native whites will not enter service. Colored help is insolent and inefficient. But this simply means the coming of the immigrant girl, who in turn will lead her man after her; and both will benefit the region."72 The best solution to the immigrant problem, Kaufman declared, was to divert Eastern European immigration to Galveston: "Italy could empty herself into Texas alone, and Texas would still have room for Germany and France to boot."73 Italians and other "Latins," considered a scourge in other parts of the country, could easily adapt to Texas's warm climate (since they were from the warm Mediterranean), and they would quickly assimilate into American society, benefiting Texas and the nation. 88 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 Immigrants' thrift, industry, and desire for hard work made them accept- able to westerners, many of whom believed that only these kinds of immi- grants should settle in the region. Yet hard work would not necessarily allow westerners to appreciate groups that seemed too radically different. Westerners singled out the Chinese and the Mormons of Utah as undesirable, despite their work ethics. The former were racially too different and the lat- ter acolytes of religious heresy in the minds of most Americans. Regardless of their willingness to labor, westerners roundly discriminated against the Chinese. James G. Eastman, the orator of Los Angeles's centennial celebra- tion in 1876, for example, declared that the nation had room for "the inge- nious Swiss, the practical Englishman, the polished Frenchman, the philo- sophic German, the gallant Spaniard, the busy, country-loving Irishman, and the sturdy Swede." These Europeans worked hard and appreciated freedom and democracy. America would remain a haven, he declared, "to all who come with brain or muscle or skill to enjoy the blessings of our government because they believe in its principles and love its doctrines, and desire to con- tribute to its success, the invitation is irrevocable, and the doors are open forever. They are brothers in blood, in thought, in aspiration and inheritance." The Chinese, by contrast, were inclined to idolatry, consented to monarchy, and despised American values and institutions, Eastman claimed. He con- cluded, "This grand continent, with its civilization and wondrous develop- ment, its cultivating valleys and happy homes, is not the lap into which China may spew its criminals and paupers, its invalids and idiots, its surplus moral and physical leprosy."74 Even worse, as many observers asserted, the Chinese could survive on very little. Edwin R. Meade, in the explorer F. V. Hayden's popular book on the West, declared that the Chinese would hurt white laborers: "It is impos- sible that the white laborer can persist in the presence of these conditions [low Chinese wage rates]. Not only substantial food, comfortable clothing, and decent household accommodations are necessary to him, but his fam- ily must be supported in a respectable manner and schooling and religious training be provided for his children. These latter have become essential, and are the glory of our race and nation."75 The Chinese, conversely, lived in a largely male society sans families and children, an arrangement intolerable for whites. To resolve the matter, Meade argued, laws should forever ban Chinese immigration to the United States. Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 89 Not everyone adamantly opposed the Chinese. James Rusling, for example, argued that the Chinese would assimilate in time and until then would pro- vide a much-needed labor source to develop the West Coast: "The first gen- eration passed away, the next[,] de-Chinaized, Americanized, and educated, would soon become absorbed in the national life . . . As the ocean receives all rains and rivers, and yet shows it not, so America receives the Saxon and the Celt, the Protestant and the Catholic, and can yet receive the Sambo and John, and absorb them all." Setting aside the obviously demeaning racial epithets, Rusling nevertheless advocated for a multiracial society. This society could be achieved, he asserted, by American institutions: "The school-house and the church, the newspaper and the telegraph, can be trusted to work out their logical results; and time, our sure ally, would shape and fashion even these [Chinese] into keen American citizens."76 Rusling's relatively egalitarian and progressive view, however, gained little public support, and legislation soon prevented Chinese entry into the nation with the passage of several acts, most notably the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, that forbade their entry into the United States. Their laudable thrift and hard work could not, in the end, overcome Americans' widespread opposition.77 At the fin de siecle, westerners sought to create a civilization in which Anglo- Americans could find refuge from a changing world. Westerners argued for the superiority of their region because it lacked the racial and ethnic problems of the rest of the country. Undesirable immigrants wielded power in the East, overwhelming native-born Americans, but the difficulty and expense of west- ern migration prevented a massive influx of these undesirable citizens. Anglo- Americans could, however, embrace desirable immigrants if they worked hard and could be easily assimilated into American culture. The Chinese in particu- lar differed too much to be welcomed into the West by most Anglo-American westerners. The West, especially California and the Southwest, nevertheless remained the home of the nation's largest populations of American Indian peoples, Hispanics, and Asians (both the Chinese and, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Japanese). This diversity might appear to give lie to the imagining of the West as a white man's home- land. Western image makers, however, romanticized and appropriated these cultures, adding an exotic veneer over the political and social domination of Anglo-Americans. In comparison, they argued, the East seemed doomed to 90 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 sink under the weight of inferior white but non-Anglo immigrants. Explaining this process, showing that the ills of industrialization and non-Anglo immigra- tion did not affect the West, proved to be the last stage in the intellectual and imagined creation of the white man's West. NOTES 1. Bayard Taylor, At Home and Abroad, a Sketch-book of Life, Scenery and Men (New York: G. P. Putnam, 186o), 497-98. 2. The best analysis of the alleged effects of the environment on race is in Con- every Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002), 229-58. Another work of interest on the relationship between the body and the environment is Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 3. Bayard Taylor, Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire ... (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1861), 144. 4. Ibid., 340. 5. Helen Hunt Jackson, Glimpses of Three Coasts (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886), 3-4. 6. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 215. 7. Jackson, Glimpses of Three Coasts, 28-29. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 29. 1o. Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, Max L. Moorhead, ed. (Norman: Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 154. 11. J[ohn] H[anson] Beadle, The Undeveloped West: or, Five Years in the Territories (Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1873; reprint, New York: Arno, 1973), 460. 12. W.R.T., "From Trinidad to Santa Fe-Six Days in the Oldest City in the United States," Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), March 4, 1869. 13. On the causes of alleged Hispanic inferiority, see Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 165-69; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 335-41; Arnoldo De Le6n, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Mak- ing of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 91 14. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas, or, A Saddle-Trip on the South- western Frontier (New York: Dix, Edwards, and Co., 1857), 349. Olmsted is later quite taken with a teenage Spanish woman with a "beautiful little bust" that she exposed as she ground corn for him and his companions. 15. Beadle, Undeveloped West, 459. 16. For an example of Lummis's fascination with Mexican women, see the story of Susie del Valle, the daughter of an old California family, in Mark Thompson, American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest (New York: Arcade, 2001), 122-24; for his apparent infidelity, see pp. 278-82. 17. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "The Spanish American Face," Land of Sunshine 12, no., 2 (January 1895): 21-23. 18. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, 1959), 5; italics in original. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. See especially Hofstadter's chapter "Racism and Imperialism," in ibid., 170-200. 21. Ibid., 176-78. 22. Aline Gorren, Anglo-Saxons and Others (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900), 2. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Ibid., 22-23. 25. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 171. 26. Quoted in Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Nor- ton, 1981), 69. 27. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1-4. Brantlinger looks mostly at the American and British experiences. The idea of the vanishing Ameri- can Indian is also recounted in Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Racial Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982). 28. In addition to works written by Lummis, many of which are still in print, see also Edwin R. Bingham, Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1955); Turbese Lummis Fisk and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975); Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119-44. 29. For discussion of Lummis's plan for an Anglo-Saxon California, see Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89-90. 92 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 30. Charles P. Lummis, "Editorial," Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (January 1895): 34-35. 31. Charles F. Lummis, "In the Lion's Den," Land of Sunshine 4, no. 3 (February 1896), 183. "In the Lion's Den" was Lummis's monthly editorial in Land of Sunshine. 32. Cited in Thompson, American Character, 181. 33. Charles Dudley Warner, "Race and Climate," Land of Sunshine 4, no. 2 (Feb- ruary 1896): 103-6. The creation of Southern California as a new Mediterranean is recounted in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 365-414. 34. Warner, "Race and Climate," 104. 35. Ibid., 1o6. 36. Charles Lummis, "In the Lion's Den," Land of Sunshine 4, no. 2 (February 1896): 141. 37. Joseph P[omeroy] Widney, The Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, vol. 2: The New World (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1907), 65. 38. Ibid. 39. Widney's views on the annexation of Mexico are in ibid, 149-51. 40. Ibid., 10-11. 41. Ibid., 211. 42. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7. 43. The historiography of violence in the West is extensive. See, for example: David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially 47-130; Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Robert M. Utley, High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Richard Slotkin's trilogy, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrial- ization, 1800-1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Okla- homa Press, 1998). An excellent example of the social conditions of frontier life, at least on the mining frontier, is Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 1:396; translated by Henry Reeve, corrected by Francis Bowen, and edited by Phil- lips Bradley. 45. Isabella L. Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 50. Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860-1900 93 46. Ibid., 69. 47. Ibid., 79. 48. Ibid., 89. 49. J. J. Warner, Benjamin Hayes, and J. P. Widney, An Historical Sketch of Los Ange- les County, California: From the Spanish Occupancy, by the Founding of the Mission San Gabriel Archangel, September 8, 1771, to July 4, 1876 (Los Angeles: Louis Lewin, 1876), 67. 50. On the literary creation of the mythic West, see two examples from a large historiography: Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 51-122; Slotkin, Fatal Envi- ronment, especially 81-io6, 191-208, 499-532. 51. Mark I. West, "Introduction," in Mark I. West, ed., Westward to a High Mountain: The Colorado Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (Denver: Colorado His- torical Society, 1994), 1-9. See also Ruth Odell, Helen HuntJackson (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939); Evelyn I. Banning, Helen HuntJackson (New York: Vanguard, 1973). 52. Helen Hunt Jackson, 'A Colorado Week," in West, ed., Westward to a High Mountain, 21-52. 53. Helen Hunt Jackson, "Colorado Springs," in West, ed., Westward to a High Mountain, 11-20. 54. William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 99. 55. Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, 2:80. 56. Ibid., 81. 57. Ibid., 93. 58. Charles Benedict Davenport, "The Geography of Man in Relation to Eugen- ics," in William Ernest Castle, John Merle Coulter, Charles Benedict Davenport, Edward Murray East, and William Lawrence, eds., Heredity and Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), 299. 59. Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway, The Opinions of the Judge and the Colonel as to the Vast Resources of Colorado (Denver: Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway, 1894), 23. 60. Charles Nordhoff, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence: A Book for Trav- ellers and Settlers (New York: Harper Bros., 1882), 18-19. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Beadle, Undeveloped West, 178. 64. "Two University Presidents Speak for the City," Sunset 20, no. 6 (1908): 546; quoted in Stern, Eugenic Nation, 132. 94 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 65. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "The Right Hand of the Continent, Part Three," Out West (August 1902): 139-71. 66. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 33-34. 67. Ibid., 34. 68. Olmsted,Journey through Texas, 140. 69. James F. Rusling, Across America: or the Great West and the Pacific Coast (New York: Sheldon, 1874), 24. 70. Ibid., 340-41. 71. Herbert Kaufman, "Southwestward Ho! America's New Trek to Still-Open Places," Everybody's 22, no. 6 (June 1910): 725. 72. Ibid., 730. 73. Ibid., 731. 74. Eastman quoted in Warner, Hayes, and Widney, "Historical Sketch," 86. 75. Edwin R. Meade, 'A Labor Question," in F. V. Hayden, ed., The Great West: Its Attractions and Resources (Bloomington, IL: Charles R. Brodix, 1880), 391. 76. Rusling, Across America, 317-18. 77. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African-Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 228. Other works on the Chinese experience in the West include Liping Zhu, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997); George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Kil Young Zo, Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-1880 (New York: Arno, 1978); Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 4 INDIANS NOT IMMIGRANTS Charles Fletcher Lummis, Frank Bird Linderman, and the Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America Charles Fletcher Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman were painfully aware that they had missed the show. It would be the better part of a decade before the US Census Bureau and Frederick Jackson Turner announced the end of the frontier, but by the mid-188os its passing already seemed obvious. Timing, no doubt, had a profound influence on both men. They came to understand the West not in terms of progress and settlement, as had an earlier gener- ation, but rather as a place threatened by those same forces. Lummis and Linderman underwent a process of transformation, of becoming westerners, or, to use historian Hal Rothman's term, neo-natives, people from outside the region who became westerners and, in their cases, self-appointed experts and defenders of the region's culture.' The transformation into westerners forever altered their conception of the West and its people. Seeing the West through the lens of romanticism and anti-modernism, they envisioned a region where Native Americans (and in Lummis's case Hispanics) would remain a vital part of the culture and society and where the negative characteristics of modern America, especially Southern and Eastern European immigration, would be DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.co04 95 96 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 kept at bay. The West would emerge as a haven for Anglo-Americans where the region's colorful racial groups could be preserved while remaining little more than quaint. The West could be a refuge for whiteness, they hoped, a last chance to create an ideal society. In celebrating a romantic version of diversity while arguing for the continued dominance of Anglo-Americans, Lummis and Linderman put the last touches on the intellectual creation of the white man's West. Like many people before him, the lithe, twenty-five-year-old Charles Fletcher Lummis set out for opportunity in the West, although in his case opportunity came in the form of a job at the Los Angeles Times. It was the fall of 1884. Unlike his contemporaries in an age of transcontinental railroads, Lummis decided to walk. He intended this roughly 2,500-mile journey from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Los Angeles to be equal parts publicity stunt and a sin- cere attempt to discover the West for himself. Like his Harvard classmate and friend Theodore Roosevelt, Lummis believed in the strenuous life, and he hoped to find himself in the arid land of mesas and canyons. He was far from unique in his desire to find meaning in the West. Roosevelt, the writer Owen Wister, and the artist Frederic Remington also went west to act out an increasingly common ritual of national and self-discovery-all believing that the West remained authentic, preindustrial, and Anglo-dominated. Going west, quite simply, meant returning to a time when (white) men were men. Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington sojourned in the West before returning to the East, where they mingled with the most powerful elements in the nation, but their time in the West had transformed them into supposedly stronger and better men. The West, for these men and others, remained an "agrarian, rural, egalitarian, and ethnically and racially homogenous" region, which compared favorably to the "industrial, urban, elitist, ethnically het- erogeneous, and racially mixed" East, according to the historian G. Edward White.2 Perhaps somewhat ironically, the western experience prepared Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington to lead and shape an eastern-dominated, ethnically diverse, industrial society. All these men emerged from the expe- rience changed in important ways, but Lummis and Linderman, unlike Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister, went west and stayed. Lummis and Linderman set out to celebrate the West and its cultures, one in Southern California and the other in Montana. They argued that the region still offered an antidote to the problems of industrialization, FIGURE 4.1. Studio Portrait of Lummis before His Tramp, 1884. Part publicity stunt and part a genuine effort to learn about his new home, Charles Fletcher Lummis walked from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California. As he said, the trip enabled him to transcend from a "little, narrow, prejudiced, intolerant Yankee" into a westerner who appreciated Hispanic and American Indian cultures. These cultures helped make the West unique and superior in many ways to the East, he believed. Courtesy, Braun Research Library Collection, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA 98 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 pollution, and non-Anglo immigration. A writer, reporter, editor, and self- taught combination of ethnologist, archaeologist, and historian, Lummis's varied career became the consummate example of the active intellectual, the uniquely American type of thinker and doer. Eventually, his opinions and reputation would carry weight far beyond Southern California. His fiery zeal for the Southwest, rather than any intellectual achievements, made him well-known in his era. He was certainly a popularizer, but in being so he left a lasting legacy. Frank Bird Linderman, trailing Lummis by less than a year, went west in 1885 at age sixteen. He chose as his destination the Flathead Lake country of the Montana Territory, the most isolated place he could find on a folded and refolded map of the nation. In his memoir, he called the place the "farthest removed from contaminating civilization," no mean consideration for a boy who feared "that the West of my dreams would fade away before I could reach it."3 A friend and an African American coachman employed by his friend's family accompanied him. The coachman had been a cavalryman in the West, and he filled the boys' minds with stories of the wild and untamed region.4 Following an eventful train trip to Montana, the trio settled in the Flathead country, but after a few days his companions grew homesick and returned to Ohio. Linderman decided to stick it out and learn to be a trapper.' In the Flathead country Linderman found a landscape as romantic as his fantasies, a place filled with howling wolves and marked only by the tracks cut by deer and Indians. The latter in particular stoked his imagination and, in time, inspired his anthropological works, works deeply tinged by his belief in the vanishing West and a threatening modern, industrial world. According to the historian Sherry L. Smith, Indians "represented, for him, the most power- ful symbols of a West that was no more."6 Linderman in Montana Adventure never gave a name to the black man with whom he went West, referring to him only as "the negro," but American Indians left him awestruck. He stared, dumbfounded, when encountering a Flathead Indian smoking "with such an air of peace and contentment that I fairly ached to shake hands with him."7 He explained that the man's name was Red-horn, a "renowned Flathead war- rior" whose martial skills were widely respected by his friends and feared by his enemies. Linderman felt grateful that the powerful warrior treated him like a man, though he knew instinctively "that I was a rank pilgrim."8 This represented, Linderman thought, a sort of acceptance by the Indians and Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 99 even by the Montana wilderness. Leaving his childhood behind him in the East, he had become a man and, even better, a frontiersman. He flattered himself for a moment, writing, "I feel nearly as they do, I am quite certain." He quickly corrected himself and admitted that this conceit was probably "only imagined success."9 Nevertheless, he felt pride in being accepted into a world he had once dreamed about, and this acceptance extended beyond Indians to another romantic group: Montana trappers. Linderman caught up with the aging trappers at the twilight of the fur trade. Later, when he himself had grown gray, he noted that they were "unlike any type that lives today," and being accepted by them "was like join- ing a fraternity."0 Linderman would spend the rest of his life believing sin- cerely that he had glimpsed the end of an era, and he would do his best to preserve the vestiges of that world through print and political action. Later in life, Linderman would go even farther, asserting that he was in fact even more Indian than younger Indians. In his biography of the Crow woman Pretty-shield, he quoted the old woman as worrying about the condi- tion of modern Indians. One of Pretty-shield's grandsons entered the room during one of Linderman's interviews with her. He described the teenage boy as "decked out in the latest style of the 'movie' cowboy, ten-gallon hat, leather cuffs and all." His appearance prompted Pretty-shield to "won- der how my grandchildren will turn out . . . They have only me, an old woman, to guide them, and plenty of others to lead them into bad ways."" Linderman saw older Indians like Pretty-shield as more genuine and noble than modern Indians. Comparing Goes-together, his translator, to Pretty- shield, he remarked, "She [Goes-together], a comparatively young woman of the same blood as Pretty-shield, frequently complained of her physical condition, had done this less than an hour ago. Pretty-shield, nearly twice the age of Goes-together, had remained an old-fashioned Indian, believing as her grandmother had believed. She had nothing to complain of, no affliction, excepting grandchildren."2 Modern Indians, like Goes-together and Pretty- shield's army of grandchildren, had lost connection with their past and grown lazy, weak, and infirm. They had, in essence, lost what made them Indian. Linderman, in contrast, felt he shared with Pretty-shield the same authentic experiences. Linderman felt that he, too, belonged to this noble age of heroes. In Pretty- shield he went to great lengths to assert his authenticity as a westerner and his I00 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 affinity with Indians. The first line of his book made this clear: "Throughout forty-six years in Montana I have had much to do with its several Indian tribes, and yet have never, until now, talked for ten consecutive minutes directly to an old Indian woman."3 While the overall point of the sentence is to pique the reader's interest in the hidden world of Indian women and to assert the importance of the story he is about to tell, it also provides readers with his credentials as an expert and a Montanan. For Charles Fletcher Lummis, becoming a westerner meant coming to appreciate both the region and its peoples. His 1884 walking tour marked the transformative moment of his life. He went West armed with standard-issue views of Hispanics and Native Americans. Both groups appeared as curious, inferior novelties and anachronisms to the young reporter. He best articulated his early views about American Indians and Hispanics in a series of letters for his former employer in Ohio, the Chillicothe Leader. He first encountered Native Americans at the Indian school in Lawrence, Kansas. After laughing at the funny translations of the students' names, Lummis concluded, "The whole institution is under the charge of James Marvin, L.L.D., an educator of almost national reputation, and he shows by deeds his faith that here lies the true solution to the vexed and vexing 'Indian Question.' "14 Such an endorsement for educators' assimilation policy made his skin crawl in later years. Indeed, only a few years later, Lummis would become an ardent critic of Indian schools, even going so far as to initiate lawsuits in fed- eral court against the policies of Indian educators.5 In August 1899 Lummis launched an assault on Indian education in Land of Sunshine (renamed Out West in 1902), a California promotional periodical he converted into a respected western magazine. The seven-month series, titled "My Brother's Keeper," excoriated the assimilation policy of schools like those in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Hampton, Virginia. Led by the reformer Captain Richard Henry Pratt, these schools sought to transform Indian children by remov- ing them from their families and tribes and forcibly assimilating them into American society.6 In his first salvo against the policy, Lummis wrote that Pratt's method effectively alienated children from their native cultures while ill-preparing them for life in the larger American world: "The confessed the- ory is that he [the Indian child] has no right to have a father and mother, and they no right to him; that their affection is not worth as much to him as the chance to be a servant to some Pennsylvania farmer or blacksmith, and Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 101 generally at half wages."17 In a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt early in his administration, Lummis congratulated the president and expressed his great optimism that Roosevelt's would be the first administration to have a competent Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was important, Lummis argued, because "I care for Indians not as 'bric-a-brac' but as actual humans."18 In A Tramp across the Continent, the memoir of his 1884 journey across the West, he marveled at the quiet Pueblo villages he encountered. Like the good New Englander he was, he called the reader's attention to the thrift and hard work of the sedentary Indians of the Rio Grande valley. A highly developed civilization, with irrigated farms and well-built homes, the Pueblos appeared the model of the industrious Indian. Lummis explained to readers that they "had learned none of these things from us, but were living thus before our Saxon forefathers had found so much as the shore of the New England."9 To be sure, Lummis did not believe all Indians were equal. He liked the Pueblo peoples best, harbored some suspicion of the Navajo, and believed the Hualapais of the Mojave stood out as "a race of filthy and unpleasant Indians, who were in world-wide contrast with the admirable Pueblos of New Mexico . . . They manufacture nothing characteristic, as do nearly all other aborigines, and are of very little interest."20 Lummis, like most self-appointed Indian protectors, could also be conde- scending toward them. The slogan, for example, of his Indian rights group, the Sequoya League, was "To Make Better Indians," something Lummis felt he knew how to do better than men like Pratt. Similarly, he warned Roosevelt that the policy of severalty, by which tribal lands were broken up into indi- vidual landholdings, most famously part of the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, threatened Indian independence. The best solution, he argued, would be to ensure that individual Indian landowners be prohibited from selling their lands for at least fifty years. The reason was that "the Indian is not yet of age and he needs the protection we give to our minors."2 Needless to say, his paternalism sounded little different than Pratt's, but Lummis at least respected Indian cultures. Similarly, he entered the West with assumptions about the region's Hispanic population. In southern Colorado he encountered his first Hispanic villages. Of the residents of the village of Cucharas he wrote, "In it, in lousy laziness, exist 200 Greasers of all sexes, ages and sizes, but all equally dirty." He continued, in his November 18, 1884, letter, to describe the Hispanics of 102 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 southern Colorado in a less than favorable light, concluding with an overtly racist joke. "Not even a coyote," he told his growing number of readers (his letters were widely published by eastern newspapers), "will touch a dead Greaser, the flesh is so seasoned with the red pepper they ram into their food in howling profusion."22 Only a decade later, in Land of Sunshine, he recanted his earlier views and wrote, "'Greaser' ... is a vulgar phrase which more soils the mouth that speaks it than the person at whom it is aimed. It is precisely on a par with the word 'nigger'; as offensive per se, and as sure [a] brand of the breeding of the user. "23 As for the Chinese, a group that drew most of the wrath of California and western nativists, Lummis again voiced positive views.24 Given that he lived in California, it is not surprising that he commented mostly on the Chinese in the state. In the November 1900 issue of Land of Sunshine, he praised Sui Sin Fah (the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton, a British Chinese contributor to the magazine).25 Of her work he wrote, "To others the alien Celestial is at best mere 'literary material'; in these stories he (or she) is a human being."26 Nevertheless, her exotic pen name considerably augmented her story's lit- erary worth. In the same issue Lummis advocated a harsh response to the Boxer Rebellion but reminded readers, "We have massacred a good many for- eigners, ourselves, in this Christian land. Our Boxers have murdered Chinese in Rock Springs and other centers of civilization; Italians in New Orleans; and Negroes everywhere." He warned that the western powers should restrain themselves and not murder innocent people who had no voice in the Chinese government.27 Lummis made it clear that becoming a westerner led him to transcend his racist views. In A Tramp across the Continent, which did not appear until nearly a decade after his transcontinental hike, he used the story of his ignorance to editorialize on the problems of racism. He sincerely asked his readers: "Why is it that the last and most difficult education seems to be the ridding ourselves of the silly inborn race prejudice? We all start with it, we few of us graduate from it. And yet the clearest thing in the world to him who has eyes and a chance to use them, is that men everywhere-white men, brown men, yellow men, black men-are all just about the same thing. The difference is little deeper than the skin."28 Long before finally reaching Los Angeles, he had become a convert to the West and a prophet of a proto-multiculturalism. Reflecting on this late in Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 103 life, he wrote in his weekly column in the Los Angeles Times, "I wasn't born a frontiersman-I Earned it. I was born a little, narrow, prejudiced, intolerant Yankee." Conversely, he argued, "the real Western Spirit is as much broader, freer, braver, richer, more independent and more tolerant than [northeast- ern] Puritanism or Tenderfootedness."29 He also believed its native inhabi- tants, the region's Hispanics and American Indians, offered much to society and should continue to exert some influence in shaping the West. Imbued with the passion of the converted, Lummis would be a defender of the West and its people for the rest of his life. An exceedingly complex, if often inconsistent, individual, Lummis took a progressive stance on issues of race, but his attitude toward new immigrants proved much less charitable. Lummis often crowed about the superiority of California society in comparison to the East because it lacked the large num- bers of "indigestible" immigrants that plagued cities like Boston and New York. In an article in the January 1895 issue of Land of Sunshine, Lummis's first month on the job, he explained the superiority of the "golden state" to the East. California was growing rapidly, but, he argued, it was the quality of the immigrants that made it different. People of "wealth and refinement" chose to relocate to Los Angeles, whereas "elsewhere the bulk of immigration has been of at least indifferent stuff." These people of wealth and refinement tended to be Anglo-Americans who left to escape the East and often to find renewed health and a sense of purpose in California. Lummis's native New England, which became a favorite target of the combative editor, witnessed a degradation of its society as a result of "an invasion which has seriously low- ered the mean of culture." The difference in the quality of immigrants meant "there is no criminal class [in Southern California]; practically no pauper class." Of course, California had a few undesirable types, "but numerically they are lonely, and politically and socially the good citizen is not ruled by them."30 Lummis was never subtle and, in case the reader missed the point, he con- tinued by extolling Los Angeles's ethnic virtues: "Our 'foreign element' is a few thousand industrious Chinamen and perhaps Soo native Californians who do not speak English. The ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of for- eigners, which infests and largely controls Eastern cities, is almost unknown here. Poverty and illiteracy do not exist as classes."3 California, therefore, represented a refuge, a still distant land of Anglo domination far removed from the problems of modernity. 104 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 Seven years later Lummis recapitulated his belief in California's superior- ity and the East's increasing inferiority in a seven-part series titled "The Right Hand of the Continent." Los Angeles, he asserted, was more eastern than Boston "in nativity, in politics, in standards. It is less [polluted] with foreign elements, and less ruled by them."32 This argument against foreigners formed a key part of Lummis's attempt to justify Los Angeles to the rest of the nation. He used the region's climate and its high proportion of Anglo-American immigrants to subvert notions of frontier backwardness. Yet he was not a "knee-jerk" foe of immigration, and, especially during World War I, when anti-German sentiment reached its peak, he spoke out in defense of immigrants.33 Similarly, he was impressed with the kindness of Italian immigrants, who shared their meager supplies with him during a chilly Colorado night in 1884. He noted, in a calculated insult to the settlers who had turned him away, "I was glad to find one 'white man' in this God-forsaken place."34 Here, playing with a common expression of the day, Lummis meant white not only in the racial sense but also as a synonym for honesty and charity. His fear of immigration melded with a strong opposition to imperialism, an opposition based in his interpretation of American values, economic fears, and racial anxiety. Before and after the Spanish-American War, Lummis attacked his nation's expansionist zeal, warning that American overseas expansion would lead to unintended consequences. Imperialism, he argued, threatened to destroy the Anglo Eden on the Pacific Coast. It represented a rejection of American values of democracy and self-determination and threatened to bring too many non-white peoples into the United States. In his monthly editorial, he pointed out America's dismal record on civil rights. Americans had enslaved Africans, treated American Indians poorly, and they "haven't done much to the Chinese-except exclude, ostraci[z]e, blackmail and occasionally mob and murder them." Lummis concluded with a warn- ing about imperialism: 'And in the face of all this [racial injustice] . . . there are optimistic ninnies who believe we are just the right guardians to adopt a few more millions, from inferior races."35 Rather than racial injustice, the deleterious effect of massive immigration on his adopted state remained his chief concern. Imperialism would mean "the sacrifice of California" because "we cannot keep out nor fine the products of our new 'posses- sions,' which raise the same things that California does."36 Importation of Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 105 cheaper crops would hurt California's economy, but worse was the arrival of cheap, non-white labor: "We cannot shut subjects of the United States out of the United States, as we can-and have been obliged to-the alien Chinese. When we force the unwilling to accept this country as their coun- try, then they must be free in it ... and the coolies ... are to come to crowd American farmers. People such as build the homes, which make California the garden of the world, cannot compete with Filipinos." Imperialism, he warned, would only benefit large corporations and syndicates, and the small farmer would be ruined.37 Lummis, however, remained a strong supporter of Latin American nations and a staunch advocate of self-determination for the peoples of the Americas. He was deeply suspicious of the expansionist designs of men like Theodore Roosevelt, a personal friend and admirer of the editor of Land of Sunshine. In a fiery letter to Roosevelt, Lummis complained of the unjust takeover of Panama. He conceded that the nation of Colombia had problems, but the United States also had its faults-chief of which was racial intolerance: The gravest fault and danger, it seems to me, of the American people-and I mean you, with both hands, for you come as near as I reasonably hope to see any one man to realize what I deem the American type-is that composed, infused and made Strong by every blood on earth, we tend to despise the Other Fellow-as if there were any. We keep up the same old medieval, anti- papist, A.P.A. [American Protective Association], lick of burning ev[e]ry man that isn't one of us. And it is a mistake. As even America is mostly populated with human beings, I hope it is not treason to hold that we may have both dangers and faults.38 Explaining Lummis's contradictory views seems difficult at first. How could he support the expansion of Anglo settlement while defending the native peoples of the Southwest? How could he fear imperialism and still be friendly with Roosevelt, the nation's preeminent expansionist? How could he defend the rights of immigrants to come to America but crow about how his adopted home was superior because of their absence? Lummis attempted to articulate a vision of place that made sense of these seeming contradictions. California, quite simply, should be a refuge for Anglo whites, a place free of new stock immigrants where non-whites knew their place and added a veneer of exoticism and regional variety. Io6 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 In terms of the preservation of the special status of Anglos, Californians need not worry about the rise of political machines or slums, which appeared to threaten democracy in eastern cities through manipulation of voting, Lummis believed. Such problems existed in New York, Boston, and other eastern cities where legions of foreigners were easily swayed by the prom- ises of clever politicians. Compared with the flood of immigrants inundating eastern ports, California's Hispanics, Chinese, and few remaining Indians seemed romantic and thus essentially harmless. Hispanics, while extended citizenship, found themselves deprived of real participation in many ways. Asians and Indians, as non-citizens, exerted no influence in California what- soever.39 The sociologist Tomas Almaguer argues that the domination of whites in California "represented the extension of 'white supremacy' into the new American Southwest."40 This system offered Anglo-Americans a privi- leged position that immigration in the East increasingly challenged. Lummis had a sincere appreciation for Hispanic and Indian cultures, but he, like other Los Angeles boomers, actively engaged in constructing an image of Southern California as a refuge for Anglo-Saxons that appropri- ated elements from California's Spanish legacy. Lummis was a major figure in what historian William Deverell aptly calls the "whitewashing" of the Hispanic past. By creating a selective, romanticized version of the Mexican past, Anglo Angelenos fashioned a distinct regional identity that promised material comfort and economic growth while simultaneously stripping actual Hispanic peoples of real political and economic power.4' California's racial diversity, as Lummis noted, made it far more desirable than the East, in large part because of the small numbers of politically impotent non-whites. These were Lummis's "few thousand" Chinese and "5oo native Californians" and a tiny population of Native Americans, including the "Warner's Ranch" Indians, a group of a few hundred "mission Indians" Lummis personally helped move to a reservation in Southern California.42 The balance and sup- posed racial harmony would, however, fall apart if thousands of peoples of "inferior races" settled in California. The distance from ports of entry on the Eastern Seaboard, fortunately, seemed to preclude that possibility. Nevertheless, this celebration of Anglo-Saxonism (and its alleged attri- butes of American democracy, vigorous capitalism, and economic and tech- nological development) masked a profound sense of anxiety. Lummis proved more egalitarian in his views, at least with respect to Hispanics and Native Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 107 V____ M FIGURE 4.2. Like Lummis, Frank Bird Linderman came to appreciate American Indians and frontiersmen. He spent his life advocating on behalf of Indian peoples, collecting their stories, and denouncing new immigrants as dangerous and irre- deemably foreign. Here, Linderman (left) stands with his friend and renowned artist Charles M. Russell (right) and Chief Big Rock (center) of the Chippewa Indians, a group for whom Linderman helped convince the federal government to create a reservation. Courtesy, Linderman Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana, Missoula. Americans, but he was no less anxious about the American experiment. He sought to preserve the special place Americans like himself (so-called White Anglo-Saxon Protestants [WASPs]) occupied, and the West seemed like the perfect place to do it. Lummis's vision of an Anglo-American West coexisting with the rem- nants of American Indian culture also resonated with Frank Bird Linderman. For Linderman as for Lummis, the noble but threatened American Indian became his most important literary subject and the focus of much of his political attention. During his long relationship with the Rocky Boy Band Io8 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 of Cree and Chippewa Indians, he helped them find employment, provided them with clothes, and fought to get a permanent reservation established in Montana. In these battles he revealed his true feelings toward Indians, feel- ings that demonstrated that he both understood and appreciated Indians in a way most of his fellow Montanans did not. He fought, for example, to destroy the common belief that Indians were lazy and shiftless, a belief even Linderman's supporters of the reservation idea held. Montana senator Henry L. Myers argued that the Rocky Boy Indians "from all that I can learn. . . will never work or till the land or support them- selves."43 He therefore supported the idea of a small reservation for them on the site of an abandoned military reserve near Harve, Montana, because there "they may be corralled, so as to keep them from wandering around over the country aimlessly and bothering people."44 Safely removed from the sur- rounding whites, the band could subsist as best they could on the two town- ships of land the congressional bill set aside for them. Linderman asserted that the high altitude and infertile character of the land made it unsuitable for agriculture. As for the belief that Indians were lazy, Linderman countered that they had been forced to live in a precarious position, denied their tradi- tional lifeways, and yet kept from participating in the white man's economy in any meaningful way. They were treated as "renegades" by the people of Helena, on whose outskirts they set up threadbare tents and tepees, and "in a sense were just that, since they had no home, no reservation, no place where they might make a living."45 He replied to Senator Myers, "When people are obliged to beg and prowl in alleys, to feed from garbage cans therein, because no one will give them employment, and because all are turned against them on account of their personal appearance and physical condition, it is easy for the onlooker to cry 'vagabond.' "46 When given a chance, he asserted, Indians would work as hard as or harder than whites, and, as proof, he cited the story of a Rocky Boy Indian who demanded thirty-five cents an hour for labor performed for Linderman's friend Dr. Oscar Lanstrum. When Lanstrum complained about the rates, Linderman spoke with the Indian, who told him he worked harder than Lanstrum's white employee and therefore deserved more money. In the end, the doctor agreed.47 Linderman enlisted other eminent Montanans in his scheme to create a reservation for the Rocky Boy Indians, including the famous cowboy art- ist Charles M. Russell. Like Linderman, Russell played an important role in Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 109 conveying the mythic West to Americans and in advocating for the contin- ued presence of Indians in America. At Linderman's request, Russell wrote to Senator Myers in 1913 in support of Linderman's proposed reservation: "These people have been on the verge of starvation for years and I think it no more than square for Uncle Sam, who has opened the west to all foreigners, to give these real Americans enough to live on."48 Russell, like Linderman and Lummis, believed that Indians, not foreigners, were real Americans and that their noble and romantic culture should be preserved in the face of rapid change. Russell, too, envisioned a white man's West, a refuge for both Anglo- Americans and colorful and subservient American Indians. Following a protracted battle over what to do with this small band of Indians, Linderman and his allies finally forced a bill through Congress for the creation of the Rocky Boy Reservation in 1916.49 Securing a reservation for them, however, was only the beginning, and Linderman continued to press politicians and Indian service bureaucrats for better rations, permission for the Indians to practice traditional dances, such as the forbidden Sun Dance, and for an expansion of the reservation. In a 1933 letter to the reform-minded John Collier, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he wrote, "These Indians are real workers, and if encouraged and helped will prove to the doubters that the red man has a future even in the white man's scheme of things."50 They needed more land to be successful, he believed, to prove themselves. As a result of Linderman's endless skirmishes with bureaucrats, he earned the Indians' friendship. John Evans, a Harve harness maker friendly to the Indians, wrote Linderman to tell him about the compliment paid him by Day Child, a tribal elder at Rocky Boy. He quoted Day Child as saying, "I want you to know how I like Frank Linderman. My father is dead. I loved him, but if my father came back and stood on one hill and I saw Frank Linderman on another hill I would not go to my father. I would go to Frank Linderman. You know I do not lie, this is the truth."5 Though filtered through Evans and no doubt intended to flatter Linderman, Day Child's comments reflected the Rocky Boy Band's gratitude for his repeated help and counsel and the important role he played in winning some semblance of security for them. Linderman's views on both Indians and modern society found expres- sion in his literary works, most notably his biographies of two significant Crow elders, Chief Plenty Coups and Pretty-shield. Plenty Coup's story was published in 1930 under the title American: The Life Story of a Great Indian, - S it-- 4 y 7Y A V n4m4 / IC ;A i-i N Y. .yam _ _ K - r ran Aim-'. "i r - r At FIGURE 4.3. Charles M. Russell dressed as an Indian. Russell em- braced and celebrated plains Indian culture in his paintings in a way no other artist had. For Russell, Indians represented a rugged and vanishing America. At Linderman's request Russell wrote to Montana senator Henry L. Myers in support of creating a res- ervation for the Rocky Boy Band of Cree and Chippewa Indians. Courtesy, Frank Bird Linderman Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana, Missoula. Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America I I FIGURE 4.4. Frank Bird Linderman and two native men holding an American flag. Indian peoples represented "real Americans," Frank Bird Linderman believed, deserving of rights and respect. Yet America, he professed, seemed on the edge of falling under the control of undesirable immigrants and the political machines they supported. Courtesy, Frank Bird Linderman Collection, Archives and Special Collec- tions, Mansfield Library, University of Montana, Missoula. Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crows, while his biography of Pretty-shield, origi- nally titled Red Mother, appeared in 1932. The two works marked the pinna- cle of Linderman's literary success. These aging figures were, to Linderman, authentic Indians who recalled the time before the white men came in num- bers and dispossessed them of their lands. In comparison, Linderman wrote that younger Indians "know next to nothing about their people's ancient ways." In keeping with his belief in a vanished era he asserted, "The real Indians are gone. "52 According to historian Sherry L. Smith, Linderman's choice of titles for his biographies reflected his inner fears and beliefs. The titles of the works "underscore Linderman's theme of a vanishing world," not only for Indians "but also one where red-blooded, Anglo-Saxon Americans held supreme against immigrants and one where women knew their place as mothers rather than as congresswomen."5 The modern world, with its problems 112 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 (not the least of which was his congressional defeat by Jeanette Rankin), made the world of the Indians all the more desirable and its passing all the more mournful. He summed up his perspective in the title of one of his works: On a Passing Frontier. Through his writing career and his political activism, Linderman attempted to preserve some of the West of his mem- ory, but increasingly the transformation going on in Montana challenged his memories of Indians, trappers, and the untrammeled wilderness of the territorial period. Dirty, industrial, and peopled by hordes of inferior immigrants, Montana's mining towns, like Butte, represented everything he hated about modern existence. Yet despite his best efforts, the modern world pulled him in, and in 1892 the would-be frontiersman had to abandon his anachronistic sojourn as a trapper and find more stable and remunerative employment. He had fallen in love and required a steady paycheck so he could marry and start a family. Linderman worked for a time in Raville and then moved on to the bustling, polluted town of Butte, where he worked for the Butte and Boston Smelter as an assayer and chemist. He described his first night on the job as hellish, filled with "clouds of bluish-green sulphur fumes that inflamed my throat and irritated my nose almost beyond endurance."54 Linderman's job required him to weigh loads of steaming calcine, a near-molten substance produced in the smelters. His first shift ended with a conflict between himself and a man who refused to weigh his loads, in flagrant violation of the orders of the mine's superintendent. The man was an Italian, which for Linderman was significant. After a brief scuffle with the man, Linderman won, but he was fired for his trouble.55 His dislike for immigrant miners extended well beyond this one encounter. He variously described Butte's Italians, Welsh, Austrian, Cornish, and Irish miners as drunks, rabble-rousers, wife beaters, and stooges for a variety of fra- ternal, political, and reform efforts.5' He loathed his coworkers at another job in the mining industry, this time as an ash wheeler, an easy job populated by the mining company's professional musicians when their musical skills were not needed. Most of his coworkers were immigrants, and he loathed one in particular. Nicknamed "Joe-joe, the dog-faced one," Linderman described him as ape-like, deformed, and with a blank and vapid expression. His dislike of the "clownish hornblower" grew after the homely musician's negligence caused the death of a highly trained horse when it fell into an ore bin.7 Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 13 Indeed, the foreign element in Butte finally drove Linderman away in search of, literally, greener pastures. Linderman and his family "wished to get away from Butte, where there were no trees, not even a blade of grass." Polluted air and hordes of rough immigrants marked the antithesis of everything he had hoped to find in Montana. He described his neighborhood as unsatisfying, in part because "English was scarcely ever heard there" and Austrian miners swore and sang outside a nearby bar at all hours of the night.58 Vowing never to force his children to live without being able to play "beneath leafy trees," Linderman decided to leave Butte and its motley population.59 The trapper-turned-assayer, however, found it more difficult than he hoped to leave the mining industry behind, but gradually he established a freelance assaying business and a newspaper and eventually became a politician and an insurance agent. He did not forget his dislike of immigrants. In a letter on the quality of beans the US government furnished to the Rocky Boy Indians he quipped, "I have always maintained that it was mighty hard to recognize the 'noble Roman' in a Dago organ grinder, and it is equally hard to recog- nize an edible bean in the black eyed specimens I forwarded you."60 Linderman most feared the threat immigrants posed to the survival of the nation. Anti-immigrationist sentiment grew to a crescendo in the J920S and Linderman led the chorus, at least in Montana. In a letter to Gertrude Atherton, he praised her article in Bookman because it would help draw atten- tion to Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, whose thesis argued that the superior Anglo-Saxon race found itself on the losing end of popula- tion growth to more fertile, cowardly immigrants, while World War I and the Anglo martial spirit culled the best young men. As he explained to Atherton, "We have not only permitted immigration to injure our country but through apathy have allowed our children's birthright of opportunity to be filched from them." The decline in America's character was obvious: "The great change that has come over our country within the last fifty years is startling indeed to those who think and American ideals are being dimmed or lost in the rabble from other lands."61 The solution, Linderman told Senator Myers, was "stopping immigration, or at least sharply restricting it." Speaking out against immigration in Montana, he cautioned, would be dangerous, but nevertheless he had "made twenty-four addresses only one or two of which were entirely public. I think you will understand me."62 Immigrants and the political machines they supported would destroy America. Linderman, 114 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 pondering a run for the US Senate, confided to a friend, "The Sinn Fein ele- ment would fight me to a stand still although I believe I could beat them."63 His reference to Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist movement, showed once again his revulsion for immigrants and the power they wielded in American politics. His assertion that he could defeat them turned out to be incorrect, as his narrow loss in the 1924 election showed. Lummis and Linderman represented but two of the many who sought to protect true whiteness while also reserving a space for American Indians. Their efforts at contacting Indian peoples and learning about their cultures were part of a larger effort by ethnologists to understand Indian peoples and offer them up as paragons of a better, more authentic existence that differed from the increasing mechanization and alienation of modern soci- ety. As Americans entered the twentieth century with the frontier experi- ence behind them, they turned increasingly to a mythological past and contact with a primitive, but less alienating and more invigorating and gen- uine, nature. Worried that future generations of Americans, men especially, would grow weak and morally bankrupt, reformers like Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton sought to put children in touch with the natural world. They could thus learn skills like self-reliance, cooperation, and sur- vival, which would create better, more confident Americans. Beard turned to America's frontier past for inspiration, creating the Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, while Seton created the Woodcraft Indians. For Beard, Indians were the antagonists, the obstacles Americans faced in tam- ing the West, but Seton found in them avatars of a better existence. The historian Philip Deloria argues that Seton grasped the complicated and con- tradictory impulses of modernity better than did Beard. Beard advocated that young people emulate the pioneer experience and act like frontiers- man, but such advice no longer seemed applicable in a modern Industrial Age. Seton, however, did not want people to reject modernity or live by out- moded methods. Instead, he wanted them to be modern by encountering the primitive. Deloria writes that this experience represented a "break not only historically [as in Beard's approach], but also racially, socially, and devel- opmentally."64 Indian peoples, unlike the frontiersman of Daniel Boone's era, still existed and, Seton hoped, remained largely unsullied by the evils of modernity. Ethnologists, by living with and observing Indian peoples, could then popularize supposedly authentic views of Indians, stressing their values Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 15 and morals as examples for children to emulate and thereby enabling young Americans to engage this other world and emerge from the experience better and stronger people. Similarly, the Camp Fire Girls used images of Indians to inculcate middle- class notions of gender into young women, stressing child care, cooking, and crafts. Children, unlike adults, could easily cross from modern society into primitive culture because they remained childlike and unaware of societal expectations and conventions, allowing them to play the role of noble savage. Playing Indian and dressing in Indian-inspired costumes helped open this world to them.65 As with childhood itself, children could not remain in such a world forever. While the experience with the primitive and Indian culture would fade, the lessons would linger long after the children had become adults. Playing Indian embodied many contradictory impulses. Having children dress and act like Indians to experience nature and the primitive so they could become good modern people is one example. Another contradiction came from acting like the people defeated by the United States to demonstrate loy- alty to the United States. Indeed, playing Indian had long featured in American culture. As early as 1775, American colonists, by choosing to dress as Indians during the famous Boston Tea Party, asserted a uniquely American identity for themselves. Deloria writes, 'As England became a them for colonists, Indians became an us."66 Nearly a century and a half later, as writers like Lummis and Linderman denounced immigrants as indigestible and undesirable, immi- grants themselves used Indian imagery to assert an American identity.67 These contradictions, between modern and primitive, savage and civilized, foreign and native, embodied the larger struggle to define the meaning of America in a radically changing world. Lummis and Linderman, like many Americans, used whiteness as the standard to judge other people. Lummis, for example, had slighted the rude Coloradans by writing that the only "white man" he'd found in the area was a kind and generous Italian immigrant.68 Being white, in this case, meant treating others with respect and courtesy something the settlers in Colorado refused to do, thinking that the roving newspaperman was a bandit perhaps. Nevertheless, the only hospitable per- son he found was an Italian immigrant, and, Lummis noted, the Italians as a group did not have the best reputation. Linderman also used whiteness as shorthand for respectable and moral. Describing one of his trapping partners as a rough and dangerous man, prone 116 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 to violent drinking binges, Linderman observed, "Though apt to be quarrel- some," the trapper "was always 'white' with me."69 Similarly, in a discussion of labor problems in Butte-area mines in the wake of labor violence in the mines of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Linderman's boss at the Helena and Victor Mining Company, A. Sterne Blake, declared that sabotage would not happen in Butte because "there are some white men in our crew of miners, old-timers who would hang a dynamiter as quick as we would."70 Being "white" meant being responsible, moral, intelligent, and, in the latter case, truly American. Linderman went west in search of a vanishing world, a place where still- free Indians mingled with rough trappers in a beautiful landscape of open plains and towering peaks. Instead of these romantic scenes, however, the new industrial West was a place of toxic smelters and lawless, un-American rabble. Filled with nostalgia, he did what he could to preserve the past, writ- ing books about "authentic" Indians who had not succumbed to the tempta- tions and vices of the white man's civilization and doing his best to preserve Indian culture by helping to secure a reservation for the Rocky Boy Band of Cree and Chippewa Indians. Perhaps these efforts would never be com- pletely successful, but Linderman felt it was worth a try. Charles Fletcher Lummis envisioned a slightly different world. In his world Hispanics, Indians, and even the Chinese could find a place in society, but that place was circum- scribed. Certainly, Lummis proved more progressive on issues of race than Linderman, or nearly any of his contemporaries for that matter, but he, too, harbored romantic notions of genuine Indians and Hispanics. In addition, like Linderman, he sought to limit the power and influence of immigrants to the region, in large part because, unlike the Indians, Hispanics, and Chinese in California and the Southwest, European immigrants represented a direct threat to the culture Lummis desired to build. In the end, both men employed whiteness as a tool to shape the West in accordance with their visions. Their efforts culminated a process of imagining the West as a refuge for Anglo-Americans. Taken as a whole, the West had undergone a reimagining throughout the nineteenth century. Early explorers questioned the compat- ibility of the arid, open, savage area for Anglo-American settlement. Later, some critics feared that the region was too pleasant for racial vigor, but by the end of the century westerners like Lummis argued that the region offered an ideal homeland for superior but increasingly beleaguered Anglo-Americans. The West, they argued, offered a last opportunity for a meaningful and Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 117 authentic life, free from the alienating evils of industrial society. This imagin- ing of the region provided a vision and intellectual basis that justified the real creation of the white man's West. Concomitant with this intellectual exercise was the process of physically transforming the West into the imagined ref- uge of Anglo-Americans. Western promoters and visionaries would employ the legal system, advertising, religious zeal, and finally violence in an effort to bring the white man's West into existence. While never complete, their vision would nonetheless become something of a reality. NOTES 1. Rothman employed the term in his discussion of tourism, but the idea is appropriate, I believe, for the way people come to identify themselves as western- ers. See Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 2. G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 184. 3. Frank Bird Linderman, Montana Adventure: The Recollections of Frank B. Linder- man, H. G. Merriam, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 2. 4. Ibid. 5. A good secondary summary of Linderman's life is in Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 95-118. 6. Ibid., 95-96. 7. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 8. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 183. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Frank Bird Linderman, Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 23. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 9. 14. Charles [Fletcher] Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, James Byrkit, ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 20. 15. See Mark Thompson, American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest (New York: Arcade, 2001), especially chapters 8 and 11. 118 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 16. For an in-depth discussion of the Indian education system, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). 17. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "My Brother's Keeper," part 1, Land of Sunshine 11, no. 3 (August 1899): 143. 18. Charles Fletcher Lummis to Theodore Roosevelt, May 11, 1902, MS.1.1.3805B, Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. 19. Charles Fletcher Lummis, A Tramp across the Continent (Lincoln: Bison Books, 1982), 94. 20. Ibid., 249-50. 21. Charles Fletcher Lummis to Theodore Roosevelt, November 21, 1902, MS.1.1.3805B, Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. 22. Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, 96. 23. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "Editorial," Land of Sunshine 2, no. 5 (April 1895): 91. 24. Works on the anti-Chinese movement in the West include George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti- Chinese Movement in California, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences Series 24, no. 3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939); Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 25. The only biography of Eaton is Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 26. Charles Fletcher Lummis, Land of Sunshine 13, no. 6 (November 1900), 336. 27. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "In the Lion's Den," Land of Sunshine 13, no. 3 (August 1900), 182-88, quote is on 185. 28. Lummis, Tramp across the Continent, 74. 29. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "I Guess So," Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1917. 30. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "Editorial," Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (January 1895): 34. 31. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "Los Angeles: Metropolis of the Southwest," Land of Sunshine 3, no. 1 (June 1895): 43-48. 32. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "The Right Hand of the Continent, Part Six," Out West (November 1902): 527-55. The series ran from June through December 1902. 33. Lummis's defense of German immigrants as true Americans is best articu- lated in his weekly column in the Los Angeles Times, variously titled "Chile con Car- nage," "I Know So," "I Guess So," and "I Wonder." The column became a victim of Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 119 wartime paper shortages (and perhaps of Lummis's outspoken opposition to the war); see Thompson, American Character, 293. 34. Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, 92. 35. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "In the Lion's Den," Land of Sunshine 9, no. 4 (Sep- tember 1898): 200. 36. Ibid. 37. Charles Fletcher Lummis, "In the Lion's Den," Land of Sunshine 12, no. 3 (Feb- ruary 1900): 193. 38. Charles Fletcher Lummis to Theodore Roosevelt, January 15, 1904, MS.1.1.3805D, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. 39. T6mas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9-11. 40. Ibid., 7. 41. William Francis Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Deverell traces the process of marginalizing Mexican Americans while simultane- ously romanticizing them from the 1850s through the 1940s. 42. On Lummis's role in relocating the "Warner's Ranch" Indians, see Thompson, American Character, 213-44; Smith, Reimagining Indians, 119-44. 43. Senator Henry L. Myers to Frank Bird Linderman, February 1, 1916, Box 1, Folder 19, Frank Bird Linderman Collection, Museum of the Plains Indian, Brown- ing, MT (hereafter FBLMPI). 44. Ibid. 45. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 140. 46. Frank Bird Linderman to Senator Henry L. Myers, February 8, 1916, Box 1, Folder 19, FBLMPI. 47. Ibid. The story is also recounted in Linderman, Montana Adventure, 141. In the published version Linderman does not name Oscar Lanstrum as the employer. 48. Charles M. Russell to Senator Henry L. Myers, January 11, 1913, Box 1, Folder 27, FBLMPI. 49. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 140-43, 157-60. 50. Frank Bird Linderman to John Collier, September 25, 1933, Box 1, Folder 5, FBLMPI. 51. John Evans to Frank Bird Linderman, June Io, 1925, Box 1, Folder 13, FBLMPI. 52. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 183. 53. Smith, Reimagining Indians, 115. 54. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 88. 55. Ibid., 88-89. 120 FROM DUMPING GROUND TO REFUGE: IMAGINING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST, 1803-1924 56. Ibid. See examples on 89, 92-93, 95-98. 57. Ibid., 109-10. 58. Ibid., 107. 59. Ibid., 109. 60. Frank Bird Linderman to Cato Sells, March 16, 1917, Box 1, Folder 28, FBLMPI. 61. Frank Bird Linderman to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, March 9, 1922, Box 1, Folder 4, Series I, Frank Bird Linderman Collection (Mss. 7), K. Ross Toole Archive, Mansfield Library, University of Montana, Missoula (hereafter FBLML). Linderman was a fan of Grant's book because he apparently sent a copy to Senator Henry L. Myers. See Myers's response dated December 2, 1920, Box 3, Folder 19, Series II, FBLML. 62. Frank Bird Linderman to Senator Henry L. Myers, March 23, 1922, Box 3, Folder 19, FBLML. 63. Frank Bird Linderman to P. A. Morrison, April 29, 1922, Box 3, Folder 16, FBLML. 64. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 105. 65. Ibid., 115-20. 66. Ibid., 22. 67. See Alan Trachenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), for the story of the complex interaction between immigrants and Indian identity. 68. Lummis, Letters from the Southwest, 92. 69. Linderman, Montana Adventure, 35. 70. Ibid., 85. PART II CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST  5 THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS AND WESTERN EXPANSION, 1848-80 Anglo-Americans, from Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Joseph Pomeroy Widney at the century's end, envisioned the West as more than an ordinary place. They dreamed of it as home to a rug- ged, independent, white population. For Jefferson, the West would be home to his ideal yeoman farmers, noble tillers of the soil and keepers of the sacred charge of freedom; for Widney, the Engle-Americans, as he called them, would complete the march to the setting sun that had begun on the steppes of Russia in a time before time. This geography of the imagination, these dreams of a whites'-only West, however, bumped up against a stubborn real- ity: the region remained racially diverse and could easily become even more so. Transforming it into the white man's West would require work. Creating a refuge for whites, in no small measure, meant encouraging the right peo- ple and discouraging those considered wrong. To do this, Anglo-American settlers would turn to the power of government. Initially, governmental power had been considered a tool to remove undesir- able and anomalous peoples, like free African Americans and eastern Indians, DOI: Io.5876/9781607323969.co05 123 124 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST from the settled sections of the republic. While efforts to remove free blacks never came to fruition, the government did embark on a controversial and costly policy of Indian removal, and yet little more than a decade after moving eastern Indians to the Indian Territory-consigning them to the margins of society-the United States acquired California and the Southwest; the periph- ery had now become the center. The attempt to spatially segregate Indians and free African Americans had failed, but in its place developed the notion of the West as an ideal location for white Americans, especially those of Anglo ancestry. In a very real sense, this was the antithesis of the earlier idea of segregating undesirable racial groups in the West. Now the region should, as much as possible, be a reserve of real Anglo-American whites. The introduction of slavery and free blacks, however, threatened this vision. By the 1850s the dual questions of where to expand and whether to allow slavery's extension into the West precipitated a crisis ultimately resolved at the cost of more than half a million American lives. Slavery would not take hold in the West, but neither would efforts to prevent blacks from settling in the region prove successful. Nevertheless, whiteness played a powerful, if inconclusive, role in preventing the arrival of both slaves and free blacks in the antebellum period, and, in the process, westerners tried to escape the cultural and political crisis that inexorably pulled the nation toward civil war. The new Republican Party championed the exclusion of slavery from the western territories in the 1850s. In control of the North and the West under Republican president Abraham Lincoln, the United States set out to destroy slavery. Indeed, the Civil War and the passage of the 1862 Homestead Act during the war forever ended the question of slavery's expansion. It also meant that the western territories and states would have a tiny African American population, since these newly free peoples lacked the resources required to make a western journey and thus remained in the South after the war. Yet the low numbers of African Americans in the West when compared with the South were not merely a result of the echoes of slavery. Westerners themselves had long sought ways of preventing African Americans from set- tling in the region. Taken together, therefore, the relative absence of blacks in the West resulted from economic and social concerns. Few blacks could afford to emigrate, and westerners did little to welcome them. These issues, however, had surfaced long before the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Indeed, in the nation's very infancy, the The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 125 character of future settlement in the trans-Appalachian West begged for some consideration. Expansion emerged as one of many pressing issues for the new nation, and one of the few successes of the nation's first government-the Articles of Confederation-was a land policy that effectively addressed the issue. The Northwest Ordinance outlined the process by which new states would be added to the nation and significantly forbade slavery north of the Ohio River.' Slaves did find their way into the Northwest Territory, often as vaguely defined servants, and legislatures in Indiana and Illinois tried unsuc- cessfully to legalize slavery in their respective states in the 1820s.2 The Ohio River, however, held as a boundary between free and slave states and set a precedent for the confinement of slavery. Crossing the Mississippi, however, changed the dynamics of expansion and the issue of slavery. Without the convenient North-South boundary of the Ohio River, no obvious line could be drawn between free and slave. This left the Louisiana Territory open for definition. What should be done with the territory's expansive lands? Would slavery be allowed anywhere, or would it be limited somehow by geographical boundary or political definition? The admission of Missouri to the Union brought the issue of expansion and slavery into sharp relief and led to the first real debate over slavery's extension into the West. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 solved the issue of Missouri's admission to the Union, allowing it to enter as a slave state and creating Maine as a free state to preserve the delicate balance of power in the US Senate. In addition, a line extending west from the Arkansas-Missouri bor- der (the 36-degree, 30-minute parallel) divided the Louisiana Territory into a free North and a slave South. The Senate debated the Missouri Compromise bill as one piece of legislation, attracting overwhelming northern and south- ern support. In the House, however, members treated each provision of the compromise separately. The Missouri Compromise line, forbidding slavery in the northern (and largest) part of the territory, drew strong support from northern congressmen but, somewhat surprisingly, was favored by a slim majority (39 to 37) of southern congressmen as well. Thus even southern congressmen, albeit by a slim majority, approved of banning slavery from the vast majority of the Louisiana Purchase.3 Why they did so remains unclear, and a generation later southern politicians would decry the compromise line and vociferously oppose any effort to prevent the extension of slavery. The geographer Donald W. Meinig offers one explanation for southern support. 126 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST He argues that Americans still only vaguely understood the dimensions of the western territory in 1820, and southern politicians assumed that at least a few more slave states could be gleaned from the territory. Most important, they wanted to add Missouri to the Union as rapidly as possible, and the com- promise accomplished that.4 The Missouri debate had temporarily inflamed passions on the issue of slavery, but the compromise cooled the rancor. The presence of two national, rather than sectional, political parties helped Congress arrive at a solution. As Martin Van Buren astutely observed in 1827, attachment to national polit- ical parties could furnish "a complete antidote to sectional prejudices by producing counteracting feelings."5 Such had been the case even in the 1820 crisis. The annexation of Texas in the 1840s, though also hotly contested, sim- ilarly remained largely partisan and not sectional, with the Whigs opposed to its annexation and the Democrats mostly in favor. Typically, these national parties largely stayed away from the slavery issue, with both Whigs and Democrats focusing on local and sectional issues and coming together every four years for the presidential election when they would shift to issues of national importance. This invariably led northern Whigs and Democrats to commit to free soil, while their southern counterparts could remain in sup- port of slavery. For a long time, this division worked.' The Mexican-American War, however, brought the slavery debate into sharper relief. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, provoked a war with Mexico in 1846 with the hope not only of keeping Texas but of acquiring much of the Southwest and California as well. By starting the war with Mexico, historian Michael F. Holt declares, "Polk had pried open the lid on a Pandora's box."7 Northerners saw the war as an effort to expand slavery, and the carefully created national parties buckled under the strain. In August 1846, a few months after the commencement of hostilities, President Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million to pay Mexico for any land the United States might gain from the war. Northern Democrats, seek- ing to distance themselves from President Polk and his southern Democratic allies, promised to support the bill only if it included a provision to bar slavery from any territory conquered from Mexico. In this way they hoped to deflect the ire of northern free-soil voters in upcoming elections. David Wilmot, an obscure Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, introduced the proviso that would forever bear his name. Echoing Jefferson's Northwest The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 127 Ordinance Wilmot wrote, 'As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory."8 In the House, Wilmot's Proviso passed easily on a sectional vote of 134 to 91. All but four northern congressmen voted in favor of it and all southern represen- tatives, regardless of party, opposed it. The proviso would die at the hands of southerners in the evenly divided Senate, but it resurfaced continually in the next several sessions-much to the consternation of southern politicians. The Mexican-American War and the Wilmot Proviso split the Whigs and Democrats along sectional lines, propelling the nation toward a long-delayed reckoning with the "peculiar institution" of slavery.9 Although far removed from the center of the increasingly vociferous debates over slavery in the 1840s and 185os, the turmoil nonetheless pulled the West into the growing controversy. Westerners hardly had monolithic views, and gauging them is difficult, but clearly many people opposed the extension of slavery into the West, and many also rejected the prospect of having free blacks in their midst. The debates over both slavery and the pres- ence of African Americans played out in the two Pacific Coast states that gained admittance to the Union before the Civil War: California and Oregon. Debates over the future of California reflected Westerners' attitude toward both slavery and the presence of African Americans. Slaves had been brought into the newly acquired territory following the discovery of gold in 1848. Free blacks likewise journeyed to California in search of fortune. One correspondent for the New York Tribune claimed that in the goldfields "the Southern slaveholder [works] beside the swarthy African, now his equal."0 The reporter no doubt exaggerated (or did not bother to ask either the southerner or the "swarthy" African their opinions), but clearly both enslaved and free blacks toiled in the goldfields alongside white, American Indian, and Asian miners. Indeed, Anglo-America miners appear to have deeply resented the presence of slaves in the goldfields. In the gold-laden streams of California, as individual miners worked against slave owners with several slaves at their command, the abstract debates over free labor versus slave labor became tangible. William Manney's four slaves, for example, panned an amazing $4,000 in gold in a single week." Walter Colton declared that white miners "know they must dig themselves: they have come out here for that purpose, and they won't degrade their calling by associating it with slave labor." They 128 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST cared little about "slavery in the abstract, or as it exists in other communities; not one in ten cares a button for its abolition, nor the Wilmot Proviso either: all they look at is their own position; they must themselves swing the pick, and they won't swing it by the side of negro slaves." Colton concluded that miners saw California as a "new world, where they have a right to shape and settle things in their own way. No mandate, unless it comes like a thunder- bolt straight out of heaven, is regarded."2 Having slaves compete against free men seemed patently unfair. The 1849 state constitution agreed with this view, its framers writing, "Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude . . . shall ever be tolerated in this State." The state's suffrage requirements, however, conspicuously omitted African Americans. The law enfranchised all white males over twenty-one, as well as "every white male citizen of Mexico, who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States." The constitution even allowed for the possibility of "admitting to the right of suffrage, Indians or the descen- dants of Indians, in such special cases as such proportion [a 23 majority] of the legislative body may deem just and proper."3 Similarly, the law forbade blacks from serving as members of the state's militia. These restrictions, however, turned out to be far more moderate than many of the delegates wanted, and an effort to exclude blacks from California nearly found its way into the constitution.4 One delegate to the California Constitutional Convention, M. M. McCarver, offered a "negro exclusion clause" that drew a great deal of support. The amendment declared, "The Legislature shall, at its first session, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this State, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this State for the purpose of setting them free." Representative Oliver M. Wozencraft, in support of McCarver's amendment, declared that blacks' inherent inferiority and propensity for servitude would only degrade the value of free labor in the new state. Black exclusion would therefore protect the value of white labor. He declared, "If there is one part of the world possessing advantages over another where the family of Japhet [a son of Noah and considered by some the first European] may expect to attain a higher state of perfectibility than has ever been attained by Man, it is here in California. All nature proclaims this a favored land." The land would bless the efforts of whites, while blacks, Wozencraft asserted, would The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 129 be better off living in the "boundless wastes" of Africa where God had first created them. Delegates withdrew the amendment out of fear that an exclu- sion clause might hurt efforts to get the state's constitution approved by the US Congress, but only on the promise that the legislature would take up the issue soon after statehood had been granted.5 California's first governor, Peter Burnett, introduced the issue of Negro exclusion soon after coming to office in 1849. During his inaugural speech on December 20, 1849, Burnett opened with a warning for his fellow Cal- ifornians. Because of the state's natural advantages, most notably gold, California would "be either a very great or a very sordid and petty state." History, Burnett explained, showed that "in all those countries where rich and extensive mines of the precious metals have been heretofore discovered, the people have become indolent, careless, and stupid. This enervating influ- ence operates silently, steadily, and continually, and requires counteracting causes, or great and continued energy of character in a people to successfully resist it."16 Burnett hoped industrious Americans could resist the fate of lesser nations and maintain their vigor in the face of golden wealth. Wise legislation, especially at the dawning moment of the state's admis- sion to the Union, would forever determine the course of California's des- tiny, the governor warned. In Burnett's opinion, Californians needed to care- fully select which groups would be allowed into the Golden State. Burnett warned about the dangers of Chinese immigration, noting that while hardworking and honest, they would never break their ties to the mother country. Further, their presence drove down wages for whites, accustomed as they were to surviving on next to nothing (a complaint that would be leveled repeatedly at the Chinese), and in time they could potentially over- run the state. "Were Chinamen permitted to settle in our country at their pleasure, and were they granted all the rights and privileges of whites, and the laws were impartially and efficiently administered, so that the two races would stand precisely and practically equal in all respects, in one century the Chinese would own all the property on this coast," Burnett claimed.17 Far from banning the Chinese, however, Burnett would later argue for an amended treaty to replace the Burlingame Treaty that would ensure that Chinese merchants stayed only temporarily, thereby giving California a much-needed labor force while still ensuring that the Chinese would not become permanent residents. 130 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST Burnett next turned his attention to the presence of free blacks, advocating strongly for Negro exclusion. Taken together, Burnett wished to maintain the dominance of Anglo-Americans in a state already the most diverse in the nation. The efforts of Burnett and others to limit the presence of blacks in California, however, came to little, as the legislature never acted to exclude blacks, who proved to be a statistically insignificant and therefore non- threatening group. After 1852, legislators instead turned to efforts to stymie the more worrisome Chinese immigration.8 Legislating whiteness proved difficult, but nevertheless attempts to exclude blacks and the Chinese spoke volumes about the future Californians envisioned for their state. Even in remote Oregon, the issue of slavery and black residence proved divisive. Slavery had been prohibited under an act of the 1844 provisional gov- ernment and again in 1848 when the federal government created the Oregon Territory. By the 1850s, however, the issue had come to prominence, mirror- ing the national debate. Many Oregonians disliked the presence of African Americans, whether free or enslaved, in their territory and sought to exclude them.'9 Perhaps in this way, many believed they could avoid the evils of slav- ery and the presence of an inferior group of people as well. Excluding children, most Oregonians had emigrated from older sections of the country-many from the Midwest. According to the 186o census, 23 percent of Oregon's population hailed from the Old Northwest and another 17 percent from the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A full 43 percent were either foreign-born or children born in the West; the remainder were from the Deep South (5 percent), New England states (4 percent), and Mid-Atlantic states (8 percent). The majority of whites from Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee also owned no slaves. Thus, in a very real sense, Oregonians reflected the attitudes of midwesterners in their desire to prevent both slavery and the presence of blacks.20 The provisional government set the tone for Negro exclusion and the prohibition of slavery. The impetus for excluding blacks came after a dis- pute between James Saules, an African American settler, and a Wasco Indian named Comstock turned violent. After an exchange of bullets and arrows, Comstock lay dead. Local whites blamed Saules for the altercation and threatened his life. In response Saules, who had married an Indian woman, warned that he could turn the Indians against the whites. The Comstock affair seemed to prove that blacks, especially those who made alliances with The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 131 Indian peoples, posed potential danger and should be prevented from emi- grating to Oregon.2' Hailing from American culture like Anglo-Americans but embittered and envious of their social betters and willing to mix and fraternize with Indians, African Americans like Saules represented a dan- gerous group, Oregonians believed, that, as Saules claimed, could stir up trouble between the groups. Better, many felt, to limit their presence in the territory. In June 1844 the provisional government took up the issue and outlawed slavery, giving slave owners three years to free their slaves. It ordered free blacks and mulattoes to leave the territory within two years or face periodic floggings. The flogging provision, however, proved too controversial, and in December the government changed the punishment to indentured servitude under a white man, a provision modeled on an 1819 Illinois act. The Oregon act had been introduced by a Missourian named Peter Burnett-the same Burnett who would follow the Gold Rush to California and become that state's first governor. Burnett had come to dominate the legislative committee.22 In a letter dated December 25, 1844, he explained that Oregon offered settlers an opportunity to right the failings of other societ- ies. He bragged that Oregonians rarely engaged in drinking, quarreling, and gambling, and he declared that the exclusion of blacks would "keep clear of that most troublesome class of population. We are in a new world, under most favorable circumstances, and we wish to avoid most of those evils that have so much afflicted the United States and other countries. Availing our- selves of the peculiarities of our favored condition, we are determined, if we can, to improve upon the best systems that have existed, or now exist." The result, Burnett explained, was a vigorous white population "from various places; some from the commercial shores of Great Britain, some from the free pure air of the U. States, some from the cold region of Canada." He admitted that these disparate groups held different customs and views, "and yet we have the utmost harmony. National and sectional prejudices do not seem to exist."2 That would not remain the case, however. Burnett's exclusion law proved short-lived, and the following year, led by Jesse Applegate, a farmer recently removed from Missouri, the legisla- ture repealed the act. In September 1849 the issue resurfaced when legis- lators passed a new bill to prohibit free blacks and mulattoes from settling in Oregon. The justification for the act reiterated the alleged cause of the 132 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST Comstock affair, arguing that "it would be highly dangerous to allow free Negroes and mulattoes to reside in the Territory, or to intermix with Indians, instilling into their mind feelings of hostility toward the white race."24 Given relations between whites and Indians in the Northwest, Indians certainly did not need blacks to instill feelings of hostility in them, but Oregonians feared the feasibility of an alliance between the two non-white groups. However, excepting James Saules, little proof exists that African Americans held any sway over native peoples whatsoever. More likely, Oregonians, like Burnett, sought to ensure the "utmost harmony" in the state's population by keeping it as white as possible. As the venom of the slave issue spread through the body politic in the 1840s and 1850s, even far-off Oregon was not immune. Efforts to organize it into a territory foundered over the issue. It took nearly a year and a half for Congress to finally create a bill to organize the Oregon Territory-usually a fairly sedate and mundane task-but in the tense climate of the Mexican- American War and slavery's expansion the task became anything but mun- dane. Northerners hoped to explicitly exclude slavery in the territory, believ- ing it an essential precedent for future territories and states in the West. David Wilmot, for example, asserted that if slavery stretched to the Pacific Ocean, it would ensure "the ultimate subjugation of the whole southern half of this Continent and its dominion."25 Similarly, Julius Rockwell, a congress- man from Massachusetts, argued during the 1848 debates in favor of creating the Oregon Territory with an explicit prohibition of slavery. He explained, "The Territory of Oregon, by reason of its high northern latitude, may be justly thought to stand upon different grounds in relation to slavery from the other Territories [acquired following the Mexican-American War]. But none of these free Territories, I wish it distinctly understood, shall ever, so far as my vote is concerned, be organized without this restriction.1"26 Fear of such a precedent, however, worried southern congressmen. The stakes of the debate really had little to do with Oregon, which few people thought suitable for slavery, and everything to do with the settlement of the vast territory soon to be taken from Mexico. Finally, in 1848 the bill creating the Oregon Territory, a bill that implicitly banned slavery, passed the House and Senate by a narrow margin.27 Even some northern lawmakers felt the West should be free not only of slavery but also of the presence of blacks. During debates on western The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 133 expansion in the 3oth Congress, John Adams Dix, a senator from New York, addressed the issue of slavery and the future of the West in a long speech on June 26, 1848. After a lengthy legal analysis of whether Congress had the authority to specifically bar slavery from newly acquired territories, Dix spoke about a grand vision of the West as a land destined to be settled by whites. He argued that those who maintained that spreading slavery would not increase the number of blacks grossly underestimated the power of human beings to reproduce and that in a climate as good as Oregon's, it was inevitable that a substantial black population would increase dramati- cally. Dix claimed to "foresee in our political organization the foundations of an empire increasing more rapidly, and destined to expand to broader limits, than the Roman Republic; not an empire, like the latter, founded on brute force; but an empire founded on peace, and extending itself by industry, enterprise, and the arts of civilization." Dix thought it was America's mission to accept "the surplus of the over-peopled and over-governed countries of Europe" and "instruct them in the arts of peace, and to accelerate the march of civilization across the continent." America would continue to grow, Dix predicted, reaching at least Too million people by 1900.28 Yet, Dix asked, what would be the racial makeup of that population? The "earth is peopled ... [by] four grand divisions-the Asiatic, the Caucasian, the Ethiopian, and the Indian. The whole surface of Europe, with some incon- siderable exceptions, is occupied by the Caucasian race . . . [which] laid the foundations of nearly all the civilization the world contains." Ultimately, Dix argued, Europeans roughly equaled each other in talent and intellect, and God wanted them to settle the West and transform the United States into a powerful nation: "It is in the vast and fertile spaces of the West that our own descendants, as well as the oppressed and needy multitudes of the Old World, must find the food they require, and the rewards for labor which are necessary to give them the spirit and independence of freemen. I hold it to be our sacred duty to consecrate these spaces to the multiplication of the white race."29 Speaking in the House the day following Dix's speech, Congressman Julius Rockwell argued that exporting slavery would inevitably lead to the develop- ment of a free black population in the far West. He noted that slave owners, including those in Congress, held up the allegedly degraded condition of free blacks as proof that they qualified only for slavery. "It is said with great force," 134 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST Rockwell began, "that slavery in the slave States must not be interfered with, because, among other reasons, the white and black races in numbers so nearly equal can never exist together in a state of freedom; because the eman- cipation of the black race implies destruction to one race or the other." If such became reality, Rockwell continued, "What do you propose to do? You propose to put that institution into these free Territories, and forever subject them to that condition of things; to plant an institution there which must exist forever, because it can never safely be removed."30 Once established in the West, he warned, slavery could never be destroyed, since the two races could not coexist. Barring slavery, therefore, would also prevent large num- bers of free blacks from ever living in Oregon and would prevent the same conditions that many argued made emancipation impossible in the South. During the 1850s Oregonians continued to reject both slavery and the pres- ence of blacks. Samuel Thurston, Oregon's territorial delegate to Congress, spoke out against an Ohio congressman's proposal to open the Oregon Territory to African American settlement during debates over passage of the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Law. Asahel Bush, a newspaperman and friend of Thurston's, quoted the delegate as saying, "The people of Oregon were not pro-slavery men, nor were they pro-negro men; there were but few negroes in the territory and he hoped there never would be more; the people themselves had excluded them and he trusted that Congress would not intro- duce them in violation of their wishes."3 In 1853 the Oregon territorial supreme court ruled that Nathaniel Ford, a migrant from Missouri who had brought several slaves with him, must free his slaves. In 1854 and again the following year, the territorial legislature enter- tained bills to exclude blacks and mulattoes from the territory in an effort to ensure that Oregon remained for whites only. One member of the territorial house declared: "Niggers . . . should never be allowed to mingle with the whites . . . If niggers are allowed to come among us and mingle with the whites, it will cause a perfect state of pollution ... I don't see that we should equalize ourselves with them by letting them come among us.5"32 Oregonians, by and large, endorsed the principle of "popular sovereignty" as outlined in Stephen Douglas's 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, seeing it as an avenue for giving them increased control over their own affairs. Many, like Delazon Smith, a ter- ritorial representative from Linn County, argued that Oregonians could sup- port the concept of popular sovereignty and still remain opposed to slavery.33 The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 135 Finally, in 1857 Oregonians voted overwhelmingly in favor of organizing a state government and applying to Congress for statehood. This step led to a final reckoning with the issue of slavery in the Oregon country. The national situation had grown more divisive with the election of the pro- slavery Democrat James Buchanan to the presidency, bloodshed over popular sovereignty in Kansas, and the US Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case. As Oregon politicians jockeyed for position ahead of the necessary constitutional convention, these national events focused Oregonians' attention on the issue of slavery. While Oregon had a vocal group of pro-slavery advocates (perhaps one- third of the state's population, according to anti-slavery editor William L. Adams of the Oregon Argus, a number almost certainly exaggerated) and some strongly anti-slavery agitators, in general, Oregonians rejected both slavery and the presence of free African Americans. Asahel Bush, who founded the Democratic Oregon Statesman (with Thurston's covert financial backing), argued that Oregonians, a practical lot, cared little for the debate over the morality of the institution.34 As one letter opined in the Statesman, Oregon's cool and wet climate was not conducive to slave labor. George H. Williams, the territory's chief justice and a leading Democrat, wrote an influential and widely circulated letter in which he argued that slav- ery could not flourish in Oregon's climate. He noted, for example, "New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New Hampshire ascertained by actual trial that slavery was detrimen- tal to their interests, and therefore abolished it"-states with cool climates like Oregon's where labor-intensive cotton and similar crops could not be grown.35 Williams claimed that slaves did not work hard since no incentive motivated them to do so, and they cost far more than it cost to hire free laborers for a few months during the growing season. Further, Williams asserted, the climate might actually be hazardous to African American slaves, since their ancestors originated in hot and sunny Africa. One winter's work in Oregon's cold rain could very well kill them.36 Controlling slaves would also be a problem, Williams warned, since they could easily flee the state and take refuge in the free state of California, in Canada, or among Indian tribes, just as fugitive slaves had once taken shelter among the Seminole of Florida. Even worse, Williams argued, census num- bers revealed that settlers to the Midwest preferred to settle in free territories. 136 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST Emigrants rarely came as men of means, but they were men "whose limbs are made sinewy by hard work; who go to new countries to get land and homes and who expect to depend chiefly upon their own labor. Slave states are objectionable to such men."37 Oregon needed these hardworking, inde- pendent, and ambitious men, but such men would not compete with slav- ery. Similarly, foreign immigrants looking to escape poverty and oppression in Europe could be expected to find homes in Oregon. These immigrants tirelessly built farms, canals, and railroads-developing every place they set- tled-but they would not deign to work beside slaves. Establish slavery in Oregon, Williams cautioned, and "you will turn aside that tide of free white labor which has poured itself like a fertilizing flood" on the free states and territories.38 Worse yet, laboring whites and enslaved blacks would invariably mix, and each would learn the bad habits of the other. "Taking everything into consideration," Williams concluded, "I ask if it is not the true policy of Oregon to keep as clear as possible of negroes, and all the exciting questions of negro servitude. Situated away here on the Pacific, as a free state, we are not likely to be troubled much with free negroes or fugitive slaves."39 Williams argued that Oregon therefore should be reserved for whites. Similarly, the Oregon Statesman in August 1857, with the constitutional con- vention looming, argued that slavery fit in the South and that southerners should keep the black and white races separate through slavery because "the wisdom of man has not yet devised a system under which the negro is as well off as he is under that of American slavery. Still, we think that our climate, soil, situation, population, etc., render it, to any useful extent, an impossible situation for Oregon."40 Those in favor of slavery certainly had supporters, including Democrats Joseph Lane (Oregon's territorial delegate following Thurston's death in 1851) and Matthew P. Deady, like Williams a territorial supreme court justice.4' Their argument rested on the belief that slavery would prevent the chronic labor shortages plaguing the region, especially when news of a gold strike somewhere caused many hired hands to flee to the goldfields. Further, some claimed, Oregon's climate did not differ markedly from that of Virginia, Kentucky, or Missouri-all places with slaves (a markedly different interpre- tation of Oregon's climate than that of Williams). Oregon's constitutional convention convened on August 17, 1857. The terri- tory's prominent Democrats led the convention, including Deady, who was The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 137 chosen president. The presence of blacks, whether free or enslaved, occupied a great deal of attention in the sessions. Thomas Dryer, the Whig editor of the Oregonian and a convention delegate, declared that he would "vote to exclude Negroes, Chinamen, Kanakas [Hawaiians], and even Indians" from Oregon.42 Indeed, delegates drafted articles of the constitution intended to deny citizenship to blacks, mulattoes, and the Chinese, as well as to prevent Chinese immigrants from purchasing real estate. These issues and that of slavery, however, threatened to derail the convention. The delegates therefore decided not to address the issues of slavery and the presence of free blacks and instead to send them directly to the people. In November 1857 Oregonians weighed in on the constitution, the issue of slavery, and the presence of blacks. They voted overwhelmingly for statehood and in favor of excluding slavery, by 7,227 votes to 2,645 votes. Oregonians also prohibited free blacks from settling in the fledgling state by a stunning margin of 8,640 to 1,081.4 Statehood, though, waited for more than a year, as Congress bickered about admitting Oregon in a time of acrimonious debate, but the results of the election on Oregon's fate showed, perhaps better than any other measure, how Oregonians felt about the institution of slavery and the presence of blacks in their midst. Oregon would strive to be a free state but also a white state. Peter Burnett, reflecting late in life on his prominent role in debates over Negro exclusion in both Oregon and California, explained that he always staunchly opposed slavery. From the vantage point of the 188os and advanced age, he justified exclusion as part of a belief that the West would be different from and better than the older regions of the country and that racial purity would be a key part of that superiority. He noted, "One of the objects I had in view of coming to this coast was to aid in building a great American com- munity on the Pacific; and, in the enthusiasm of my nature, I was anxious to aid in founding a State superior in several respects to those east of the Rocky Mountains. I therefore labored to avoid the evils of intoxication [by supporting prohibition efforts], and of mixed-races, one of which was disfranchised."44 Being staunchly anti-slavery, however, was only half of the equation, a fact that Burnett carefully left out of his reminiscences, for he, like many other westerners, attempted to use whiteness to create a uniform society. As Oregon and California worked to prevent the presence of both slavery and free blacks, national leaders continued their march toward war. As late as 138 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST 1850 cooperation remained possible, but it had become increasingly difficult, as the motley provisions that composed the California Compromise of 1850 demonstrated. Lacking a new slave state to offset California's admission to the Union as a free state, northerners offered several provisions, including efforts to strengthen the fugitive slave law, to win enough support to pass the legislation. By the mid-1850s such forced cooperation became impossible as the debate over slavery grew increasingly hostile. Most northerners came out against the expansion of slavery, while their southern counterparts remained in favor of expansion. Southern partisans believed slave owners had the right to take their slaves anywhere, since the legal system recognized them as private property. Navigating this split proved to be fraught with difficulty. Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, seeking to address the issue and propel himself into the national spotlight, offered the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Essentially, the act created two separate territories, Kansas in the south and Nebraska to the north. He advocated a system called popular sovereignty in which the voters would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. He assumed that Kansas (directly west of the slave state Missouri) would endorse slavery and that the Nebraska Territory would not, sustaining a tee- tering balance for a bit longer. Opposition to this act (and to the broader 1857 Dred Scott decision by the US Supreme Court, which effectively allowed slav- ery anywhere) gave birth to the Republican Party, whose issues and support were sectional, not national. As popular sovereignty in Kansas demonstrated, however, not even the voters could solve this problem. Facing its second presidential election campaign in 1860, the Republican Party chose Abraham Lincoln as its candidate. While Lincoln stressed that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, he nevertheless advo- cated for the territories in the West to be preserved as "free soil" and free of the institution of slavery. Southerners feared as well that Lincoln's triumph in the 186o election repudiated their rights and standing as equal members of the Union. A bare majority of northern voters had overridden their values, beliefs, and key economic institutions; and the constitution, they contended, included protection of minority views from such a tyrannical majority. This new presi- dent and his party, southern secessionists claimed, desired their subjugation and the destruction of the southern economy and way of life. As one Mississippi newspaper editor claimed, "The domination of Black Republicanism is wholly The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 139 inconsistent with every idea of a free or beneficent government." As for Lincoln he asked, "Can a man be said to be [a] constitutionally elected president, the very object of whose election is to destroy the Constitution?" Southern fire- eaters argued that dissolving the Union and seceding was the only logical way to preserve the fundamental principles of the revolution on which the nation was founded.45 During the first six months of 1861, the nation tore itself in two. Ironically perhaps, secession sealed the fate of the West as free soil. Issues, such as the Homestead Act and location of the transcontinental railroad, long mired in sectional politics, could now be easily resolved since the West remained firmly in the hands of the federal government and the United States. Northerners rather than southerners determined the course of the new west- ern empire, championing both free labor and whiteness in the process. The Homestead Act in particular had been a long time coming. Northern politicians before and during the Civil War offered a vision of the West as populated by Jefferson's yeoman farmers, whose own strong hands pro- vided their only source of labor. This would be a free West, where no person received an unfair advantage by drawing off the labor of slaves. Assumptions about free labor drove the creation of a homestead law. In the past, the pros- pect of a homestead law had been supported by both northerners and south- erners, but a law had never come to fruition. Indeed, Democrats had long advocated a policy of allowing settlers to claim sections of the public domain. Southern politicians like Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, James Walker of Mississippi, and, later, Tennessee's Andrew Johnson argued in the 1830s and 1840s for a policy that would help settlers procure farms in the West. Opposition to a homestead policy in those years came not from the pro-slav- ery South but rather from the Northeast.46 The dynamics behind a homestead law changed when homesteading by yeoman farmers became equated with "free labor." The belief that the West should be reserved as "free soil" helped destroy the second-party system, cre- ating a split in political views along sectional lines, a split personified by the rise of the Republican Party. The Republicans' support of free soil turned the Old Northwest away from the Democrats and, in turn, forced the Old Southwest, long a supporter of homesteading, into an alliance with the Southeast.47 This realignment doomed the passage of the act until the Civil War. In their attacks on slavery and its extension, it became almost axiomatic for northern critics of slavery to denounce the institution as an evil not only 140 CREATING AND DEFENDING THE WHITE MAN'S WEST for slaves but also for whites. Slavery degraded and debased labor in areas where it thrived, and few whites of any social class would work, they claimed. Republicans like William H. Seward and Frederick Law Olmsted invariably denounced southerners as lazy, shiftless, and eager to make their slaves work. Northerners pointed to that reluctance to work as a major cause of the South's alleged economic backwardness. Olmsted in particular made something of a cottage industry out of touring the South and denouncing it as inferior to northern society.48 He rejected the common belief that beneficent climates would cause white racial deterioration and instead pointed an accusing finger at slavery in his 1857 Texas travelogue A Journey through Texas. Like much of the Southwest, Texas had both a warm climate and a mul- tiracial society. Touring the state in 1853-54, Olmsted marveled at its fertility, declaring, "The labor of one man in Texas will more easily produce adequate sustenance and shelter for a family. . . than that of two anywhere in the Free States."4 Labor in Texas, however, did not always mean merely subsistence for small families, the northern abolitionist stressed. Many Texans engaged in cotton production, and cotton, with few exceptions, meant slavery. Some thought the heat and humidity of Texas, like elsewhere in the South, weak- ened and exhausted whites. Supposedly, only peoples of African descent could endure it. Southerners therefore considered slavery an economic and envi- ronmental necessity.50 Olmsted dismissed this argument, writing, "Nor did we ... have reason to retain the common opinion ... that the health of white people, or their ability to labor, was less in the greater part of Texas than in the new Free States.""5 Whites, he observed, could be seen in the cotton fields alongside slaves, and their health did not seem adversely affected. Yet Texas, Olmsted asserted, was underdeveloped even by the meager standards of the frontier. He described fertile fields that lay fallow, homes of rude and haphazard construction, neglected livestock, and a poor, backward, uncouth, anti-intellectual white citizenry-all typical effects associated with climatic degeneration, or so conventional wisdom asserted.52 Such striking poverty in a land of abundance did seem to make a case for climate-induced, white racial degeneration, but Olmsted differed with the "common opinion" and concluded that climate did not account for the inferior quality of Texas's white population. The pernicious influence of slavery, however, did. Olmsted described the son of a northerner who had settled in Texas as being "with- out care, thoughtless, with an unoccupied mind." He dwelled in a hovel on The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848-80 141 A ,, -4 w. {I .J0U1I1\1Y TILIU)U(11 TEXAS: INK EN'T N B ''>K DIN JI AI:" . *';