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BrainPop Trail of Tears

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Learn about one of the saddest episodes in U.S. history: the removal of American Indians from their native lands, and their tragic march through the Trail of Tears

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Women Of The Wild West | History Detectives | PBS

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Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Belle Starr, Pearl Hart: Toting guns, these women of the Wild West shot down the view that life as a female pioneer was about cooking, sewing, cleaning and caring for children.

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Narrator: The first Transcontinental Railroad has been called the engineering marvel of the 19th century and a flat-out swindle; it opened new economies in the American West, while consuming vast quantities of its natural resources; it birthed one way of life on the Great Plains and destroyed another.

In making the road, a young nation would display its capacity for boldness, ingenuity, and industry. It would also reveal its capacity for greed, graft, and mindless violence.

New heroes of business and industry -- such as hardware dealer Collis P. Huntington and construction boss Jack Casement -- would make names for themselves. As would the engaging but rapacious scoundrel, Thomas C. Durant.

Phil Roberts, Historian: These were bigger than life kinds of adventures that were going on out West. Here was, in essence, the railroad representing civilization moving into the wilderness.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: It was just the feat that boggled the imagination -- that from Omaha and the Missouri River, they could build all the way to Sacramento and the Sacramento River with nothing in between these two early settlements.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: The Transcontinental Railroad was the technological manifestation of Manifest Destiny. This was how we were going to make this all one country.

Narrator: Even before construction began, the Transcontinental Railroad had precious freight to bear: the hopes and dreams of an entire nation. It hauled the promise of new wealth to the filthy rich, the landless poor, and everybody in between. As the road was built, Huntington, Casement, and Durant would be joined by Congressmen, engineers, prostitutes, laborers, and Main Street merchants in a desperate race for the loot. But the stakes were not merely personal. With the railroad complete, it was asserted, America could take its place as "the first nation of the world, in commerce, in government, in intellectual and moral supremacy."

The man who would fire America's first Transcontinental Railroad, Theodore Judah, was born in 1826 -- to a nation on the rise. The United States was a young republic but already possessed of big ideas for itself. And as early as the 1830s, while Judah was still a schoolboy, pamphleteers began to champion one entirely new idea: a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The earliest railroad projectors were zealous as missionaries, and about as practical. None of these men had even seen the Far West. Yet they insisted this railroad would be the main commercial road between Europe and Asia. "The whole commerce of the vast world," one exclaimed, "will be tumbled into our lap."

Few Americans bought into these dreamy projections. Much of the West was presumed useless: a land, said one United States Senator, "which no American citizen should be compelled to inhabit unless as a punishment for crime."

Donald Fixico, Historian: There's so much land, so much space, air, the clouds, everything. It's almost magnified. The Rocky Mountains to the West. They're awesome. Rivers when they're flooding, awesome. A tornado, awesome. So these things are much greater than a human being.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: The country was empty essentially. Miles and miles of sage brush between anything they recognized in the Missouri River Valley until they got into the mountains of the West. It was basically a big blank slate.

Narrator: There were a few lonely military and trading posts out west, the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City, and about 350,000 Indians, some friendly, many not. And as discovery of gold in California began to draw travelers across that land, those who made the nearly 2,000 mile trip found out how malicious the interior west could be.

David Bain, Writer: It was five months of sheer misery, and there were many people who died along the way whether if by the hands of Indians or from dysentery or cholera, accidents, starvation, lack of water.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: The 40 mile desert got its name during the overland immigration to California during the gold rush. It was the distance from the last good water of the Humboldt River as it evaporated and trickled into the sand before they finally got to the Truckee River. Forty miles without water in a world that's powered by animals is a long distance.

Carol Bowers, Historian: As the animals had difficulty they might have to lighten their loads. And so they might have tossed aside things like cook stoves, rocking chairs, furniture, almost any type of household goods. And certainly all along those trails, there are graves where people had to bury their loved ones and move on without them.

David Bain, Writer: There was a danger of the bodies being dug up by wolves and other predators. So usually people would be buried right on the trail itself, and then the constant tapping down of all of those covered wagons going past would just harden the earth and make it impossible for the grave to be desecrated. So most of the graves were not marked, and there's no way of knowing how many thousands of people died along that route.

Narrator: As gold-rich veins of ore were cracked open in California, the U.S. Army began to worry about protecting this valuable but far-flung state -- and safeguarding both the people and precious goods flowing east and west. A railroad could do it -- with all sorts of side benefits. Railroads in the east were already generating enormous revenues for owners -- and prosperity for the towns and cities along the lines. Many in Congress recognized that there was potential in a railroad to the western sea -- and agreed to fund surveys of possible routes for what was known as "the Pacific Railroad."

Wendell Huffman, Historian: They had personal stakes in the matter. Very realistic stakes. The Congressmen that were active on behalf of specific geographical points to be starting points for the railroad were, for the most part, invested in those communities. Stephen Douglas owned property in the site of Chicago. He also owned area in Duluth.

David Bain, Writer: Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, was very interested that the railroad would go through Missouri and head off toward the Rockies that way. Stephen Douglas would not cooperate unless the railroad went through Illinois. The Southern politicians -- people like Jefferson Davis -- wanted it to start in Georgia and move across. There was just no way that they could come to any kind of decision.

Narrator: Though Congress appeared to be hopelessly deadlocked, the idea of a coast-to-coast railroad had captured the imagination of engineers all over America -- and none more than Theodore Judah. Judah was a practically trained civil engineer, having begun work on eastern railroads at age 13 before heading west in 1854 to build the first railroad in California.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: His wife, years later, said that Theodore Judah took the job that took him to California because he wanted to have something to do with the Pacific Railroad. I suspect every civil engineer in the United States, at the time, wanted to have something to do with the Pacific Railroad.

David Bain, Writer: He really had what his wife liked to call "the Pacific Railroad bug." And there were some people in Sacramento who called him "crazy Judah" because he was such a mono-maniac about the railroad.

Narrator: Theodore Judah had passable engineering skills but a genius for friendly persuasion. He could rhapsodize about 90-ton locomotives with driving wheels 14 feet in diameter, pulling freight and passengers across the plains at a hundred miles an hour. Judah also understood that before investors came on board they wanted to know what it would really cost to build the road through prairie, desert, and mountains, to grade and bridge and tunnel, and to lay nearly 2,000 miles of iron rail.

But Judah simply didn't have the money to conduct the sort of survey that would answer those questions. So he went to Congress to try to get a few happy incentives for potential investors.

When Theodore Judah arrived in Washington in the fall of 1859, talk of slavery and secession was crowding out all other business in the nation's capitol. Still he pressed his case. Even without a proper survey, Judah insisted a railroad could race across the plains, scale the Rockies and push easily through the Great Basin. The biggest obstacle was the Sierra Nevada Mountains -- and he'd yet to find a way through. So in his earliest projections, Judah's railroad would skirt the range to the north.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: In 1860, he's still thinking in terms of a railroad coming around the northern part of the state. And up until that time, he had never been in the Sierra Nevada looking for railroads. But in July of 1860, California is a different world than it was when he left the previous October. Everybody is trying to get to Virginia City, Nevada. The Comstock was discovered in late 1859. California had basically been in a depression for five years. The gold rush had been over. And suddenly there's silver just across the mountains. And there's this huge rush from California to Virginia City. And people are beginning to think that they could build a railroad to Virginia City. There's suddenly financial incentive to build directly into the Sierra.

Narrator: In October of 1860, a local storekeeper named Daniel Strong invited Judah to have a look at a place where he thought a railroad could cross the Sierras. If it worked, Strong knew, it was the straightest line to the Comstock Lode, and his little town of Dutch Flat would prosper.

It was a difficult, two-day ride to the summit, but on top, when Judah looked east -- out along an immigrant trail largely abandoned after the Donner Party's ugly demise -- the engineer understood immediately what he saw.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: So many places in the Sierra Nevada, there's a double summit. You come across the mountains and you drop down into a valley such as the valley where Lake Tahoe is. And then on the other side, you got another mountain ridge that you have to cross. And at Donner, you've only got one Summit. You come up the American River, you go down the Truckee River. And by being on the ridge above the river, you have a nice continuous plain that you use as a ramp. He knew that this was going to be a shortcut to Virginia City. This was going to make money.

Narrator: Judah and Strong drew up articles of incorporation for the Central Pacific Railroad Company and started looking for investors. At a meeting in Sacramento, Judah managed to entice one very important Main Street businessman.

Collis P. Huntington was a hardware wholesaler known for his willingness to bury competition and for his shrewd business sense. When Huntington said he was considering Judah's railroad proposition, other Sacramento merchants followed: Huntington's business partner, Mark Hopkins, dry-goods merchant Charles Crocker, and his brother, the attorney E.B. Crocker, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer and would-be Governor.

Taken together, the five were worth less than $150,000; they were mistrustful of others and fiercely protective of their solid credit ratings. But with California's Gold Rush waning, and their revenues falling, this new project offered some hope. Even if the Sacramento merchants failed to get a railroad through the Sierras, they could at least use Judah's engineering for a wagon road to Virginia City.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: Huntington was very practical. And he wanted to know: what's the return? Hopkins didn't want any part of it. He was saying, what are we doing getting involved in this railroad? We've already got a good thing going with this hardware business. And so all they did initially was give Judah enough money to do a survey. And following that survey, in October of 1861, Judah went back to Washington, D.C. This time with maps and with profile.

Narrator: In an office in the Capitol building, Judah unfurled a 60-foot long map and smaller profiles of his proposed line across the Sierras. When Representatives and Senators wandered in, the 35-year-old engineer was always there to explain his plan: It would take just over $12 million to build the line across California, he'd tell his visitors. He'd show them where the bridges and tunnels would go, the curves, the grades, the water tanks and depots.

David Bain, Writer: Looking at a map was one thing. But what Judah would have to face in reality was the 7,000-foot high Sierras with the terrible weather, the 30-foot snow drifts, the mud slides, the deep rock cuts that had to be done, the tunnels that had to be dug. It was going to be a tremendous amount of work to actually get this dream across the mountains.

Narrator: In the Sierras, Judah's plans called for bridging rivers and ravines, carving 20-foot wide shelves out of sheer mountain faces and driving18 tunnels -- one more than a thousand feet long -- through solid granite. And there was not a manufacturer on the Pacific coast who could provide them locomotives or railroad cars, let alone drills, spikes, and rails.

Many in Congress shied at starting such a difficult and costly project as the Civil War raged. But President Abraham -- who had long championed a Pacific railroad -- was lobbying hard for the project.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: Lincoln had a problem. The federal union was falling apart. He was fighting a costly and bloody civil war to put the union together. And here we had three Pacific states -- California, Oregon 1859, Nevada 1863 -- three Pacific states that were a continent away.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: It was essential for the conduct of the Civil War to have California money. California had a fairly strong secessionist movement. There was no way of guaranteeing that California would remain in the Union. That railroad is essential to keep the two coasts together.

Narrator: On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed a bill that gave Judah's own Central Pacific the right to build from Sacramento east and chartered a second company -- the Union Pacific -- to build from the Missouri River west. The legislation did not specify a meeting point for the two roads, but it did grant the railroad builders 6,400 acres of land for every mile of track laid, and as much as $48,000 in government bonds for each mile completed.

There were strings, of course, and enough of them to hang both companies. The government would withhold nearly 20 percent of the bonds until the entire line was in working order, and it would not release a single dime to either company until it had built 40 miles of working railroad. If the road was not completed between the Missouri and Sacramento Rivers within a dozen years, all railroad company assets would be forfeited.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: When Theodore Judah returned with a franchise to build a Pacific Railroad, I think his partners -- and at that time they were all equal partners in this corporation -- I think they were a little bit surprised. And realized that it was time that they had to put up or shut up.

Narrator: On the morning of January 8, 1863 -- with Judah notably absent -- the Central Pacific began work with great fanfare. In downtown Sacramento, where the railroad grade began, thousands of people watched California's new Governor, Leland Stanford, throw the first shovel full of dirt. From the bunting-fronted grandstand, dignitaries heralded the coming of "a mighty tide of wealth such as mankind has never realized before."

When the party broke up, the CP partners found themselves alone. Few others were willing to invest in such a dicey project. When they began issuing contracts to local construction firms, it proved a mess.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: They discovered that the contractors were bidding against each other for the fairly limited labor market. And, they weren't getting the job done. And so it seemed to them that a better way to do it was to, for one of them to go out and just have one contract. And supervise and coordinate all of the construction effort. And for whatever reason, Charles Crocker was the man that became the contractor initially. And, Theodore Judah was uncomfortable with that.

David Bain, Writer: He just did not trust Crocker. He didn't trust the idea. He was afraid that these men were going to try to bleed the railroad dry. He wasn't convinced that they were really serious about doing it.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: Judah didn't have a good working relationship after the start with the big four. And they really took the reins in their hands after they could see there was feasible civil engineering ways of going through, through the mountains. And, that's what they did. They left Judah by the wayside.

Narrator: Even as their crews were grading along Judah's line, the Sacramento shopkeepers were slow in paying their chief engineer. They cancelled contracts Judah had made with iron makers in the East, even questioned his lines of survey.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: In the summer of 1863, there's a showdown. And they basically tell Judah either you buy us out or we'll buy you out. But there was absolutely no way they were going to go down the same path together from that point on. Officially, Judah was still carried as chief engineer of the Central Pacific Railroad, but Judah sailed east, for the East Coast in the fall of 1863. He had seen grade built. He had seen a bridge built at Sacramento. He had not seen any rail laid. He had not seen any locomotives. He had not seen any part of the railroad. Judah is heading to New York. We know that he's looking for partners there to help him buy out these guys in California that he's not getting along with.

David Bain, Writer: Judah was really convinced that he could find some backers in the East. He maybe even had them lined up. So he and his wife got on the boat and headed down to Panama, crossed Panama and got on another boat heading for New York. And we will never know who those secret partners might have been because Judah contracted either typhoid or yellow fever along the way.

Narrator: When Judah's ship docked in Manhattan, the 37-year-old engineer was carried off the boat on a litter and deposited in a sickbed in the Metropolitan Hotel. On October 26, 1863, while Judah lay a continent away, the first rails of the Central Pacific were spiked to their ties. Before the news of the event reached him, Theodore Judah was dead.

The 1862 Railroad Act did not specify a starting point in the East. Railroads had already been built out past the Mississippi River, so the jumping off point for the new road would be somewhere along the Missouri. But again, Congress could not agree. The burden of decision, like so many other burdens, fell on the stooped shoulders of President Abraham Lincoln.

In November of 1863, two days before he gave the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln puzzled over the maps and financial affidavits provided him by the Union Pacific company. Lincoln knew the 450 miles across Nebraska's Platte River Valley offered a cheap and easy start. He also knew he had political favors to repay. So he chose as the eastern terminus Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: He was nominated in 1860 on the third ballot. Seward had been leading on the first ballot. And his managers made all kinds of deals. And, the bulk of the Iowa delegates at the Republican National Convention switched over to Lincoln and he really owed them something after the 1860 election. And this was kind of a pay-off to Iowa.

Narrator: This was happy news for Thomas Clark Durant. The vice president of the new Union Pacific Railroad Company was heavily invested in real estate just across the river, in Omaha, Nebraska. That real estate would be much more valuable if the railroad west began there. So the real terminus, as far as Durant was concerned, would be Omaha.

Thomas C. Durant had begun his professional career as a doctor of ophthalmology but found the world of business a more invigorating occupation for a man of his thrusting personality. He was a restless, energetic man who loved making money and knew how to do it. In fact, throughout his life, Durant showed a remarkable integrity of purpose. The Civil War, he discovered, was a bang-up way to cash in on contraband cotton.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: Durant comes across to me as a scoundrel. He's like someone that would bet on the other team. He would manipulate the market against his own company just for his own personal fortune.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: He was a tremendous stock manipulator. In one episode he made $5 million in one week pushing the stock of one railroad down and the stock of another railroad up and then going back into the original stock.

David Bain, Writer: Durant had seen railroads being built across Michigan and into Illinois. He knew that there was a lot of money to be made. But usually it was along the side. His whole life with the Union Pacific-- he really-- I don't think cared whether it actually got finished. He just wanted to make as much money along the side as he could. And the people who worked under him knew that.

Narrator: Durant's earlier railroad projects were small potatoes compared to the Union Pacific. This new road was the biggest single government-funded construction project ever, and the 43-year-old Durant wasn't going to miss out. He managed -- illegally -- to get control of $2.2 million worth of shares in the Union Pacific, installed his own straw man as president, and took charge of the company.

In 1864, in hopes of getting extra government aid, the Doctor distributed $435,000 in cash and a quarter million dollars in bonds among legislators, their proxies, friends, and relatives. "If you think it safe," Congressman Lorenzo Di Medici Sweat wrote to Durant, "please let me into some purchase of stock will you... I will give my personal attention to your interests here." The Honorable Sweat and his colleagues passed a revised railroad bill in the summer of 1864.

The new act doubled the land grants, permitted the UP and the CP to borrow money in advance of the line built and ceded to the railroad companies all coal, iron and precious minerals found on the granted lands.

With these new enticements in place, Durant set up a separate corporation: a top secret entity called Credit Mobilier. Only a few of Durant's special friends were offered stock in the new company.

David Bain, Writer: The Credit Mobilier was almost a revolutionary business practice at the time. It was the idea of a railroad company being able to borrow money on the land that they didn't even own yet but would if they actually built the railroad. That was the first principal. The second principal though was the real center of energy for it, and that was the notion of limited liability. Up until then, anybody investing in a company, if the company got into trouble, that person would be liable for not only what they had in the company, but their own personal fortunes, their own houses, their own property. But with this new idea, if a company got into trouble, the investor would only lose his investment. And this was a kind of an insulation that had never been practiced in business before.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: The Credit Mobilier was really formed by the directors of the Union Pacific to do the construction. Now, originally, Durant gave the contract to an associate named Herbert Hoxie. What Hoxie did was hold the contract for a short period of time, sell it to Durant for $10,000 so the Credit Mobilier would build the road and then charge the Union Pacific. In effect, Durant was paying himself for building the railroad.

The Hoxie contract called for building the railroad up the Platte Valley at $50,000 per mile. Peter Dey was the chief engineer and he made the statement that anybody who charged $50,000 for a railroad down the Platte Valley was nothing but a thief.

Narrator: The contract was worth $12.5 million for building the first 247 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad. Peter Dey figured it would cost half that. The rest was pure profit. But the Doctor knew nobody was really watching; Congressional oversight was virtually nonexistent. So Durant's next move was the boldest yet.

David Bain, Writer: They were being paid by the mile, so why not make the line longer? So what he did was he took a perfectly good railroad survey and he lengthened it with this tremendous ox-bow shaped route that went out in a different direction from Omaha and added about a half million dollars to Durant's pocket in the bargain.

Narrator: Peter Dey resigned in protest, but it didn't much matter. More than two years after Congress had chartered the company, the Union Pacific was little more than a paper railroad.

When the Civil War came to an end in March of 1865, the UP had not spiked a single length of track. When the railroad's great champion Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a month later, the company still had not laid any iron. And on Independence Day, 1865, still nothing.

Many in Congress were wondering if they should simply cut losses and withdraw support from the Union Pacific Railroad. Thomas C. Durant had good instincts for self-preservation, and he understood it was now in his interest to start building a railroad. Suddenly, he cared about nothing else.

David Bain, Writer: He just sent a veritable blizzard of telegrams out to the poor people who were working for him out on the line saying, "Hurry up, hurry up, we're far behind our time. What are you doing wrong? I can replace you very easily. I want more work out of you. I will not accept no for an answer and I will not accept failure."

Narrator: Day after day, Durant wired his crew-bosses in Nebraska: "Do you or do you not want more men to lay 60 miles this fall, if so what kind? ...If men are not fed well and made comfortable they will not stay -- see to this.... What is the matter that you can't lay track faster."

For the Central Pacific, the earliest work -- nearest Sacramento -- had proved the least difficult. By the spring of 1865, the company had received more than $2 million worth of federal and state bonds for track built -- and had revenues in both passenger and freight service for the 31 miles between Sacramento and Newcastle. Collis Huntington had moved to New York, where he could arrange for shipments of iron and raise East-coast money. Charlie Crocker had found a construction boss: the profane, hard-driving James Harvey Strobridge, who could run the mostly Irish immigrant crews.

But Strobridge had constant problems finding dependable men to fill grading and track-laying crews; California still had a small population; and most laborers preferred work nearer the comfort of town, or out in the gold fields.

David Bain, Writer: They put out handbills all over northern California advertising they needed 5,000 workers immediately for good pay. They advertised for 5,000 and 200 showed up, and they were absolutely desperate. They finally had the money. Money was burning a hole in their pockets, and what were they going to do?

Charlie Crocker suggested to their labor boss, James Harvey Strobridge, "Let's try some of the Chinese from down in the Valley and see if they work out." And Strobridge didn't like this idea. He said, "They can't be good workers. They're too weak. They're too insubstantial."

Sue Fawn Chung, Historian: Strobridge did not feel that the Chinese were physically able to do the kind of heavy labor that was required, especially in the Sierra Nevadas, the rocks, the granite, you know, the moving of this massive material. And, Charles Crocker said, "No, no, they can do it. They built the Great Wall. They can do it."

David Bain, Writer: Crocker persuaded him to try 50 and the 50 worked out. So they tried another 50. And those 50 worked out. So then they hired another 100 and slowly but surely, the labor force built up.

Frank Chin: They especially recruited the Chinese. They sent out circulars saying, you know, good jobs on the railroad, and it attracted us. We needed the money.

Narrator: In the Kwangtung province of China, decades of flood, famine, war, and depression had left much of the population without a decent living. Many men left home for railroad jobs in America to support their families; others left simply to make a new life in a new land.

Frank Chin: I don't think they saw the West as a white country. They saw it as a country, just a country for anybody. And the Chinese wanted a piece. They were willing to work for it. But they wanted a piece for themselves, a piece for the families.

David Bain, Writer: They were certainly harder workers and more conscientious. They didn't get drunk every night and have fights. But one of the most interesting things that I think kept them going was just the question of diet. If you went to the Irish camps, you would find them eating boiled beef and boiled beans and drinking boiled coffee. And if you went over to the Chinese, you'd begin to smell the fertile aromas of garlic and cuttlefish and stir fried pork. When they drank, they didn't drink from ditches. They drank boiled tea. And they also didn't come down with dysentery the way that the Irish workers did because of this boiled tea.

Sue Fawn Chung, Historian: It was at least better than working in China where there was very little food and famine and starvation going on. A Sunday meal for the railroad workers was an elaborate banquet in their eyes. They would have imported foods from China that they were familiar with: oysters, dried meat. They would have pork, and chicken and abalone. This was really a magnificent meal.

Narrator: By the turn of 1866, the Central Pacific had 6,000 Chinese immigrants on the payroll, from ages 13 to 60. As much as 80 percent of the CP work force was Chinese. For $30 a month -- less board -- the men worked six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, chopping down trees, blasting out cuts or shoveling in huge fills to even the grade. At the imposing Cape Horn, rising above the town of Colfax, they had to make a ledge where track could be run 1,300 feet above the valley floor.

David Bain, Writer: The only way to get the railroad line across was to start slow, to carve out a narrow shelf just wide enough for a man to walk. Then, over time, it could be enlarged until they could get entire crews out to chisel away the cliff face.

Frank Chin: They had to cut a very hard rock. It had to be cut by hand. Tediously, cut by hand. It's hard, back-breaking, dangerous work.

David Bain, Writer: They lowered them by ropes, probably looping them around trees a couple of times up on the top and they would drill in a foot into this cliff face and then they would fill it with black power and attach a fuse and light it and then scramble up those ropes as quickly as they could.

Narrator: By mid-summer 1866, track-laying crews were pushing out beyond Colfax, 55 miles east of Sacramento, laying 350 iron rails, 2500 wooden ties, and 10,000 spikes every mile. And that was the easy labor. Grading remained the balkiest work. Up to 500 kegs of black powder a day were spent blasting through cuts. Deep ravines had to be bridged by wooden trestles or dirt fill. As the crews pushed farther up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, shale, sandstone, and cemented gravel began to give way to granite -- and the big question loomed: could those mountains be bested?

Out on the Great Plains, Thomas C. Durant was still in a swivet. The Union Pacific had completed only 40 miles of railroad in 1865, and they were the easiest 40 on the line. But as the company geared up for the 1866 work season, there was no shortage of labor. Tens of thousands of Civil War veterans had landed out of work, roaming the country, anxious to get as far as possible from the scenes of horror they'd witnessed.

Durant hired as his new chief engineer General Grenville M. Dodge. Dodge had been a commander for the Union Army in Tennessee and Georgia, and then on the Great Plains. He was a confidante of the two most important military men in the country: Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. And he had already proved a useful agent to Durant. As a Union officer, Dodge had provided the Doctor classified intelligence to aid his contraband cotton operation.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: Dodge was probably as good a chief engineer -- that is surveyor locating routes -- he was as good as Peter Dey. But he was nowhere near as honest. He was imbued with this overwhelming desire to make money.

Narrator: The other man Durant sought that winter was a former Union Army cavalry officer named Jack Casement. Jack and his brother Dan had a reputation in railroad construction. On the Philadelphia and Erie, before the war, Casement crews had once laid three miles of track in a single day. But when Durant pushed him to take the track-laying contract, Jack said he'd have to check with Mrs. Casement. He lived in a democratic household, he said, and generally his wife outvoted him.

In fact, Frances "Frank" Casement was in a fragile state. Work and war had kept her husband away from their Painesville, Ohio, home nearly five of their seven years of marriage. And just weeks before Jack's new job offer, the Casement's four-year-old son, Charlie, had died of scarlet fever. But like Dodge, Jack Casement was a man in a hurry, convinced misfortune could be outrun, and fortune could be run down.

Casement spent the winter in Omaha overseeing construction of boxcars specially outfitted to serve as dormitories-on-wheels for his track-laying crews, waiting for the spring thaw so supplies and iron could be shipped up the Missouri River to UP warehouses, and trying mightily to hold to the temperance pledge he'd given his wife, who remained home in Ohio.

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: My Dear Husband, When I go to bed here all alone I think so much about Charlie and I see his little pale face while he lay sick, then his little body as he lay in his coffin and then that little mound of earth. I have never missed Charlie so much since he died as I have since you left me. I love you dearly and it is so hard for me to live away from you. Your Wife, Frank.

Voice, reading letter from Jack Casement: My Dear Wife, I am first rate but impatient to have the ice go out of the river. It is mighty lonesome here and I am impatient to get to work. I want to see the thing start before I leave here. Just as soon as I get a bar laid I mean to travel home for my true love. I love you more than all the world besides. Write to me often. God Bless you and Keep you happy. Jack.

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: My Dear Husband, How many lonesome Sundays I have had in the past five years and I suppose I must expect more if I live. This cold weather does not look much like opening up the river, does it? I am trying to be patient, but it is rather hard. Goodnight dearest. Your wife, Frank.

Voice, reading letter from Jack Casement: My dear wife, The river is beginning to rise. I have been working with a few men grading and putting in a side track. We will commence track-laying next Monday. God Bless you and Keep you happy. Jack.

Narrator: The flat Nebraska prairie presented little difficulty for UP crews. The real obstacles were the people who saw themselves as the stewards of the land: the Northern and Southern Cheyenne Indians, the Sioux and the Arapaho. Skilled on a horseback, and with bow-and-arrow or rifle, these tribes moved by season from field of plenty to field of plenty, from hunting ground to hunting ground, sustained by the seemingly inexhaustible supply of buffalo.

Donald Fixico, Historian: The buffalo is a great symbol and great being to the Plains people because it's really their staff of life and even more than that. They figured out how to use the buffalo 52 different ways for food, supplies, war hunting implements, things like that. And so the hooves for example are boiled to use as glue. The hump back is, that part of the buffalo is really kind of sturdy and so it's used for making shields, the hides making a teepee for example. Took about 12 to 14 hides to do that.

Narrator: For many Plains Indian tribes, the buffalo was the center of the natural world; following the path of this animal, they learned to respect the potency of nature: in its power to give, and to take away.

So when white settlers began streaming across the plains toward gold in California and then nearby Colorado, Indians regarded them as a new force of nature -- and an increasingly dangerous one. These travelers spread smallpox and typhoid, ran off buffalo herds, decimated the Indians foraging fields and fouled their water sources. By the time Pacific Railroad construction began, starvation and disease had wracked the Cheyenne, the Sioux, and the Arapaho.

Donald Fixico, Historian: The white intruders were changing the land. The game was becoming more difficult to find. Elk and buffalo, antelope was becoming more difficult to pursue because the people on the wagon trains, they also needed food. And obviously you had warriors who were, especially young warriors who were very upset by this.

Narrator: Though many of the Plains Indians remained on friendly terms with the Anglo-American travelers, the more militant tribes treated them as they would any other rival: they robbed and looted wagon trains, raided settlements and ranches, stole horses, mules, and cattle. On occasion, they killed, scalped and mutilated their victims. Peace was fragile; settlers rarely tried to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly Indians. U.S. militia units didn't always recognize a white flag.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: More and more white settlers came and coveted more and more of the land. Governor Evans of Colorado territory in 1864 abrogates the treaties with the Plains Indians. And then he encourages Colorado militias, vigilante type militias to go attack and raid the Indian camps. And in 1864, the camp of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle was raided. And about 140 men, women, and children of the Cheyenne were badly butchered by these vigilante militias. They were clubbed, stabbed, shot. Accounts of the time talk about Indian women trying to crawl away from the carnage and being chased down and killed.

Narrator: Immediate and bloody reprisals followed the butchery at Sand Creek; an army of a thousand Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux stalked up the Platte Valley, murdering soldiers and civilians, menacing stage lines and wagon trains, ripping up miles of telegraph wire and destroying the town of Julesburg, Colorado, which sat astride the proposed UP line.

But by then, Indian leaders understood dramatics would not slow the steady press of westward migration. Pawnee warriors read the signs, and joined up with the U.S. Cavalry to help protect western settlers from other warring parties. The more visionary Cheyenne and Sioux leaders -- like Red Cloud -- concentrated their efforts north in the Powder River region, where the Bozeman trail threatened to destroy the only good buffalo hunting left to them. Farther south, near the Union Pacific line, their people were simply fighting for their lives.

David Bain, Writer: The winter of 1865 and 1866 had been a very brutal one. It had been colder than usual, and the Indian tribes had suffered terribly from famine. The U.S. government knew that there was trouble afoot. They had scheduled peace talks for June. And the tribal leaders were inclined to wait to see what the whites were going to bring to the peace table. But they just absolutely could not control the younger hot heads who, as soon as they could get out onto the Plains, were going out and rustling horses and livestock to feed their families, to survive.

Narrator: Small parties of Union Pacific surveyors were harassed and shot at. A few men were even killed. And their boss, Grenville Dodge, was apoplectic, sending pleas for help to his old army mate, General William Tecumseh Sherman. So the commander of the U.S. Army's western district headed out to assess the problem for himself.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: They met very few Indians at all. When they did meet a few Indians, they were very, very friendly. When they got to Colorado City a delegation came and asked them about protection against the Indians. And Sherman's answer was, 'There's no Indian menace around here. All you want is the Army stationed here so it will make Colorado City prosperous.' He came to the conclusion in 1866 that the Indian menace was vastly overrated.

Narrator: By the summer of 1866, the Casement crews were a juggernaut. In July, they built past the hundred mile mark; by fall past the 100th meridian. Jack Casement's men made as much as three miles in a day, fixing into place 300 tons of iron rail in 12 hours' time -- moving down the tracks in the 85-foot-long rolling dormitories Casement had built.

David Bain, Writer: Casement knew how to manage men. He knew how to get a 10 or 11 hour day out of his workers. He was very efficient and tough about moving forward.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: The model of organization, the marshaling of material logistically, etc. was done along military lines. A lot of the construction workers were Confederate and Union soldiers used to taking orders and, and the discipline that this kind of work required.

David Bain, Writer: Plus you had thousands of poor Irish who had just come over after the potato famine. They had filled up the teeming cities of the East and slowly been pushed westward. It was a rough life. The days were long; the work was hard; the sun beat down; the winter winds howled; there was always the threat that there was an Indian band over the next hillside.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: Well, if you're a laborer there, there wasn't too much good news. They had simple, simple foods: boiled beans, the equivalent of hardtack. The water often had Giardia in it; it caused dysentery. They lived in tents and the outfit cars with their berths four or five high that you slept in. They had very little opportunity for baths or bathing, personal hygiene. So the stench both within the cars and outside of the cars had to be tremendous. You got your two or so dollars a day and your inadequate meals such as they were. And then you could look forward to the pleasures of Hell On Wheels.

Narrator: Hell On Wheels was a town made to carry; as the railroad workers moved down the prairie, the entire town could be packed onto flatbed cars or wagons and hauled to the next felicitous spot, re-constituted and renamed.

Carol Bowers, Historian: End of tracks towns sprang up very quickly as the railroad came along. Many of the buildings were tents, maybe four posts in the ground with a canvas top for a cover. Many of the gambling halls and the saloons would operate 24 hours a day and one of the things that settlers mentioned frequently in their letters and journals was the annoyance from the noise of these gambling halls, the saloons. People shouting in the night. It was very noisy, very crowded, and very rough.

Most of the women coming along in that point were entrepreneurs. They were prostitutes who were here primarily for the same reason that the men were following this westward press of empire which was to make quick money and lots of it. And so they would locate themselves wherever there was a fluid population of men with money to spend.

Voice, reading W.O. Owen: It cost a man about $10 an hour to trip the light fantastic with those soiled doves, and if he had anything left they would drug him and strip him of everything of any value before kicking him into the street. Immediately in front of Bull's Big Tent occurred the first murder I ever witnessed. In 10 minutes after that shot was fired the excitement had subsided. The street was clear, the games were in full blast, and the cry of "Promenade to the bar!" was issuing from the Big Tent. -- W.O. Owen

Carol Bowers, Historian: Bull's big tent was a full-service establishment. They had almost every kind of gambling game that anyone could desire to play. And in the back there were cubicles that were partitioned with canvas for the women to transact business with their customers. And then a Dr. Allen announced that he had established offices in the rear of Bull's Big Tent and specialized in the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. So actually you could go to the big tent, you could spend an afternoon or evening's diversion, catch things that you really did not want to have, and hopefully have them taken care of before you headed back on the railroad.

Narrator: As winter brought work to a halt in 1866, many railroad workers settled into the lascivious comforts of the newest end of track town: North Platte, Nebraska. Jack Casement had much to celebrate: his crews had made 265 miles in 1866, and back home in Ohio, his wife had given birth to a son. But not even that happy news could pull Casement from his pursuit of money. General Jack decided to stay on in North Platte, to make a little extra on side bets. That winter he built a boarding house, a general store to cash in on his free freighting privileges, and a cattle ranch so he could take a contract to provide beef to his own UP work-gangs.

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: Dear Jack, Be careful of your health. And for the sake of our little boy more for your own sake, beware of the tempter in the form of strong drink. Do come home as soon as possible. Your wife, Frank.

Voice, reading letter from Jack Casement: My Dear Wife. Here it is almost Christmas and I am still here. and if I get home on New Years now I shall feel thankful. There is so much to do. We want two or three hundred cows for next summer, are building a large ice house, have built a good slaughter house and Blacksmith shop, wash house and corral, so you see we are getting quite a ranch. Darling be as patient as you can. You don't want to see me more than I do you. God Bless and Keep you happy. Jack."

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: My Dear Husband, If you don't come home and stay with us some this winter you will never know any thing more of this baby than you did of your first. Your wife, Frank.

Narrator: Jack Casement wasn't about to go home, not now that America was watching. With the North and South reunited, the nation had finally turned its attention to the joining of East and West.

The railroad line was crawling with correspondents and photographers. A new and exotic dateline -- "End of Tracks" -- festooned newspapers across the country. Telegraph wires strung alongside the tracks carried news of the iron road, its daily progress, and future it promised: "Great indeed will be the vitality of the republic when the warm blood from its heart pulsates to the remote extremities. This magic key will unlock... a world-encircling tide of travel, commerce and Christian civilization."

All that stood in the way of this new bounty was the road's completion. But that would prove more difficult than anyone imagined.

In the fall of 1866, as the Central Pacific completed its track to Cisco, 92 miles east of Sacramento, Chinese work gangs were hurried to Donner Summit, where seven separate tunnels had to be dug. The most difficult was number six, the Summit Tunnel. November snows were already beginning to blanket the mountains.

Forty-four snowstorms hit the summit that season. But inside the man-made caves, work continued around the clock, in three eight-hour shifts, at four separate headings: one on the east side, one on the west. And two in the center, where the men had to be lowered by ropes a hundred feet down an eight-by-12-foot man-made shaft.

Even with 12 to 15 men drilling at each face and hundreds of barrels of black powder expended daily, the Central Pacific partners figured it would take 15 months to break through the tunnel.

David Bain, Writer: The Summit Tunnel was 1,659 feet long and its through some of the hardest rock in North America. And remember that we're working with hand drills and black blasting powder. It's not very efficient. It takes a lot of human effort and a lot of money to pay for that blasting powder.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: The Central Pacific is building a foot a day through these tunnels -- and it's just agonizing for them. They recognize that the Pacific Railroad is going to generate revenue from Omaha to San Francisco. And their portion of that revenue is going to be based on how many miles of track was the track that they built. They want to get as far east as possible. Those mountains are slowing them down. Meanwhile the Union Pacific has finally gotten organized. They've hired this guy Casement and he was bragging that he could build five miles of track a day.

Narrator: In his office in New York, Collis P. Huntington was reading breathless newspaper accounts of Casement's rapid advance -- with a growing sense of dread. If the CP crews remained stuck in the tunnels too long, Huntington figured, the Union Pacific would build right by them and all the way into San Francisco. Four years of work would be for nothing. The CP partners would be ruined beyond repair.

The Central Pacific's best hope was a dangerous gamble: liquid nitroglycerin. Nitro was the most powerful explosive ever made, and the least stable. In 1867, transportation of liquid nitro was illegal in the state of California -- and for good reason. Accidental explosions had all but disintegrated a Panama steamer and blown up half a block in downtown San Francisco. Body parts were found atop of buildings hundreds of feet from the blast site. But when a British chemist named James Howden told E. B. Crocker he could mix the compound on site at the tunnels, the CP partner shipped him straightaway to the summit.

Frank Chin: Nitro is a very temperamental compound. It tends to blow up on its own. And the Chinese had to handle it delicately.

David Bain, Writer: They had a surprisingly good safety record with this. And they were able to do more than twice the amount of work with nitroglycerin. It blasted more, it smoked less, it cleared out quicker. And they could really start to move on those tunnels.

Narrator: Construction boss James Harvey Strobridge hired Welshmen from Nevada's hard-rock mines to further speed the work. But he was surprised to see the Chinese gangs out-distance the Welsh crews week after week. The Chinese did the most difficult work and the most dangerous; and they were paid the least.

David Bain, Writer: Californians had suddenly come up with the idea that these Chinese were good workers, and so they were being hired away from the Central Pacific. The Central Pacific raised the wages to $35 a month. It wasn't enough. This little crew went on strike. They were threatened, we will fire you if you don't go back to work. So they raised their demand to $40 a month and it got around to the other camps and then all of a sudden all of the Chinese camps were on strike. So the Central Pacific cut off their food and cut off their supplies.

Frank Chin: Strobridge and Crocker, you know, they weren't thinking of the Chinese as human. They never thought of the Chinese as having a family. They never thought of the Chinese as having a wife. They never thought of the Chinese as supporting people across the ocean. And the Chinese were. And they thought, well, the Chinese can live on a dollar a day. It's the white man that really needs the money.

David Bain, Writer: After about a week of running out of food, the Central Pacific managers brought what looked very much like a posse of whites up to just make sure that there wasn't any rioting going on up there on the mountainside, on this empty mountainside. And when these hungry Chinese looked out and they saw this mob of deputized whites and they realized that there was really nowhere to go, they went back to work and they went back to work for $35 a month.

Narrator: From its inception, all that slowed the Union Pacific was bad management and politics. The company was chartered by Congress; its engineering, construction, and financing had to have federal government approval. More than a few in the capital doubted the integrity of a company run by Thomas Durant.

As far back as 1864, a second axis of power was fighting for control of the Union Pacific boardroom: that power was chiefly the Ames brothers, who had been early investors in the UP and early beneficiaries of Credit Mobilier.

David Bain, Writer: Oakes and Oliver Ames were the sons of a wealthy manufacturer who had made an immense fortune by supplying the gold rush with its shovels and picks. And Oakes Ames had a real civic spirit. He stood for Congress and was elected from Massachusetts during the Civil War.

And, through that, he became known to Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln took Oakes Ames aside and said, I want you to get involved in this Union Pacific business. If you don't take hold of it, no one will, and it's not going to get done. And if you do this, it would be a great service to the country, and it would make you the most remembered man of the century.

Narrator: By the summer of 1867, the Ames and their Boston counting-house friends had gained controlling interest from Durant and installed Oliver Ames as president; the Doctor had begun what would become a blizzard of lawsuits against the board, but remained as vice-president, director, and major stockholder. Whether they liked it or not, Durant and the Ameses were in harness together. Durant still provided remarkable drive. The Ames brothers provided respectability. When Oakes sprinkled Credit Mobilier stock through Congress, he did it quietly.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: What Oakes Ames did was to pass out only 343 shares -- they were worth $200 each -- to members of Congress to influence them in voting for things for the Union Pacific. And no one received over 100 shares of stock. It really amounted to nothing. But it showed how easy it was to buy the influence of representatives and senators.

Narrator: While Congressman Oakes Ames greased the skids in Washington, Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge led the Union Pacific into a remote corner of the Dakota territory. In July of 1867, 90 miles north of the only metropolis of the Rockies, Denver, Colorado, at the intersection of two small creeks, Dodge staked out a new town. It was about halfway between Omaha and Salt Lake City, a straight shot to the rich coal fields of western Dakota, and the spot where the land begins its gradual rise into the Rockies. Here would be the roundhouse where west-bound trains beginning their ascent took on extra locomotives, and where east-bound trains shucked theirs.

The town would be a Union Pacific division point, with a machine shop and watering tanks, a depot, dining room, and hotel. A brand new military post would set up nearby. Dodge named the town Cheyenne. And announced that it would one day rival Denver. The last little bit was to help drive up the price of lots the Union Pacific was selling off.

Phil Roberts, Historian: It wasn't going to be like those other Hell on Wheels towns that were going to be there just as long as the tracklayers were coming in to buy their liquid refreshments, etc. It was going to be a place that was going to endure because the railroad said it was going to endure. Within a week, there were people locating there. And within a month, there were businesses that were established there. There were speculators. There were fly-by-night operators that simply wanted to follow the tracks. But there were also a number of people who had made some determination that they were going to move their families out to this area. And they were going to put down roots and establish themselves.

Narrator: All America was watching the railroad's progress, and some folks were inspired to hop on the train. Anybody traveling to Cheyenne on the railroad in 1867 saw the future shimmering before them. Railroad workers had dropped off to take up farming along the line in Nebraska; their wives and children had followed. Towns behind the end of tracks were filling in, becoming safe for schoolmistresses and seamstresses. The most adventurous kept heading west toward Dakota Territory and the Magic City of the Plains.

By September of 1867, Cheyenne's population was in the thousands, and rising. A newspaper went to press with plenty of advertising columns full of the new businesses setting up on the main streets. A town council was established, and a public school. As the U.P tracks neared Cheyenne, the price of a town lot skyrocketed from $600 to $4,000.

"Here is the City of Cheyenne," exclaimed the town's first mayor. "May she ever prosper, and the tribe of Indians after whom she is named be completely exterminated." The sentiment, it was reported, was much applauded.

David Bain, Writer: Up the Platte River Valley, the railroad is going up right through the center of this place. And all of these tribes were used to crossing through this valley. The buffalo herds, which had been in the millions in the 1840s, were being decimated by all of the emigrants going across, by the forces who were trying to get meat for the thousands of railroaders.

Donald Fixico, Historian: By the late 1800s, there is perhaps about 1,200 buffalo altogether. We're talking about an animal that was almost literally erased from this earth. For the Plains Indians tribes, it affected their whole scheme of life and understanding of their universe. And they saw that their life was being taken away from them.

Phil Roberts, Historian: There were people coming out on the train that were shooting buffalo from the train as they were passing through the plains. So a lot of these Indians saw this march of the railroad as a far more permanent presence than even the trails. And far more threatening than the trails because this demonstrated a great deal more permanence than simply a few people passing through in a covered wagon.

Donald Fixico, Historian: Plains Indians began to realize that they were going to have do something and to fight for their lands, in a way to fight for the buffalo. They're defending their lands. I mean anyone would defend their lands, their homelands.

Narrator: In the summer of 1867, Union Pacific advance men were being picked off with growing frequency. News of dead surveyors -- bodies punctured with bullets and arrows -- burned the telegraph wires between Cheyenne and Omaha. From Plum Creek, Nebraska, came the news that Cheyenne warriors had torn up tracks, derailed and looted a train, killed an engineer and a brakeman, scalped them, and set them afire. Their charred bodies were soon on display at the Plum Creek station. As was telegraph repairman William Thompson, who had escaped alive but skinned. In a pail of water at his side was his recently removed scalp.

After that ugly summer, peace conferences were held, and Cheyenne and Sioux leaders pled their case. If they were expected to control their most angry and militant men, they would have to give them a chance to feed their families. Few whites were in sympathy.

Phil Roberts, Historian: Where initially there was fear on the part of a lot of people about the possible threats from Indians and from the Native population, as time passed, that fear became one of almost, almost hatred. And that's not universal, of course. But it was a pretty strong feeling that we've got to get rid of these people. Yeah, we're trespassing on their lands you might say, but we have to permanently get them out of the way, dispose of them.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: Dodge was in favor really of just exterminating all the Indians, just getting rid of them all. He kept telling Sherman that we need more soldiers out here. We have to protect our parties.

David Bain, Writer: Sherman was interestingly a conciliator at the very beginning. He had a lot of feeling for the Indian tribes. But when relations broke down and reprisals began to happen, he came over rather quickly to the other side of things and really just decided that if these people didn't make way, then they just had to be annihilated.

Narrator: "I have no sympathy with the Red Devils," wrote one surveyor. "May the greedy crow and dark-winged raven hover over their silent corpses. May the coyote feast upon their stiff and festering carcasses... Education and civilization will be satisfied when they cease to be."

In new towns like Cheyenne and Laramie, where the front lines of western culture pushed through, the march of civilization was no ennobling procession.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: Let's face it, cut-throat types who probably would be on wanted posters in post offices today were busy operating there. So if you protested that you were short-changed or someone was cheating at the cards, they were liable to follow you outside and do bodily harm to you or even kill you.

Carol Bowers, Historian: Laramie tried to mount a town government, to seat a town government. The town council and the mayor resigned after three weeks saying the town was so wild, it was virtually ungovernable. And a number of the more unruly members of the community took over -- Con Wagner, Asa Moore, Big Ed Wilson, and some of their cronies.

Voice, reading the words of W.O. Owen: It was the consensus of opinion that something had to be done. Accordingly, a vigilance committee was organized and its first act was the hanging of a boy known as "The Kid." This act of the vigilantes served only to intensify the bitter feeling of the lawless element and these now threatened openly to burn the town. -- W.O. Owen.

Carol Bowers, Historian: Finally the respectable people had decided the town had to be brought under control. Something had to happen. And so there was a vigilante sweep through Laramie. Prostitutes and other undesirables were loaded on flat cars, on the Union Pacific Railroad, and sent off to Rawlins, the next end of track town which probably wasn't all that wonderful for Rawlins. But others such as Wagner, Moore, and Wilson were hanged. And because of the scarcity of the trees in Laramie at that time, finding places to hang people was a bit of a challenge. And so Wagner and his cronies were hanged inside a cabin from the rafters. And they were also shot I believe before they were hanged so it was a bit of overkill. People wanted to be sure they were rid of Wagner and Moore and the scourge they were bringing to the town.

Voice, reading the words of W.O. Owen: Early the following day my chum and I hastened to the Keane log building and viewed the bodies . . . We then returned to the streets and had been there only a short time when our attention was attracted to a body of men coming down the street. The party had in their midst a man known as "Long Steve," who was talking excitedly. He begged them to let him go."Boys," he said, "for God's sake let me go and I'll start right down that railroad track and never stop til I get to Omaha!" They then crossed the street to a telegraph pole, which stood near the Union Pacific Railway Company's oil house and executed the poor wretch in the presence of a large crowd. The hangings made Laramie about as safe a town to live in as could be found on the continent. -- W.O. Owen.

Narrator: Up on Donner Summit in the summer of 1867, the Central Pacific crews were still fighting through the Summit Tunnel. The anxious CP partners had already had track laid east of the tunnel, out along the Truckee River. But they couldn't connect the track -- or collect their ample government subsidy -- until the tunnel was finished.

David Bain, Writer: We get to August, and the crew down on the western shaft is working. There's a nitroglycerin blast. They clear away the smoke and they pull away the rubble, and all of a sudden, there's a fresh breeze of cool air coming in at them. And they've linked the two western shafts together. And there's this tremendous feeling of accomplishment which redoubles their effort in the eastern face. And three or four weeks later, at the end of August, they're through on that side.

Narrator: "For these years past gravitation has been so continually against us," wrote Mark Hopkins. "At last we have reached the summit, are on the downgrade and we rejoice."

In five years of construction, the Central Pacific had laid just more than a hundred miles of track; the Union Pacific had laid five times that. But with the Sierras finally conquered, Collis P. Huntington wired Charley Crocker that he could supply him money and iron to lay 350 miles of track in 1868. Could they do it? "If the Union Company lay more track '68 than we do I will pay the damage," Crocker wired back. "We will beat the Union Pacific to Salt Lake. Stick a pin in there."

In the spring of 1868, on a windy plain 8,200 feet up in the Rocky Mountains -- 30 miles west of Cheyenne, 530 west of Omaha -- the Union Pacific Railroad laid rails at the highest point on the transcontinental line and Thomas Durant shot off a telegram to Central Pacific President Leland Stanford, announcing the achievement. Stanford wired back his congratulations, with a sly rejoinder: "May your descent be rapid."

The effect of the original railroad legislation was just now becoming clear: it had made the two companies bitter rivals. This was a zero sum game: every dollar gained by one company was a dollar lost to the other. And only one company would get the valuable coal fields in western Wyoming and eastern Utah. "I'll be damned," Durant had said, "if I would not prevent the CP from coming more than 200 miles east of California." In the nation's capital, especially, it was beginning to look like the fight would be costly.

David Bain, Writer: We have Congressman Oakes Ames down in Washington; the Credit Mobilier had just declared a dividend. It was quite a high dividend and the congressmen got wind of it. And this almost anonymous man from Massachusetts walks out to his desk in the Hall of Congress and all of a sudden he is just absolutely surrounded by congressmen and senators looking to buy into this Credit Mobilier -- to get whatever they could for free, if possible. Or perhaps to be loaned the purchase price and he couldn't keep up with it. These were men who would be voting on railroad legislation and yet they were becoming stockholders in the very company that was getting the railroad built.

Narrator: Collis P. Huntington was passing out cash and stocks, too, in hopes of winning the rights to the Wasatch coal fields east of Salt Lake. "If $100,000 will get the line located," he wrote to Hopkins, "I shall get it done."

Central Pacific engineers were at pains to keep the supply trains running through the deep Sierra snows. High in the California mountains, carpenters were constructing 37 miles of wooden snowsheds, using 65 million linear feet of lumber.

David Bain, Writer: The Central Pacific had prided itself on its workmanship. I mean you go up in the Sierras even today and you look at those retaining walls and those culverts that were built by hand by the Chinese, and they're still doing their job, and they're still objects of beauty. But when the railroad got down in 1868 into Nevada, the real rush was on.

Narrator: "Make it cheap," Huntington told his partners. "When you can make any time in the construction by using wood instead of iron for culverts, etc., do it, and if we should now and then have a piece of the Road washed out for want of a culvert, we could put one in thereafter."

Wendell Huffman, Historian: Huntington kept saying, build faster. Build with the devil behind you and heaven ahead of you. Build. Build. Build.

Narrator: Speed was never easy for the Central Pacific. Everything -- from locomotives to rails to spikes -- still had to be built at iron works in the east and then sailed around the tip of South America to the San Francisco docks, loaded onto steamboats and shipped up the Sacramento River. Schedules rarely held.

Much needed spikes, rails, and rail-chairs sat under becalmed sails; a locomotive sank in the Hudson River, parts of another in San Francisco Bay. Rail fell overboard into the Sacramento River. Shipments that made it to the Sacramento's docks were packed onto trains for a perilous ride forward to the work crew.

By 1868, 51 CP locomotives were pulling freight trains and passenger cars on only one track. The Central Pacific used a standard system known as Timetable and Train Order Operations. Conductors carried timetables, but they had to wait for telegraph orders at every station before they could proceed with their 50-ton locomotives pulling hundreds of tons worth of iron. Racing up and down steep grades, trying to make up lost time, engineers could never be sure what lay around the next curve.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: The Central Pacific and Union Pacific were both what is called dark territory -- there were no wayside signals -- and these written train orders on tissue paper blanks -- called by the crews "flimsies" because they're on flimsy paper -- were all that keeps trains apart.

Frank Chin: You send a train out. It's supposed to be at such and such a place at two o'clock. But you have a hot box. Or a flat wheel and it could take you three or four hours to split the train, move your part of the train down to where you can leave it safely and then go back for the car that has to be removed. And meantime, the rest of the train is left on the track. Nobody knows it's there.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: It might take a half a mile or a mile to stop one of those trains. The engineer could try to reverse the motion of the engine and use that as a braking force. But the main braking force was the handbrakes.

Frank Chin: You didn't have air brakes in those days -- so you'd have to tie each brake on each car by hand.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: When the engineer whistled, one whistle signal, that means down-brakes, then the brakemen on top of the cars would start tying down the handbrakes.

Frank Chin: A brakeman would start from the engine end, and a brakeman would start from the caboose and they'd be working their way down each car, tightening the brakes. The space between cars is roughly five or six feet. And, you're liable to slip, especially in the wintertime. And if he slips, probably the whole train will crash.

Fred Gamst, Anthropologist: And if the locomotive boiler or any of its pipes were broken, which they would be in a crash, the live steam could cook the meat off the bones of a person in just a matter of half a minute.

Narrator: In one three-month span, there were four separate crashes on the Central Pacific line. These wrecks crippled new locomotives, wasted materials, crushed and burned engineers and brakemen.

As the pace of construction quickened, the toll increased for both companies. The nation's great railroad project devoured lives. Iron workers making rails in Pennsylvania dropped dead from the heat of blast furnaces. At the tunnels near Donner Summit and across Nevada, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Chinese workers died while building the line.

Sue Fawn Chung, Historian: We do know that in 1870, there were six carloads of coffins that were going to be shipped back to China, and the cost of the freight was $10 per coffin. Beyond that we don't know.

Frank Chin: I wonder about their names, and I'll probably wonder about their names until the day I die. The bodies were just buried by the wayside and later, you know, some of them were moved and went back to China. And unfortunately, not one name, the railroads didn't take names. They only took bodies.

Narrator: On the Union Pacific side, the surveyors out front had it worst. In his personal diary of the summer of 1868, surveyor A.N. Ferguson noted 45 men killed by Indians, six drowned, one construction worker killed falling off a bridge, 10 shot dead in robberies or fights and one killed by a stray bullet, while sitting in his tent.

That summer was the most brutal yet for the men on both sides of the line. Three years and 680 miles into construction, and the UP was finally running into the sort of obstacles the CP had faced in the Sierras. In the mountains of eastern Utah, four tunnels had to be dug, one through black limestone and another through quartzite. The tunneling and grading work in Utah was contracted out to Brigham Young and his Mormon followers. Behind them, the Union Pacific tracklayers were choking in western Wyoming's alkali desert. Temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees by day and fell below freezing at night. Mules died by the dozens, left to rot track-side as the crews moved on.

Five hundred miles west, Charley Crocker's Central Pacific crews were working their way across Nevada's 40-mile desert, where they had to haul thousands of gallons of water a day by train to men and livestock. Curves still had to be bent by hand, literally hammered into an arc. But the CP had finally learned to build fast. In a single day, out in that Nevada desert, Crocker's crews laid more than six miles of rail.

Speed mattered more than ever now; big money was at stake -- and with the entire nation looking on, so were bragging rights. When Casement got news of Crocker's six-mile day, he went him one better, laying down seven miles of rail in a single shift. After three years of exhausting labor, Jack Casement was pushing his crews harder than ever.

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: My Dear Husband, I had hoped that tonight the anniversary of our wedding would bring me a love letter from you but I am disappointed. The fourth week is now passing that you have been away and not a letter yet. What is the matter dear Jack? Your wife, Frank.

Voice, reading letter from Jack Casement: My Dear Wife, We are bothered to get material to keep us going. We are straining every nerve to get into Salt Lake Valley before the heavy snow falls. God bless you and keep you happy, Jack.

Voice, reading letter from Mrs. Casement: My Dear Husband, I expect that you are bending all your energies to out-do everybody else and do the biggest thing that was ever heard of. There are a few things that pay in this world and I hope that is one of them. How glad I shall be when the last mile is laid -- Your wife, Frank.

Narrator: At the turn of 1869 surveyors, graders and tracklayers were all nearly spent. And the end was not yet in sight. The issue of meeting point was still unsettled, and as such, unsettling to both ends of the track. When Collis Huntington met with Oliver Ames and Grenville Dodge in Washington to try to fix a meeting point, it devolved into a shouting match. Ames offered a point in the middle. "I'll see you damned first," Huntington replied, and suggested the mouth of Weber Canyon. Ames stormed out.

Grading crews from the companies had already gone past one another and were working side by side, leveling two separate lines, sometimes a hundred feet apart. But only one company would be paid for its work. The Union Pacific, especially, was desperate for cash. Both the Casement and the Mormon crews were working without pay. Meanwhile, Credit Mobilier was paying out huge sums to Durant, the Ames brothers, and other stockholders -- including the wife of Union Pacific's grasping chief engineer, Grenville Dodge.

Stanley Hirshson, Historian: Mrs. Dodge owned a hundred shares of stock in the Credit Mobilier and the dividend was absolutely enormous. The Credit Mobilier over an 18-month period paid 341 percent. So if a stock was worth $200 a share -- at a hundred shares -- she got a dividend of almost $70,000. They're paying themselves all this money and the Union Pacific has no money left.

Narrator: A malodorous scent was beginning to surround the entire project; nearly everybody involved was on the take or in the till: from the former UP president who was blackmailing company directors to the clerks on the line who took bribes to look the other way when freight arrived lighter than its weigh-in.

Government inspectors were rolling over for the companies. When they called the Central Pacific's construction through Nevada "worthy of... a great national work," Huntington wired Charley Crocker: "I think you must have slept with them." And if construction on the CP side was shoddy, the Union Pacific's shortcuts were criminal. Three separate UP bridges collapsed under their own weight, before a locomotive had a chance to test them.

"The truth is," opined the New York Herald, "there is cheating on the grandest scale in all these railroads." Many in Congress were in high dudgeon -- especially those who hadn't been cut in on Credit Mobilier stock. With some of the press turning sour, the federal government even delayed payments to the cash-strapped Union Pacific Company. By April of 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific knew they had better settle their hash, before Congress got punitive.

David Bain, Writer: The two companies finally got together. And it was Grenville Dodge and Collis Huntington in a meeting place in which there was a lot of stalking out and slamming doors, but they finally decided that what they would do would be that the two railroads would meet in the Promontory Mountains, at a place called Promontory Summit -- the most God-forsaken place that you could imagine.

Narrator: Collis P. Huntington had been forced to give up his dream of owning the Wasatch coal fields, and he wasn't happy about it. But for CP construction boss Charley Crocker, eight years of work and worry were finally coming to an end. Charley had one last thing to prove to the Union Pacific work crews.

Wendell Huffman, Historian: Finally, on almost the last day, the Central Pacific held off, they got organized and they build 10 miles of track in one day. And in New York, Huntington wrote back and said, "Well, I read in the newspaper that they built 10 miles of track in one day. It was an amazing thing. I wish they would have done it when it made a difference.'

Narrator: In early May, 1869, the competing companies neared the north end of the Great Salt Lake and the day of completion. Company VIPs and government dignitaries traveled by private car to Promontory, while the track-layers literally worked their way to the finish line -- stringing the telegraph wires as they went. On the morning of May 10, 1869 -- under brilliant blue skies -- all gathered at a recently tossed-together settlement in northern Utah. And the whole country listened in for news of Promontory.

David Bain, Writer: The rails are almost touching at this point, and the telegraph wires are going from Promontory Summit out across the deserts, across the plains and the mountains; and they're going to the settled places: San Francisco, Sacramento, New York, Boston, Washington. And it's as if there's a gigantic electrical circuit linking the nation together for the first time in history. In every city and town in the United States, it was like there was a collective, in-drawn, breath taken.

When the signal flashed across the United States, a cannon faced over the Pacific and one over the Atlantic went off simultaneously warning the world what was about to happen. Church bells and fire alarms in every city and town in the nation went off. Crowds cheered. Fireworks went off. Parades began. Thousands of people kneeling in prayer. It was as if the entire country was suddenly linked at this moment.

Narrator: "'Tis Finished!" wrote a Union Pacific surveyor who was there that day. "This great and mighty enterprise that spans a continent with iron and unites two oceans... the future is coming and fast too."

Much of the original transcontinental railroad line was so poorly built that both companies were forced to begin shoring it up right away. But even that first rickety road had done its job.

By 1880, the two railroad companies were hauling $50 million of freight every year -- much of it between Europe and Asia. Nearly 2 million acres of land had been taken under the plow by immigrants coming west on the railroad. The tattered remains of the Plains Indian tribes had been shoved onto reservations well north.

For those involved in the railroad's making, the results were not always happy ones. For the Chinese, the thanks of a grateful nation included a series of vicious laws that blocked them from citizenship. The Mormons never did receive the money owed them by the Union Pacific. And though Frank Casement got her husband home for a time, he soon left Ohio to chase fame and fortune building a new road.

When the railroad companies' financial shortcuts became an issue in the 1872 elections, Congress embarked on dramatic and well-publicized hearings. Collis Huntington and his partners were little help in the investigation. They were sorry, they said, but they'd thrown away all their records. Thomas C. Durant, as always, slipped the noose. Even as he was testifying, he was buying up more than 700,000 acres of land in upstate New York, developing a new railroad. Congressman Oakes Ames -- who had dealt Credit Mobilier stock to his fellow legislators -- became the lone scapegoat.

David Bain, Writer: Oakes Ames was tossed out of the Congressional club and virtually everyone else got off scott free. Ames retired in disgrace and went back to Massachusetts, and he was dead within a matter of weeks. I think just of accumulated grieves over the whole scandal.

The scandals are important, the corruption, what it says about American society, what it says about what happened to the Plains Indian tribes. But on the other side of this coin, is how this did bind the nation together and it signaled a new era.

Donald Fixico, Historian: It brought so much change at a rapid, exhilarating rate. It meant change in the lives of Indian people, white settlers, even the game in the area. In a way, it was the mark of an era, an era that meant perhaps even national completeness.

Carol Bowers, Historian: It was an enormous event for the country. A journey that might have taken six months by wagon could now be accomplished in a matter of a week or two. Goods became available, readily available. Towns sprang up along the railroad.

Sue Fawn Chung, Historian: You see a whole new world opening up at a critical time in America's development. The railroad now allowed ideas to go from the East Coast and the West Coast, the newspapers, stories, novels. So it's not just goods. It's not just products. It's not just ideas. It's a whole, in a sense, revolution.

Phil Roberts, Historian: It did connect the East with the West Coast and it did, in essence, provide us with a continental culture. And it really did bind the country together.

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The Transcontinental Railroad | American Experience | PBS

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Narrator: The first Transcontinental Railroad has been called the engineering marvel of the 19th century and a flat-out swindle; it opened new economies in the American West, while consuming vast quantities of its natural resources; it birthed one way of life on the Great Plains and destroyed another.

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Reliable historical information about Sacajawea is very limited. More information about the Lewis and Clark Expedition can be found in this video.
Sacagawea, the daughter of a Shoshone chief, was born circa 1788 in Lemhi County, Idaho. At around age 12, she was captured by an enemy tribe and sold to a French-Canadian trapper who made her his wife. In November 1804, she was invited to join the Lewis and Clark expedition as a Shoshone interpreter. After leaving the expedition, she died at Fort Manuel in what is now Kenel, South Dakota, circa 1812.
The Shoshone are a Native American tribe in the United States with three large divisions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern. They traditionally spoke the Shoshoni language, a part of the Numic languages branch of the large Uto-Aztecan language family. The Shoshone were sometimes called the Snake Indians by early ethnic European trappers, travelers, and settlers.
More about Toussaint Charbonneau.

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The true story of Sacajawea - Karen Mensing

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In the early 19th century, a young Agaidika teenager named Sacajawea was enlisted by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to aid her husband Toussaint Charbonneau as a guide to the Western United States. Karen Mensing debunks some of the myths that surround the familiar image of the heroic woman with a baby strapped to her back and a vast knowledge of the American wilderness.

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BrainPop Mexican American War

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Texas Revolution BrainPop

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The history of Texas is truly unique. Trace its journey from foreign territory to independent nation to 28th state in the union!

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Students will discover the different ways of life for each tribe and the many ways the buffalo was used in day to day life. Students will also learn about a battle that erupted over the differing views of land ownership between Chief Sitting Bull and General Custer know as the Battle of Little Big Horn.

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History & Culture - Pony Express National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service)

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It is hard to believe that young men once rode horses to carry mail from Missouri to California in the unprecedented time of only 10 days. This relay system along the Pony Express National Historic Trail in eight states was the most direct and practical means of east-west communications before the t…

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Just the Facts: Trail of Tears 22min

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Teaches about former President Andrew Jackson's forced removal of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Tribes from the Southeastern United States. This video focuses on the experiences of the Cherokee during the removal and outlines the legal battles the Cherokee Nation waged to defend their rights.

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[Cattle, horses, and people at the fair with stables in the background]Popular Graphic Arts

The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there. Chinese railroad workers further added to the diversity of the region's population.

Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were almost wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market.

The loss of the bison and growth of white settlement drastically affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, despite occasional victories, seemed doomed to defeat by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white settlers.

The cowboy became the symbol for the West of the late 19th century, often depicted in popular culture as a glamorous or heroic figure. The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however. The first cowboys were Spanish vaqueros, who had introduced cattle to Mexico centuries earlier. Black cowboys also rode the range. Furthermore, the life of the cowboy was far from glamorous, involving long, hard hours of labor, poor living conditions, and economic hardship.

The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our views of the West in the late 19th century. Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a "meeting point between civilization and savagery" in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance. Think about these differing views of the history of the West as you examine the documents in this collection.

To find additional documents in Loc.gov on topics related to the West, use such keywords as West, ranching, Native Americans, and pioneers, or search using the names of states or cities in the West.

Documents

The Architecture of the West

Denver, Colorado, 1898

Pueblo de Taos, New Mexico, 1891(?)

Old Mission Church, Los Angeles, California, between 1880 and 1899

Salt Lake City, Utah, 1896

The Old Carreta, Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico, 1890

A Mexican Home (ranchita), between 1880 and 1897

As Some Things Appear on the Plains and Among the Rockies in Mid-Summer

Beef and Beans

The Extermination of the American Bison

I Will Go West

American Indian and Oklahoma Territories Maps

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The American West, 1865-1900 | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there.

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Transcontinental Railroad ‑ Construction, Competition & Impact

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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Sacagawea- National Women's History Museum

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Sacagawea- National Women's History Museum

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MLA - Potter, Teresa, and Mariana Brandman. "Sacagawea." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2021. Date accessed.

Chicago - Potter, Teresa, and Mariana Brandman. "Sacagawea." National Women's History Museum. 2021. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sacagawea.

Photo Credit: Drawing of Sacagawea by Henry Altman, 1906, Oregon Historical Society

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Sacagawea is best known for joining Louis and Clark on their expedition westward from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast. Learn more at womenshistory.org.

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California Gold Rush- American Experience

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California Gold Rush- American Experience

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The California Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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The discovery of gold in1848 unleashed the largest migration in United States history and drew people from a dozen countries to form a multi-ethnic society in California.

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Learn about the Oregon Trail from the Old West. A roadway used by pioneers in covered wagons to travel west.

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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Article

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A tobacco label with a portrait of General Zachary Taylor, "Old Rough and Ready," on the battlefield

The soldiers in the Mexican War, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, suffered from the intense heat, dust, insects, poor rations, low wages, and disease, which perhaps killed more soldiers than bullets. Mexican soldiers also encountered poor treatment by officers, who were from a wealthy class, while most enlisted men were peasants. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Was Signed In Mexico City
February 2, 1848

In contrast, U.S. General Zachary Taylor, called "Old Rough and Ready" by the American soldiers, was much more considerate of his troops. He often wore a straw hat with his uniform, looking more like an old farmer than a general. Winfield Scott was nicknamed "Old Fuss and Feathers" for his neat and tidy uniform and strict ways. Both officers led the way to victory, setting the scene for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Was Signed In Mexico City

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A tobacco label with a portrait of General Zachary Taylor, "Old Rough and Ready," on the battlefield The soldiers in the Mexican War, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, suffered from the intense heat, dust, insects, poor rations, low wages, and disease, which perhaps killed more soldiers than bullets.

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The Alamo Video by History.com 2m

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1,966 miles in 10 days!

Young men once rode horses to carry mail from Missouri to California in the unprecedented time of only 10 days! This relay system along the Pony Express National Historic Trail crossing eight states was the most direct and practical means of east-west communications in 1860. From Missouri to California the Pony Express riders could deliver a letter faster than ever before.

The Pony Express was in operation for only 18 months between April 1860 and October 1861. Nevertheless, the Pony Express has become synonymous with the Old West. In the era before easy mass communication, the Pony Express was the thread that tied East to West.

Thousands of people moved west on the Oregon and California Trails starting in the 1840s, followed by the 1847 Mormon exodus to Utah and the 1849 Gold Rush. The growing West needed fast mail communication beyond the Rocky Mountains. William H. Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell created the Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express Company to carry mail across the county. It later become known as the Pony Express.

On June 16, 1860, about ten weeks after the Pony Express began operations, Congress authorized a bill to subsidize a transcontinental telegraph line to connect the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast. This resulted in the incorporation of the Overland Telegraph Company of California and the Pacific Telegraph Company of Nebraska.

While the telegraph lines were under construction the Pony Express operated as usual. Letters and newspapers traveled the entire length of the line from St. Joseph to Sacramento. The telegrams went only between the rapidly advancing wire ends.

It was on October 26, 1861 that San Francisco was in direct contact with New York City. The Pony Express was officially terminated. In November 1861 the last Pony Express letters completed their journey.

Most of the original trail has been obliterated by time or human activities. Along many segments, the trail's actual route and exact length are matters of conjecture. In the western states, the majority of the trail has been converted, over the years, to double track dirt roads. Short pristine segments, believed to be traces of the original trail, can be seen only in Utah and California. However, approximately 120 historic sites may eventually be available to the public. This includes 50 existing Pony Express stations or station ruins.

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Young men once rode horses to carry mail from Missouri to California in the unprecedented time of only 10 days! This relay system along the Pony Express National Historic Trail crossing eight states was the most direct and practical means of east-west communications in 1860.

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The Trail of Tears & The Long Walk Articles

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The West: A Film by Steven Ives | Ken Burns | PBS

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A nine-part series chronicling the turbulent history of one of the most extraordinary landscapes on earth. Beginning when the land belonged only to Native Americans and ending in the 20th century, the film introduces unforgettable characters whose competing dreams transformed the land. It was a…

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First Transcontinental Railroad
History >>Westward Expansion

The First Transcontinental Railroad stretched from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast. No longer would people travel in long wagon trains that took months to reachCalifornia. They could now travel faster, safer, and cheaper by train. In addition to people, things like mail, supplies, and trade goods could now be shipped across the country in just a few days. The railroad was built between 1863 and 1869.

Background

The first talk of a transcontinental railroad started around 1830. One of the first promoters of the railroad was a merchant named Asa Whitney. Asa tried hard for many years to get Congress to pass an act to build the railroad, but failed. However, in the 1860s Theodore Judah began to lobby for a railroad. He surveyed the Sierra Nevada Mountains and found a pass where the railroad could be built.

The Route

There were two main routes along which people wanted the first railroad to be built.

One route was called the "central route". It followed much the same route as the Oregon Trail. It would begin in Omaha, Nebraska and end up in Sacramento, California.

The other route was the "southern route". This route would stretch across Texas, New Mexico, and end up in Los Angeles, California.

The central route was eventually chosen by Congress.

Route of the First Transcontinental Railroad by Unknown

Pacific Railroad Act

In 1862President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law. The act said that there were two main railroad lines. The Central Pacific Railroad would come from California and the Union Pacific Railroad would come from the Midwest. The two railroads would meet somewhere in the middle.

The act gave the railroad companies land where they could build the railroad. It also paid them for each mile that they built. They were paid more money for miles of track built in themountains versus miles of track built on the flat plains.

Building the Railroad

Across the Continent
by Joseph Becker

Building the railroad was tough, hard work. Weather conditions were especially tough in the mountains during the winter. A lot of times the only way to travel over the mountains was to go through the mountains by blasting a tunnel. The Central Pacific Railroad had to blast a number of tunnels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The longest tunnel built was 1659 feet long. It took a long time to build the tunnels. They were able to blast around one foot per day on average.

While the Central Pacific Railroad had to deal with mountains and snow, the Union Pacific Railroad was challenged byNative Americans raids. As the Native Americans came to realize the threat to their way of life that the "Iron Horse" was going to bring, they began to raid the railroad work sites. Also, a lot of the land that was "granted" to the railroad by the government was actually Native American land.

The Workers

The majority of the workers on the Union Pacific Railroad were Irish laborers, many who had served in both the Union and the Confederate armies. In Utah, a lot of the track was built by Mormon workers. Most of the Central Pacific Railroad was built by Chinese immigrants.

The Golden Spike

The two railroads finally met at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869. Leland Stanford, governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad, drove in the last spike. This final spike was called the "Golden Spike" or "The Final Spike". You can see it today at Stanford University in California.

Driving the Golden Spike on 10th May, 1869
by American School

Interesting Facts about the First Transcontinental Railroad

The Pony Express traveled a similar route to the central route and helped to prove that the route was passable in winter.

The transcontinental railroad was also called the Pacific Railroad and the Overland Route.

The total length of the First Transcontinental Railroad was 1,776 miles.

The Central Pacific Railroad was controlled by four men called the "Big Four". They were Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker.

It was later, in November of 1869, when the Central Pacific connected San Francisco to Sacramento.

Activities

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Works Cited

History >>Westward Expansion

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Kids learn about the First Transcontinental Railroad. Fun facts about the route, the Union Pacific, and the Pacific Railroad Act.

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Who Was Sacagawea?

Possibly the most memorialized woman in the United States, with dozens of statues and monuments, Sacagawea lived a short but legendarily eventful life in the American West. Born in 1788 or 1789, a member of the Lemhi band of the Native American Shoshone tribe, Sacagawea grew up surrounded by the Rocky Mountains in the Salmon River region of what is now Idaho.

The Shoshone were enemies of the gun-possessing Hidatsa tribe, who kidnapped Sacagawea during a buffalo hunt in 1800. The name we know her by is in fact Hidatsa, from the Hidatsa words for bird ("sacaga") and woman ("wea").

Did you know? Sacagawea was a highly skilled food gatherer. She used sharp sticks to dig up wild licorice, prairie turnips (tubers the explorers called "white apples") and wild artichokes that mice had buried for the winter.

Today, however, many Shoshone, among others, argue that in their language "Sacajawea" means boat-pusher and is her true name. (And in North Dakota the official spelling is "Sakakawea.") Her captors brought her to the Hidatsa-Mandan settlement near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota; the Mandan is an affiliated tribe.

In 1803 or 1804, through a trade, gambling payoff or purchase, Sacagawea became the property of French-Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau, born no later than 1767 and well over two decades her senior. Charbonneau had lived among Native Americans for so long he had adopted some of their traditions, including polygamy. Sacagawea became one of his two wives and was soon pregnant.

The Louisiana Purchase

Meanwhile, President Thomas Jefferson had made the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803-828,000 square miles of almost completely unexplored territory. Within this vast wilderness he hoped would lie the rumored Northwest Passage, the legendary waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that was long-sought trade route.

But Jefferson wanted more from the explorers who would search for the passage: He charged them with surveying the landscape, learning about the varied Native American tribes, collecting natural specimens and making maps. He turned to his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to head the Corps of Discovery. Lewis, 29, chose his friend and former military superior, 33-year-old William Clark, as his co-captain.

Lewis and Clark Meet Sacagawea

After more than a year of planning and initial travel, Lewis and Clark and their men reached the Hidatsa-Mandan settlement-about 60 miles northwest of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota-on November 2, 1804, when Sacagawea was about six months pregnant.

They recognized the potential value of Sacagawea and Charbonneau's combined language skills. Most of the Corps members spoke only English, but one, Francois Labiche, spoke French as well. Charbonneau spoke French and Hidatsa; Sacagawea spoke Hidatsa and Shoshone (two very different languages).

Through this translation chain, communications with the Shoshone would be possible. Lewis and Clark also recognized that the Shoshone had horses they would need to purchase.

Without horses, they wouldn't be able to transport their supplies over the Bitterroot Mountains (a rugged section of the Rockies) and continue toward the Pacific. And they couldn't procure horses earlier, because they'd be traveling by water until they reached the Rockies' edge.

Sacagawea delivered her son Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau (known as Baptiste) on February 11, 1805. On April 7, Sacagawea, the baby and Charbonneau headed west with the 31 other Corps members.

Sacagawea Saves the Day

Within a month, a near-tragedy earned Sacagawea particular respect. The boat in which she was sailing nearly capsized when a squall hit and Charbonneau, the navigator, panicked.

Sacagawea had the presence of mind to gather crucial papers, books, navigational instruments, medicines and other provisions that might have otherwise disappeared-all while simultaneously ensuring her baby's safety. In appreciation, Lewis and Clark named a branch of the Missouri River for Sacagawea several days later.

Clark, in particular, developed a close bond with Sacagawea as she and Baptiste would often accompany him as he took his turn walking the shore, checking for obstacles in the river that could damage the boats.

Cameahwait and Sacagawea

Five days after the first members of the Corps crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, Sacagawea did, as planned, translate the captains' desire to purchase horses to the Shoshone they encountered. Sacagawea was surprised and happy to recognize the Shoshone's leader, Chief Cameahwait, as her brother, and they had an emotional reunion.

Sacagawea also put her naturalist's knowledge to use for the Corps. She could identify roots, plants and berries that were either edible or medicinal. Sacagawea's memories of Shoshone trails led to Clark's characterization of her as his "pilot." She helped navigate the Corps through a mountain pass-today's Bozeman Pass in Montana-to the Yellowstone River.

And although it couldn't be quantified, the presence of a woman-a Native American, to boot-and baby made the whole corps seem less fearsome and more amiable to the Native Americans the Corps encountered, some of whom had never seen European faces before. This eased tensions that might otherwise have resulted in uncooperativeness at best, violence at worst.

After reaching the Pacific, Sacagawea returned with the rest of the Corps and her husband and son-having survived illness, flash floods, temperature extremes, food shortages, mosquito swarms and so much more-to their starting point, the Hidatsa-Mandan settlement, on August 14, 1806.

For his service Charbonneau received 320 acres of land and $500.33; Sacagawea herself received no compensation.

Sacagawea's Later Years

Three years later, in fall 1809, Sacagawea, Charbonneau and Baptiste ventured to St. Louis, where Charbonneau was taking the kind-hearted Clark up on an offer: Clark would provide the Charbonneau family with land to farm if the parents would agree to let Clark educate Baptiste.

The farming didn't work out, however, and Sacagawea and Charbonneau left Baptiste in St. Louis with Clark-now his godfather-in April 1811 so that they could join a fur-trading expedition.

How Did Sacagawea Die?

In August 1812, after giving birth to a daughter, Lisette (or Lizette), Sacagawea's health declined. By December, she was extremely ill with "putrid fever" (possibly typhoid fever).

She died at 25, on December 22, 1812, in Fort Manuel, located on a bluff 70 miles south of present-day Bismarck. She may have been buried on the Wind River Reservation, occupied by Lemhi Shoshone tribe, but some scholars dispute that.

Within a year, Clark became legal guardian to both Lisette and Baptiste. While little is known of Lisette's life, Baptiste traveled in Europe and held a variety of jobs in the American West before he died in 1866. Charbonneau died in 1843.

Legacy

Sacagawea's fictionalized image as a "genuine Indian princess" was promulgated most widely in the early 20th century by a popular 1902 novel by Eva Emery Dye that took liberties in recounting the travails of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

A suffragist, Dye was not satisfied to present the facts then known about Sacagawea; she wanted to make her a compelling model of female bravery and intelligence, and didn't mind rewriting history to do so.

"Out of a few dry bones I found in the old tales of the trip, I created Sacajawea," Dye wrote in her journal. Today, some scholars contend that the romanticized versions of the Sacagawea "legend" popularized before and after the publication of Dye's novel do the real woman a disservice, as her true legacy of accomplishments speaks for itself.

Sacagawea Coin

In addition to numerous memorials throughout the United States, Sacagawea was honored with a dollar coin made by the U.S. Mint from 2000 to 2008. The manganese brass coin features an image of Sacagawea carrying Jean Baptiste, her infant son.

Designed by artist Glenna Goodacre, the coins show Sacagawea looking directly at the viewer, a break with coin-making tradition, where subjects are typically viewed in profile. Goodacre used a modern-day Shoshone student as her model.

Sources

Sacagawea / Sacajawea / Sakakawea. National Women's Hall of Fame.
The Sacagawea Mystique: Her Age, Name, Role and Final Destiny. Columbia Magazine.
Sacagawea Golden Dollar Coin. U.S. Mint.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Sacagawea: Facts, Tribe & Death - HISTORY

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Sacagawea was a Shoshone Indian woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804-06, exploring the lands procured in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

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Oregon Trail, in U.S. history, an overland trail between Independence, Missouri, and Oregon City, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in the Willamette River valley. It was one of the two main emigrant routes to the American West in the 19th century, the other being the southerly Santa Fe Trail from Independence to Santa Fe (now in New Mexico). In addition, branches from each main trail provided connections to destinations in California, and a spur of the northerly Oregon route, part of the Oregon Trail, led to the Great Salt Lake region of what is now northern Utah.

The Oregon Trail, which stretched for about 2,000 miles (3,200 km), flourished as the main means for hundreds of thousands of emigrants to reach the Northwest from the early 1840s through the 1860s. It crossed varied and often difficult terrain that included large territories occupied by Native Americans. From Independence it first traversed the vast prairie grasslands of present-day northeastern Kansas and southern Nebraska, there following the Platte River. Skirting the southern end of the Sand Hills, it continued along the North Platte River (a major tributary of the Platte) into much drier and increasingly rugged lands in what is now southern Wyoming. There, leaving the river, it crossed its first mountain ranges before heading across the arid and desolate Great Divide Basin.

In southwestern Wyoming, after having run largely westward for hundreds of miles, the route trended generally to the northwest as it traversed more mountains and then followed the relatively level plain of the Snake River in what is now southern Idaho. Entering the northeastern corner of present-day Oregon, the trail crossed the Blue Mountains before reaching the lower Columbia River. From there travelers could float downstream or, after 1846, go overland through the Cascade Range to the trail's western terminus in the fertile Willamette valley situated between the Cascades and the Coast Ranges to the west.

Background

Early trailblazers

Portions of what was to become the Oregon Trail were first used by trappers, fur traders, and missionaries (c. 1811-40) who traveled on foot and horseback. Until the trail's development as a wagon route, however, people of European descent (whites) in eastern North America who wished to travel to California or Oregon generally went by ship around the southern tip of South America, an arduous and often harrowing sea journey that could take nearly a year to complete. Thus, before the turn of the 19th century few whites had ventured into the vast territory west of the Mississippi River that came to be included in the U.S. government's 1802 Louisiana Purchase. One of those was the French Canadian trapper and explorer Toussaint Charbonneau. He and Shoshone wife Sacagawea were instrumental members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06), the government's first attempt to systematically explore, map, and report on its newly acquired lands and the Oregon country that lay beyond them.

In 1810 fur entrepreneur John Jacob Astor organized an expedition of frontiersmen to head westward and establish a trading post for his American Fur Company in Oregon. The men followed the Missouri River upstream from St. Louis to Arikara Indian villages in what is now South Dakota and then struck out on the difficult trek across the plains and mountains through Wyoming and Idaho to Oregon. There they, and another group that had sailed there by ship, established in 1812 Fort Astoria (now Astoria, Oregon) near the mouth of the Columbia River, the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific Ocean coast and what the company hoped would be the major post from which Astor would conduct trade with China.

Astor's expedition, in dire need of supplies and help, sent members back east in 1812. During that journey Robert Stuart and his companions discovered the South Pass in southwestern Wyoming, a 20-mile (32-km) gap in the Rocky Mountains that offered the lowest (and easiest) crossing of the Continental Divide. (Lewis and Clark, unaware of the pass, had crossed the divide at a more treacherous spot farther to the north.) Astor's venture foundered, however, when the British took over his post in 1813 during the War of 1812, and he sold his operation there to the North West Company (then a rival of the Hudson's Bay Company, the dominant fur traders in the Northwest and Canada).

Despite Stuart's detailed account of the Astor expedition, the South Pass remained largely ignored. In 1806 Zebulon Montgomery Pike, after exploring the Great Plains region, had famously called the West the Great American Desert, a judgment given even wider publicity by Stephen H. Long after he led an expedition to the southern Great Plains in 1819-20. For some years thereafter an American public that initially had been thrilled by the reports of Lewis and Clark became swayed against the West. Not until trappers Jedediah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick rediscovered the pass in 1824 did that critical route through the mountains became widely known.

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Oregon Trail | Definition, History, Map, & Facts

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The Oregon Trail was an overland trail between Independence, Missouri, and Oregon City, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in the Willamette River valley. It was one of the two main emigrant routes to the American West in the 19th century, the other being the southerly Santa Fe Trail.

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Texas and the War with Mexico Article

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Texas Revolution Begins by Discovery Education

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Russell, Majors and Waddell - Founders of the Pony Express

The Pony Express was founded, owned and operated by the freighting firm of William H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell.These men were interested in transportation and their reason for establishing the Pony Express was to prove that the central route was viable all year long and their interest in the government mail contracts.

At the brink of the Civil War, California was thought to be thinking about secession and communication with the east was crucial.Though the Government made many false promises to the founders they believed that the Pony Express should keep on running . Russell, Majors and Waddell felt their obligation to their country and kept it running without regard to their own sacrifice and loss. They assured that California and her gold would remain in the Union.

In March of 1862 the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company was sold at Leavenworth, Kansas to satisfy a mortgage held by Benjamin Holladay, who bought the property. In November, 1866, Holladay sold the equipment to Wells Fargo, a transaction which was the latter's first connection with the long extinct Pony Express.

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Russell, Majors and Waddell - Founders of the Pony Express The Pony Express was founded, owned and operated by the freighting firm of William H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell.These men were interested in transportation and their reason for establishing the Pony Express was to prove that the central route was viable all year long and their interest in the government mail contracts.

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Corps of Discovery Expedition Map

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Buffalo Bill

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An advertising poster for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show

Buffalo Bill in Show Business
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was an accomplished Indian scout and buffalo hunter when E.Z.C. Judson, a writer who went by the name of Ned Buntline, met him in the summer of 1869. Judson wrote western stories and what were known as "dime novels" (small paperback books that sold for 10 cents.) He helped create "Buffalo Bill" and made him the hero in a number of his books. These stories made Buffalo Bill famous in the East and when he went to New York for a visit, he saw a play based on his adventures.

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An advertising poster for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Buffalo Bill in Show Business William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was an accomplished Indian scout and buffalo hunter when E.Z.C. Judson, a writer who went by the name of Ned Buntline, met him in the summer of 1869.

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A Legacy from the Far East - Golden Spike National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Transcontinental Railroad was built by many thousands of workers from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, which created a blend of people that continues to define the nation to this day. One of the groups that literally took on the brunt of the work, were the Chinese laborers. Most of…

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Animates and highlights some of the recorded events in the life of Sacagawea, and focuses on her role in the Corps of Discovery (commonly referred to as the Lewis and Clark Expedition). The program emphasizes Sacagawea's skill set that greatly aided the expedition, and provides details on some pivotal moments, such as her reuniting with her brother Cameahwait, saving important documents and medicine, and witnessing the Pacific Ocean.

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Major “Strikes” in the California Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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An astounding amount of gold was pulled from the ground during the California gold rush.

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oregon trail center "montpelier idaho" "bear lake" pioneers history museum

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Mexican-American War by Ducksters.com

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History >>Westward Expansion

The Mexican-American War was fought between the United States andMexico from 1846 to 1848. It was primarily over the territory of Texas.

Background

Texas had been a state of the country of Mexico since 1821 when Mexico gained its independence from Spain. The Texans, however, began to disagree with the government of Mexico. In 1836, they declared their independence from Mexico and formed the Republic of Texas. They fought several battles including The Alamo. In the end, they gained their independence and Sam Houston became the first President of Texas.

Texas Becomes a US State

In 1845, Texas joined the United States as the 28th state. Mexico didn't like that the United States took over Texas. There also was a disagreement over the border of Texas. Mexico said the border was at the Nueces River while Texas claimed the border was further south at the Rio Grande River.

War with Mexico

President James K. Polk sent troops to Texas to protect the border. Soon Mexican and US troops were shooting at each other. On May 13, 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico.

Mexican-American War Overview Map
By Kaidor [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons
(Click picture to see larger view)

The Mexican army was led by General Santa Anna. The US forces were led byGeneral Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott. General Taylor's forces were the first to engage the Mexican army. They fought an early battle at Palo Alto where the Mexicans were forced to retreat.

General Taylor advanced into Mexico fighting battles at the city of Monterrey and a mountain pass called Buena Vista. At the Battle of Buena Vista, Taylor and 5,000 troops were attacked by 14,000 Mexican troops led by Santa Anna. They held off the attack and won the battle despite being outnumbered.

Capture of Mexico City

President Polk didn't trust Zachary Taylor. He also considered him a rival. Instead of reinforcing Taylor's troops to capture Mexico City, he sent in another army led by General Winfield Scott. Scott advanced on Mexico City and captured it in August of 1847.

Fall of Mexico City during the Mexican-American War
by Carl Nebel

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

With the United States in control of their capital city and much of the country divided, the Mexicans agreed to a peace treaty called the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the treaty, Mexico agreed to the border of Texas at the Rio Grande. They also agreed to sell a large area of land to the United States for $15 million. Today this land makes up the states of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Portions of Wyoming, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Colorado were also included.

Mexican Cession in Mexican View
from the U.S. Government

Interesting Facts about the Mexican-American War

Several of the commanders of the US troops would become leaders during the American Civil War including Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.

Mexico gave up around 55% of its territory to the US after the war. The territory was called the Mexican Cession in the United States.

When the US attacked the Mexican Military Academy at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, six Mexican students fought to the death defending the castle. They are still remembered as the Ninos Heros (meaning "boy heroes") in Mexico with a national holiday on September 13.

There was also a rebellion in California during the war where settlers declared their independence from Mexico.

Activities

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Works Cited

History >>Westward Expansion

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Learn about the Mexican-American War fought over the land rights to Texas after the Texan Revolution.

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Texas Revolution- Video by Discovery Ed.

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Some of the riders of 1860-61 are better known than others. But it took all the riders to make this rigorous schedule happen. Meet a few of the notable riders:

Johnny Fry

Johnny was born in Kentucky and moved with his family to Missouri when he was 16 years old. Because he was an accomplished horseman, Alexander Majors asked him to ride for the Pony Express. Historians disagree on whether he was the first rider out of St. Joseph. After the Pony Express, Johnny enlisted in the army. He was killed at Baxter Springs where a huge monument salutes those buried there.

William Campbell

Billy came to the United States with his parents as a young boy. After a few years, he and his brother were hired by Russell, Majors and Waddell as bullwackers. Later they were sent west to help build stations for the Pony Express. In 1860 he was placed on a run between Valley Station and Box Elder in what is now Nebraska. After the running of the Pony, he and his brother became freighters. He died in Stockton, California.

Major Howard Egan

Howard emigrated to the United State from Ireland with his parents in the early 1830's. While living in Massachusetts, he was won to the Mormon faith. He was with the Pioneer Party of 1847 that journeyed to the west to establish a home for the Mormons. At the start of the Pony Express, he was appointed Superintendent of the Division from Salt Lake City to Robert's Creek which is in present day Nevada. Major Egan filled in when others couldn't ride. After the Pony Express, he ranched and became involved with the court system in Utah.

Robert Haslam

"Pony Bob" was one of the most daring riders for the Pony Express. He was first hired to help build stations and was then put on a run from Friday's Station to Buckland's Station. During the Pyramid Lake War he made one of the longest and most dangerous rides. After the telegraph line put the Express out of business, he worked for several stage lines. Pony Bob is buried in Chicago.

William (Sam) Hamilton

Sam was hired for Bolivar Robert's division because he knew the territory. He took the first mochila off the boat at Sacramento. When the first west bound mail arrived, he carried it from Placerville to Sacramento where he boarded the boat, horse and all, for San Francisco. Little is known about this noteworthy rider.

Other Riders

The Following is a Compilation of Rider lists, noting the Various Sources that have cited their names.

**Courtesy of NPEA Historian Patrick Hearty.**

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Some of the riders of 1860-61 are better known than others. But it took all the riders to make this rigorous schedule happen. Meet a few of the notable riders: Johnny was born in Kentucky and moved with his family to Missouri when he was 16 years old.

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The Transfer of Land from Native Americans to White Americans during 1775-1894

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Kids learn about the cowboys of the old west. Fun facts like the cattle drive, round up, the clothes they wore, and the cowboy code.

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The Transcontinental Railroad | Article

The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad

American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

On May 10, 1869, as the last spike was driven in the Utah desert, the blows were heard across the country. Telegraph wires wrapped around spike and sledgehammer transmitted the impact instantaneously east and west. In San Francisco and New York, wires had been connected to cannons facing outward across the ocean. When the signal from the spike came through, the cannons fired. The world was put on notice: the transcontinental railroad was completed and America was moving to the forefront of the world's stage.

The World Grew Smaller
One day later, the first transcontinental freight train rumbled out of California on its way to the east coast. It carried in its hold an emissary of the Asian markets: a shipment of Japanese teas. On May 15, though the road required hundreds of thousands of dollars in patchwork along its length, regular passenger service opened for business. Travelers could make the trip between San Francisco and New York in a week. No longer did passengers or cargo have to take the treacherous route across ocean and Panama that had killed railroad advocate Theodore Judah. The coasts were connected -- and the world as Americans knew it had grown smaller.

A Competing Canal
Railroad pioneer Asa Whitney had once dreamed an iron route would re-center the world toward America, making it a conduit of exchange between Asia and Europe. In this sense, his vision of the grand project remained unfulfilled. Just six months after the meeting at Promontory Summit, workers half the world away consummated their own monumental feat of engineering. Opened in November, 1869, Egypt's Suez Canal linked Asia and India to Europe by a single waterway, thus ensuring that exchange between the two regions would continue to circumvent American soil.

Surging Interstate Trade
However, the transformation achieved in intracontinental trade was substantial. Within ten years of its completion, the railroad shipped $50 million worth of freight coast to coast every year. Just as it opened the markets of the west coast and Asia to the east, it brought products of eastern industry to the growing populace beyond the Mississippi. The railroad ensured a production boom, as industry mined the vast resources of the middle and western continent for use in production. The railroad was America's first technology corridor.

Improved Public Discourse
As it encouraged the growth of American business, so too did it promote evolution of the nation's public discourse and intellectual life. Americans could travel across the length of the continent in a matter of days, and gaze upon their country in its entirety from the windows of their train cars. Conversations begun in the east ended in the west. Books written in San Francisco found homes on New York shelves just one week after their publication. The rails carried more than goods; they provided a conduit for ideas, a pathway for discourse. With the completion of its great railroad, America gave birth to a transcontinental culture. And the route further engendered another profound change in the American mind. Here was manifest destiny wrought in iron; here were two coasts united; here was an interior open to settlement. Distances shrank, but identification to land and fellow American grew in inverse proportion.

A Disaster for Native Americans
Not everyone would benefit from that transformation. The transcontinental railroad was not the beginning of white settlers' battles with Native Americans. Nor was it the final nail in the coffin. But it was an irrevocable marker of encroaching white society, that unstoppable force which would force Indians onto reservations within decades. By 1890, even the Powder River Valley - the rich hunting ground so hard won by red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux - would be lost. New treaties scattered the Indians to reservations and opened the last great Native American holding to the settlers so steadily branching outward from the iron road. And the buffalo herds upon which Indians depended had been nearly depleted. They were easy prey to sport-hunters brought to the plains by the carload. More disastrously, the railroad introduced the herds to American industrial production, for which they became one more resource to be mined en masse. Millions of buffalo fell to indiscriminate slaughter, their hides shipped back along the rails to the markets of the East.

A Web of Rails
The transcontinental railroad did not long remain the sole venue of travel through America's center. Lines spiderwebbed outward from its branch points, conveying north and south the settlers coming west to consume millions of acres of land. By 1900 a number of routes ran parallel - the Northern Pacific and Southern Pacific among them - reaching westward from Mississippi to the Pacific just like the pioneering road.

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The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad | American Experience | PBS

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The Transcontinental Railroad | Article On May 10, 1869, as the last spike was driven in the Utah desert, the blows were heard across the country. Telegraph wires wrapped around spike and sledgehammer transmitted the impact instantaneously east and west. In San Francisco and New York, wires had been connected to cannons facing outward across the ocean.

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Before the resort town of Cannon Beach, Oregon, a Tillamook tribal village-NeCus'-sat along the tiny brackish bay where Ecola Creek crosses the sandy beach. The Lewis and Clark Expedition journals provide a tantalizing but fragmentary glimpse of this community.

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Latest Additions The Trail Eastern Beginnings → Down the Ohio → Up the Mississippi → Winter at St. Louis → Starting Up the Missouri → Past the Omahas → Among the Yanktons → Crossing the Lakotas → Winter at Fort Mandan → Along the Northern Reach → Portaging the Falls → Gates of the Rockies [...]

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Sutter's Mill

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California.

At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento). As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: "It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold."

Did you know? Miners extracted more than 750,000 pounds of gold during the California Gold Rush.

Days after Marshall's discovery at Sutter's Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States-a remarkable twist of fate with important ramifications for an America eager for westward expansion.

At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769).

Sutter, in fact, had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.

Gold Fever Strikes

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being turned up at Sutter's Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through town displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter's Creek.

By mid-June, shops and businesses stood empty, as some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had abandoned the city for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area ballooned to some 4,000 by August.

As news reports-many wildly overblown-of the easy fortunes being made in California spread worldwide, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and China.

Polk Spreads Gold Fever

When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off nationwide in earnest, however, after December 1848, when President James K. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California's military governor, in his inaugural address.

As Polk wrote, "The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service."

The '49ers Come to California

Throughout 1849, people around the United States (mostly men) with gold fever borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns. In turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone.

Thousands of would-be gold miners, known as 49ers for the year they arrived, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America.

By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (as compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the 49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own Gold Rush fortune.

The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier.

Gold Rush Politics

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped up California's admission to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians.

According to the Compromise of 1850, proposed by Kentucky's Senator Henry Clay, California was allowed to enter as a free state, while the territories of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide the legal status of slavery for themselves.

California's Mines

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848.

As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Though gold mining continued throughout the 1850s, it had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 million was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, however, and by the end of the decade the state's population was 380,000.

Impact of the Gold Rush

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently altered the landscape of California. The technique of hydraulic mining brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Dams designed to supply water to mine sites in summer altered the course of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry in the area was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources.

In 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by court order, and soon agriculture became the dominant industry in California, and it remains so today. While a few mines and Gold Rush towns remain, much of the heritage of that era is preserved at places such as Bodie State Historic Park, a decaying ghost town, and at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where Sutter's Mill once stood.

Sources

Environmental Impact of the Gold Rush. Calisphere.org.
After the Gold Rush. National Geographic.

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Gold Rush: California, Date & Sutter's Mill - HISTORY

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The Gold Rush in California started in 1848 after gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Within a year, hundreds of thousands of 49ers seeking fortune poured into the state.

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The National Oregon/California Trail Center and the City of Montpelier, Idaho are located on the historic Oregon/California Trail, mid-way between Jackson/Yellowstone and Salt Lake City. Our hotels, restaurants and location are within the beautiful Bear Lake Valley and offer the tourist traveler a unique vacation stopover.

Step Into the Days of the Oregon Trail by taking our simulated Wagon Trail Adventure. You and your family will become members of a simulated wagon train headed west and be guided by our live cast of pioneers whose dialogue and stories will make the adventure come alive! Sign up at our front desk.

The Center also offers spacious and clean restrooms, the Peg Leg Smith Trading Post gift shop, exhibits , Rails and Trails Museum, the Allinger Community Theatre, an original art exhibit of Oregon Trail paintings by Idaho artist Gary Stone and the beautiful murals of artist-in-residence John Wayne Cook. This will be an experience you will never forget!

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National Oregon/California Trail Center Museum in Montpelier, Idaho

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The National Oregon/California Trail Center and the City of Montpelier, Idaho are located on the historic Oregon/California Trail, mid-way between Jackson/Yellowstone and Salt Lake City. Our hotels, restaurants and location are within the beautiful Bear Lake Valley and offer the tourist traveler a unique vacation stopover.

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Mexican American War Britannica Kids

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Introduction
The Mexican-American War, or Mexican War, was fought between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848. "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil. War exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself." So U.S. President James K. Polk said in his message to Congress in May 1846.

The trouble grew out of a dispute over the border between the two countries. Texas, formerly a part of Mexico, claimed that its southwest boundary extended to the Rio Grande. When Texas entered the Union and became a U.S. state, this was the boundary accepted by the United States. Mexico claimed that the boundary was the Nueces River, which is 100 miles (160 kilometers) eastward.

In August 1845, President Polk stationed American troops west of the Nueces, showing that the United States would protect Texas to the Rio Grande but attempting at the same time to avoid war. But on January 13, 1846, he ordered General Zachary Taylor to advance to the Rio Grande. This was a frank invasion of Mexican territory. A Mexican force crossed the river at Palo Alto, and a battle took place on May 8 of that year. This was followed on May 9 by the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. The United States declared war on Mexico on May 13.

California and the Slavery Question
Two other issues complicated the matter. In the first place many American citizens had claims against Mexico for losses of property caused by the unsettled condition of the country. Mexico agreed to pay only part of the claims. The U.S. president also wished to acquire the vast region of California during his administration. He had tried in vain to purchase California, but Mexico had refused to sell its territory. The refusal had added fuel to the flame, especially for those Americans who wanted more land for the expansion of slavery. Antislavery New England opposed the war.

A One-Sided Conflict
In almost every battle in the war the American troops were victorious, though they were outnumbered by the Mexicans by about two to one. After taking Resaca de la Palma, General Taylor struck into the interior of Mexico. After a four-day siege and a gallant resistance by the Mexicans, he entered the city of Monterrey on September 24. His most famous victory was that of Buena Vista. There, for the entire day of February 23, 1847, his army of 4,700 men successfully withstood the attack of 20,000 Mexicans under Antonio López de Santa Anna. The Mexicans finally acknowledged defeat by withdrawing from the field.

While these victories were being won in Mexico, Americans were taking possession of California. U.S. Navy Commodore John D. Sloat was stationed in Mazatlán, Mexico, at the outbreak of the war. He sailed to Monterey, California, and took possession of it on July 7, 1846. Yerba Buena (now San Francisco), California, was seized the next day. In August 1846, Sloat relinquished command of the Pacific squadron to Commodore Robert F. Stockton. With Captain John C. Frémont he completed the conquest of California. In January 1847 the last areas of resistance were brought under control by General Stephen W. Kearny, who had earlier secured New Mexico.

On March 27, 1847, General Winfield Scott captured the fortress on the harbor of Veracruz. This fort controlled the gateway to Mexico. On April 18, with 8,000 men, he drove some 12,000 Mexicans from the pass of Cerro Gordo. Finally, he came to the Rock of Chapultepec (Grasshopper Hill), 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) from Mexico City. The Mexicans fought heroically in defense of this ancient fortress; however, after a desperate struggle they were defeated. On September 14, American troops entered Mexico City, and the fighting was at an end.

The Treaty of Peace
By the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (February 2, 1848), Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as its boundary. The treaty also gave the United States Mexico's northern provinces of California and New Mexico. These included parts of the present states of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. Mexico received 15 million dollars and was also relieved of all claims of citizens of the United States against it.

The United States thus acquired vast mineral wealth, especially gold, and a door to the Pacific Ocean and to East Asia. The additional territory raised again the burning question of slavery in the U.S. and the application of the Missouri Compromise to the new lands. The questionable character of the American claims to Mexican lands contributed a heritage of ill will to the troubled relations between the United States and its southern neighbor, Mexico.

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Introduction The Mexican-American War, or Mexican War, was fought between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848. "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil. War exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself."

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Annexation of Texas Article

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1. The Pony Express was more than twice as fast as its competitors.

In the mid-19th century, California-bound mail had to either be taken overland by a 25-day stagecoach or spend months inside a ship during a long sea voyage. The Pony Express, meanwhile, had an average delivery time of just 10 days. To achieve this remarkable speed, company owners William H. Russell, William B. Waddell and Alexander Majors set up a string of nearly 200 relief stations across what is now Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California.

Lone horsemen would ride between stations at breakneck pace, switching mounts every 10-15 miles and then handing their cargo off to a new courier after 75-100 miles. The relay system allowed mail to criss-cross the frontier in record time. The company's personal best came in March 1861, when riders carried the inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln from Nebraska to California in just seven days, 17 hours.

2. It was a financial flop.

Despite its enduring place in Old West legend, the Pony Express never turned a profit during its year and a half history. The company began making deliveries in April 1860, but service ground to a halt just a few weeks later when the Pyramid Lake War erupted between the United States and the Paiute Indians. The temporary shutdown cost the company some $75,000, and it continued to hemorrhage cash over the next few months due to high operations costs and its failure to secure a government mail contract. Though hailed in the press for its efficiency and adventurous spirit, the Pony Express eventually folded in October 1861, having lost as much as $200,000.

3. There was a weight limit for Pony Express riders.

Since speed was its main goal, the Pony Express went to great lengths to keep its horses' loads as light as possible. Rather than burly cowboys, most of the riders were small, wiry men who weighed between 100 and 125 pounds-roughly the same size as a modern horseracing jockey. Their average age was around 20, but it wasn't unusual for teenagers as young as 14 to be hired. One man named "Bronco" Charlie Miller claimed he was only 11 years old when he first joined the Pony Express.

4. Riders were required to take a loyalty oath.

In exchange for their $100-150 monthly salaries-a substantial sum for the time-Pony Express riders were expected to take a loyalty oath that read: "I do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while an employee of Russell, Majors and Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language, that I will drink no intoxicating liquors, that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers, so help me God." Those who broke the rules risked being dismissed without pay, but it appears that few Pony Express employees followed the pledge to the letter. Liquor flowed freely at relief stations, and an eyewitness named Richard Burton reported that he "scarcely ever saw a sober rider."

5. Mail was carried in a specially designed saddlebag.

To cut down on weight and facilitate swift horse and rider changes, the Pony Express used a special type of mailbag known as a "mochilla"-the Spanish word for knapsack. This consisted of a leather cover that was draped over the saddle and held in place by the rider's weight. It featured four padlocked pockets-three for mail and one for the rider's timecard-and was capable of holding up to 20 pounds of cargo. At each relief station, riders would simply grab the mochilla off one mount and then throw it over the next, allowing them to switch horses in the span of just two minutes.

6. Ordinary people almost never used the Pony Express.

The speed of the Pony Express didn't come cheap. In its early days the service cost $5 for every half-ounce of mail-the equivalent of some $130 today. Prices were later reduced to just $1, but they still remained too high for everyday mail. Instead, the service was mainly used to deliver newspaper reports, government dispatches and business documents, most of which were printed on tissue-thin paper to keep costs (and weight) down.

7. One rider completed a 380-mile run in less than two days.

In May 1860, Robert "Pony Bob" Haslam took off on the most legendary ride in Pony Express history. The 20-year-old was scheduled to make his usual 75-mile run from Friday's Station east to Buckland Station in Nevada. Upon arriving at Buckland, however, he found that his relief rider was petrified of the Paiute Indians, who had been attacking stations along the route. When the other man refused to take the mail, Haslam jumped back in the saddle and rode on, eventually completing a 190-mile run before delivering his mochilla at Smith's Creek.

After a brief rest, he mounted a fresh horse and retraced his steps all the way back to Friday's Station, at one point passing a relay outpost that had been burned by the Paiutes. By the time he finally returned to his home station, "Pony Bob" had traveled 380 miles in less than 40 hours-a Pony Express record.

8. Riders didn't have the deadliest job on the Pony Express.

Pony Express riders had to deal with extreme weather conditions, harsh terrain and the threat of attacks by bandits and Indians, but life may have been even more dangerous for the stock keepers who manned the relief stations. Their outposts were usually crude, dirt floor hovels equipped with little more than sleeping quarters and corrals for the horses. Many were located in remote sections of the frontier, making them extremely vulnerable to ambush.

Accounts differ, but Indians reportedly attacked or burned several relay stations during the Pyramid Lake War in the summer of 1860, killing as many as 16 stock hands. By contrast, only a handful of riders-six, according to the National Park Service -died in the line of duty during the entire history of the Pony Express.

9. Buffalo Bill Cody probably wasn't a Pony Express rider.

In his autobiography, the famed frontier showman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody claimed that he served as a Pony Express rider at the age of 14. He even alleged that he once rode a record 384 miles in a single run. But while Cody almost certainly worked as a messenger for the owners of the Pony Express, there is no record of him ever carrying the mail, and evidence suggests he was probably in school in Kansas during the company's brief history.

Whatever Cody's involvement with Pony Express was, there's no doubt that he later kept its memory alive with his famous "Wild West" vaudeville shows, which featured Pony Express riders and horse swaps as a recurring stunt from 1883 until 1916.

10. The transcontinental telegraph dealt the Pony Express its deathblow.

For all its financial troubles, the Pony Express didn't truly collapse until a better alternative appeared on the scene. The company had spent its brief history bridging the gap between the Eastern and Western telegraph lines, but it was finally rendered obsolete on October 24, 1861, when Western Union completed the transcontinental telegraph line at Salt Lake City. The Pony Express ceased service just two days later. Despite operating for only 19 months, its riders had successfully delivered some 35,000 pieces of mail and traveled more than half a million miles across the American frontier.

Fact Check

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10 Things You May Not Know About the Pony Express | HISTORY

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Explore 10 interesting facts about the short-lived mail service that helped transform the American West.

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The Story of Sacagawea

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Vaqueros

In 1519, shortly after the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they began to build ranches to raise cattle and other livestock. Horses were imported from Spain and put to work on the ranches.

Mexico's native cowboys were called vaqueros, which comes from the Spanish word vaca (cow). Vaqueros were hired by ranchers to tend to the livestock and were known for their superior roping, riding and herding skills.

By the early 1700s, ranching made its way to present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and as far south as Argentina. When the California missions started in 1769, livestock practices were introduced to more areas in the West.

During the early 1800s, many English-speaking settlers migrated to the West and adopted aspects of the vaquero culture, including their clothing style and cattle-driving methods.

Cowboys came from diverse backgrounds and included African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans and settlers from the eastern United States and Europe.

Manifest Destiny and American Cowboys

In the mid-1800s, the United States built railroads that reached further west, and cowboys played a central part in the nation's " Manifest Destiny" as Westward expansion led to an ever-shifting frontier.

Cowboys herded and rounded up livestock that were transported by rail around the country for sale.

To distinguish what cattle belonged to which ranch, cowboys would brand the animals by burning a special mark into their hides. It took between eight and 12 cowboys to move 3,000 head of cattle along cattle drives.

Open Range vs. Barbed Wire

By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, the Union Army had largely used up the supply of beef in the North, increasing the demand for beef. The expansion of the meat-packing industry also encouraged consumption of beef.

By 1866, millions of heads of longhorn cattle were rounded up and driven toward railroad depots. Cattle were sold to northern markets for as much as $40 per head.

Ranching continued to be widespread through the late 1800s. White settlers were permitted to claim public lands on the Great Plains as "open range" to raise purchased cattle.

But by the 1890s, most of the land became privatized after feuds over land ownership were settled and the use of barbed wire became widespread.

During the winter of 1886-1887, thousands of cattle died when temperatures reached well below freezing in parts of the West. Many scholars believe that this devastating winter was the beginning of the end for the cowboy era. Cattle drives continued, but on a smaller scale, up until the mid-1900s. Most cowboys gave up the open trail life and were hired by private ranch owners in the West.

Cowboy Characters

Even though the cowboy's role began to decline in the 1920s, Hollywood movies popularized the cowboy lifestyle with Westerns from the 1920s to the 1940s. These films featured stars like John Wayne, Buck Jones and Gene Autry. American audiences tuned in to see the fictional adventures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Will Kane in "High Noon" and "Hopalong Cassidy" on screen. Comic book fans could read about The Black Rider and Kid Colt.

Cowboy Life

Cowboys were mostly young men who needed cash. The average cowboy in the West made about $25 to $40 a month.

In addition to herding cattle, they also helped care for horses, repaired fences and buildings, worked cattle drives and in some cases helped establish frontier towns.

Cowboys occasionally developed a bad reputation for being lawless, and some were banned from certain establishments.

They typically wore large hats with wide brims to protect them from the sun, boots to help them ride horses and bandanas to guard them from dust. Some wore chaps on the outsides of their trousers to protect their legs from sharp cactus needles and rocky terrain.

When they lived on a ranch, cowboys shared a bunkhouse with each other. For entertainment, some sang songs, played the guitar or harmonica and wrote poetry.

Cowboys were referred to as cowpokes, buckaroos, cowhands and cowpunchers. The most experienced cowboy was called the Segundo (Spanish for "second") and rode squarely with the trail boss.

Everyday work was difficult and laborious for cowboys. Workdays lasted about 15 hours, and much of that time was spent on a horse or doing other physical labor.

Rodeo Cowboys

Some cowboys tested their skills against one another by performing in rodeos-competitions that were based on the daily tasks of a cowboy.

Rodeo activities included bull riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, bareback bronco riding and barrel racing.

The first professional rodeo was held in Prescott, Arizona, in 1888. Since then, rodeos became-and continue to be-popular entertainment events in the United States, Mexico and elsewhere.

Cowboys Today

Over the years, the number of working cowboys has declined, but the occupation isn't obsolete. The cowboy lifestyle and culture is still found in certain areas of the United States, albeit to a lesser degree than a century ago.

Cowboys continue to help run large ranches in states like Texas, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2003 there were about 9,730 workers in the category "support activities for animal production," which included cowboys. These workers made an average of $19,340 per year.

While opportunities may have shifted, the American cowboy is still very much a part of life in the American West.

Sources

Cowboys, PBS.
The History of the Vaquero, American Cowboy.
The Ways of the Cowboy, USHistory.org.
The Last Cowboy, PBS.
15 Places in the U.S. Where Cowboy Culture Is Alive and Well, Wide Open Country.
5 Amazing Facts You Never Knew About the American Cowboy, Ancestry.

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In 1519, shortly after the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they began to build ranches to raise cattle and other livestock. Horses were imported from Spain and put to work on the ranches. Mexico's native cowboys were called vaqueros, which comes from the Spanish word vaca (cow).

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In the first half of the 19th century, settlers pushed westward across the Appalachians, Mississippi River, and Rocky Mountains, en route to the Pacific Ocean. The frontier experience shaped the American identity and mythology.

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Introduction
The United States began building a transcontinental railroad in 1863 to connect the East Coast with the West Coast. Work began from both sides of the country, meeting at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. During those six years workers laid some 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) of track from Nebraska to California. Today various freight and passenger railroads still use sections of the line.

Up until the mid-1800s in the United States, people had few ways to get from the East Coast to the West Coast. They could travel by wagon train or stagecoach overland, by ship around South America, or by ship to Panama, where they took a railroad to that country's western coast and boarded a second ship to go back north to the United States. The journeys were long, expensive, and arduous. To ease the transportation difficulties, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862. This act set aside land and money to build a transcontinental railroad. It also appointed the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads to perform the work.

From The Days of a Man, Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy, by David Starr Jordan, Vol. 1, 1922

Railroads already connected many of the larger cities in the east by the time the decision was made to link the East and West Coasts. The Union Pacific Railroad was tasked with building westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The Central Pacific Railroad started from Sacramento, California, and worked eastward. A group of California businessmen later called the "Big Four"- Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, and Mark Hopkins -controlled the Central Pacific. Thomas C. Durant oversaw the Union Pacific at the time.

Financing the Railroad
Through the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, the U.S. government provided the companies with financial support for the major undertaking. Each company received long-term loans in the form of government bonds, with the amount of the bonds tied to the amount of track laid. The government also awarded the companies sizable parcels of land along the entire length of their route, making the endeavor a competition between the sides. Each company had an incentive to work quickly to secure a longer route and thus more land and bonds. In 1864 a second Pacific Railway Act increased the financial incentives.

During the project Durant almost forced the Union Pacific into bankruptcy by siphoning money from the railroad for his personal gain. The illegal manipulation of contracts by the Union Pacific's construction and finance company, Crédit Mobilier, became known as the Crédit Mobilier Scandal. Several U.S. Congressmen were implicated in the scandal.

Building the Railroad
Although the Central Pacific began laying tracks in 1863, the American Civil War disrupted the work of the Union Pacific in the Midwest. That company was not able to begin construction until the war ended in 1865. The Union Pacific subsequently hired hundreds of former soldiers, as well as numerous Irish immigrants; a large Mormon contingent helped with the tracks in Utah. The workers were able to lay tracks quickly through Nebraska and Wyoming, encountering little difficulty over the flat terrain. However, they met with resistance from several Native American peoples, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Angered that the railroad was being built through their lands, Native Americans raided the railroad camps and destroyed the tracks and equipment. Those actions often led to violent skirmishes with the railroad workers.

Meanwhile, Crocker was in charge of hiring for the Central Pacific. He had difficulty finding men willing to do the strenuous work, and in 1865 he began hiring Chinese laborers. Within a few years most of his workforce was made up of Chinese, to whom he paid lower wages than white workers. The track-laying advancement was slow as the workers battled the snow and cold of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. In addition, they faced the danger of using nitroglycerin and other explosives to blast tunnels through the granite; some workers were killed in the explosions. Once past the mountains, the Central Pacific workers picked up speed. They had crossed Nevada by 1868.

By early 1869 the two railroads came close to meeting up with each other. In April officials designated Promontory Summit in northern Utah as the connection spot. On May 10 the two railroads met, with Stanford and Durant driving in the last ceremonial gold-plated spikes to join the tracks. Telegraph messages were sent out to all parts of the country announcing the feat. In total, the Central Pacific laid about 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) of track, while the Union Pacific finished some 1,100 miles (1,775 kilometers). The completed transcontinental railroad was variously called the Pacific Railroad or the Overland Route.

Effects of the Railroad
The transcontinental railroad reduced the travel time between the East and West Coasts from as long as six months to under two weeks. It not only allowed more ease of movement for people but also for freight. As goods were distributed more quickly, demand increased and the U.S. economy expanded. However, the transcontinental railroad helped to bring about the end of the traditional way of life for many Native Americans. The railroad divided Indian lands and brought settlers, who encroached on the lands even further. It also carried hunters, who decimated the immense herds of bison, on which Native Americans relied for food and clothing. The unrest caused fighting between the Native Americans and the U.S. military. Within a few decades of the completion of the railroad, most Native American camps were destroyed and the survivors moved to reservations.

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Introduction The United States began building a transcontinental railroad in 1863 to connect the East Coast with the West Coast. Work began from both sides of the country, meeting at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. During those six years workers laid some 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) of track from Nebraska to California.

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Native American Land Transfer 1775-1894

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Kids learn about the California Gold Rush from the Old West. Thousands of people move to the west to search for gold and strike it rich.

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What pioneer children did with their time...

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What pioneer children did with their time...

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Pioneer Children counted Wagon Wheel revolutions on the Oregon Trail

Margaret Rodriguez on March 15 2020

Learn how the Pioneers tracked the miles while traveling across the plains. The kids counted how many time the wagon wheel went around. Visit our website at https://oregontrailcenter.org/ to learn more.

Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare has gained popularity as the safest way to watch and share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

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Pioneer Children counted Wagon Wheel revol... - SafeShare

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Margaret Rodriguez on March 15 2020 Learn how the Pioneers tracked the miles while traveling across the plains. The kids counted how many time the wagon wheel went around. Visit our website at https://oregontrailcenter.org/ to learn more.

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Mexican American War Video Discovery Kids

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The Story of the Alamo by Readworks

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In its day, the Pony Express was like the Twitter or Facebook of the mid-1800s: a means of communication that could move information across the North American continent faster than ever before, though it was powered by horses.

Almost no records survived, though, so the history of the Pony Express is littered with impostors, inaccuracies, and plain bunkum. In West Like Lightning, author Jim DeFelice separates the facts from the fiction.

When National Geographic caught up with him at his home in Warwick, New York, DeFelice explained how the Pony Express came to embody rugged American virtues as much as rodeos or westerns; how Buffalo Bill Cody was its greatest promoter, though he never actually rode for the company; and why, if things had turned out differently, we would be using Pony Express cards, not American Express.

I was amazed to discover that the Pony Express existed for just 18 months and made less than 400 runs. Yet the legend has lived on. Why do you think that is?

I was kind of blown away when I first found that out myself! There are many factors, but the most important reason is because there's so much embodied in the story of the Pony Express that's part of the American spirit: man verses nature, rugged individual exploits. And you also have these famous personalities intersecting with it, from Buffalo Bill Cody to Mark Twain.

It was also happening at a really important time in American history, right on the cusp of the Civil War. It's the tail end of the Gold Rush and there are all of these cool inventions, like the telegraph and railroads. Above all, it was the riders' endurance and resilience that made the Pony Express live on, and still resonate today.

You follow one particularly momentous bit of news westward. Set the scene for us and tease out the parallels with today's Internet.

The book is set a day or two after Abraham Lincoln's election and the Pony Express is bringing news of what happened in the election to the West, not only to Sacramento, San Francisco, and the rest of California, but also to communities along the way. Just four years before it had taken months for the news to get there, but the Pony Express company set up knowing that this was a huge, momentous event. They added extra relay stations and made a lot of use of the telegraph and were able to deliver the message in a matter of days.

Everybody back East knew that this was a huge election that very possibly was going to lead to war, and it was the kind of information that had to get out and be spread. The newspapers of the day had a symbiotic relationship with the Pony Express. They would get specific dispatches, almost what we would call a Facebook post today, and take that information, plop it on their front page and say, "Just Fresh in From the Pony Express..." The messages had to be light and small, so in another way they were like Twitter. For the election, they were so excited they wrote the news on the outside of the envelopes, so everyone would know right away what had happened.

Much of the history of the Pony Express was lost with its records. As a result there were many "liars of the purple sage," the most notorious being Buffalo Bill Cody. He never actually rode with the Express, yet he more than anyone made it famous. Unpack that paradox.

Bill Cody is by far the most important rider of the Pony Express, but he never actually did ride for them. [laughs] A lot of ink has been spilled on both sides of the argument, but it's clear from the evidence that he was just too young to have ridden in the Pony Express. On the other hand, what he did afterwards with his Wild West Shows catapulted the Pony Express into the public imagination. The Pony Express was almost always included as either an opening act or a finale.

The Wild West Show was like the Super Bowl coming to your town and it went not only all over America, but also to Europe, most notably, London. The Pony Express vignette had about as much to do with reality as motorcycles would have had to do with the Pony Express then. But it raised public awareness.

What sort of men actually did ride the Pony Express? Was there a particular type? And what sort of equipment did they have?

As a general rule, they were young men, usually late teens on up to early 20s. They were lightweight even for the time; sinewy and of course really good riders. To ride 100 miles, potentially four times a week, in all kinds of weather, day and night, you have to be a top rider with a lot of endurance. Some riders lasted a couple of rides and would leave.

There were quite strict rules for the riders. Two of the most important were that they were not allowed to drink alcohol, and that they were forbidden from using curse words. But there's all sorts of tales about a lot of bad words and drinking heavily. [laughs]

The Pony Express was established by a man called William H. Russell. What sort of a man was he? And why did he create it?

Russell is a fascinating character. He's a 19 th-century visionary showman entrepreneur, who goes to the dark side toward the end of his career. His vision was to create an empire transporting goods, people, and information everywhere west of the Missouri River to California. They had elements of that empire in place even before they started the Pony Express. They had a freight business where they delivered all sorts of goods, mostly for the U.S. Army, which was their biggest customer. They had a stagecoach business, a bank, and an insurance company. It sounds like an improbable idea, but a company had done that same thing barely a few decades before, starting in upstate New York, and it's still with us today. It's called the American Express. If the Pony Express had succeeded, we wouldn't be leaving home without the Pony Express today instead of American Express. [laughs]

The hardest part of the trail was through the Sierra Nevada. Give us a picture of the challenges the riders faced there and elsewhere.

The hardest part of the Sierra Nevada would have been in winter. There would be snow drifts and the tracks are relatively narrow. You could fit a horse, sometimes two horses, but if there was a wagon in front of you, you had to wait until you got to a spot where you could get around it. In some places you're up very high, with sheer cliffs below you, like the area where the Donner Party had succumbed a few years earlier.

The desert was also very dangerous. If you knew where the path was, you were fine. In most places it was relatively well marked. But west of Salt Lake, in the desert, if you went off course a bit you could suddenly find yourself in a lot of trouble. There's a story of at least one rider, who knew the trail very well, but was trying to take a short cut one night and ended up in quicksand and only survived by luck.

In the far West, relations with Native Americans were complex and sometimes violent, but some riders spanned both worlds. Tell us about Nick Wilson, "The White Indian."

Nick Wilson is an interesting character. One caveat is that he's so colorful, and there are so many different tales attached to him, that to be definitive is very difficult! Uncle Nick, as he was called in later life, was from a Mormon family, who as a young boy then went to live with a Shoshone Indian family in the Utah area. He then ends up as a teenager coming back home where he meets someone who is recruiting for the Pony Express, and he gets a job. Obviously he'd be a good rider if he could ride with the Pony Express. He also worked as a stagecoach driver and a trapper. He was also said to have had a good way with breaking horses, like a horse whisperer.

Relations between whites and Native Americans broke down completely with the Pyramid Lake War. Describe its origins and what effects it had on the Pony Express.

There's some contention about what actually happened, but the Pyramid Lake War, or Paiute War as it is also known, was up to that point the biggest conflict between Indian tribes and white settlers. It almost certainly started when some whites raped, or wanted to rape, some Indian girls. Naturally, their families took exception and the end result was that a number of whites were killed and several Pony Express stations were burned down. As a result, the service was stopped because it was too dangerous to proceed.

Remarkably, the people of eastern California, who were served by the Pony Express, raised money to rebuild some of the stations and supplied volunteers to help. The work force went from West to East, rebuilding the stations, and the service got back up and running shortly thereafter. Interestingly, that happened while there was a census being taken. Because of that, riders who were part of the work force to rebuild the stations are recorded at certain locations where the census was taking place. That enabled me to see how they are being listed in the census and get a picture of their ages and work conditions.

Why did the Pony Express end? And is it today anything more than a colorful footnote in the history of the American West?

The Pony Express lives on because it's that story of the American spirit, of individuals against nature, of endurance, and speed. It continues to resonate because for the most part it's a very positive image. It's a Western with only good guys, as long as you ignore the Indian War. And because of that, people can relate to it.

But the Pony Express was always intended as a short-term venture to raise public awareness-like a huge PR stunt-to get a big mail contract. When it came to the mail contract, sadly, then just as today, when you rely on Congress, you may find that at the end of the day that they're not going to come through for you. That's what happened with the Pony Express. The mail contract they were counting on came much too late to help them, and when it did come, it was far too small.

But it is financial stuff that sinks Russell. He is so desperate for money that he goes to the War Department and tries to get an advance on some other contracts they had. He doesn't succeed, but ends up with bonds that are supposed to be in trust. They don't belong to the government; they belong to the Indian tribes. But Russell uses them as collateral to get cash advances. Unfortunately, the whole scheme quickly collapsed. He was arrested, hauled before Congress and the judge, but for various reasons the whole matter gets dropped because then, as now, Congress doesn't like to air its dirty laundry in public. Not only did that ignobly end the Pony Express, it also ended Russell's career as an entrepreneur.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com.

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The Pony Express Lasted Only 18 Months. Why Does the Legend Live On?

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In its day, the Pony Express was like the Twitter or Facebook of the mid-1800s: a means of communication that could move information across the North American continent faster than ever before, though it was powered by horses. Almost no records survived, though, so the history of the Pony Express is littered with impostors, inaccuracies, and plain bunkum.

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American Indians Background on Tribes from DK Findout!

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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In his 1907 autobiography, cowboy Nat Love recounts stories from his life on the frontier so cliché, they read like scenes from a John Wayne film. He describes Dodge City, Kansas, a town smattered with the romanticized institutions of the frontier: "a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else." He moved massive herds of cattle from one grazing area to another, drank with Billy the Kid and participated in shootouts with Native peoples defending their land on the trails. And when not, as he put it, "engaged in fighting Indians," he amused himself with activities like "dare-devil riding, shooting, roping and such sports."

Though Love's tales from the frontier seem typical for a 19th-century cowboy, they come from a source rarely associated with the Wild West. Love was African-American, born into slavery near Nashville, Tennessee.

Few images embody the spirit of the American West as well as the trailblazing, sharpshooting, horseback-riding cowboy of American lore. And though African-American cowboys don't play a part in the popular narrative, historians estimate that one in four cowboys were black.

The cowboy lifestyle came into its own in Texas, which had been cattle country since it was colonized by Spain in the 1500s. But cattle farming did not become the bountiful economic and cultural phenomenon recognized today until the late 1800s, when millions of cattle grazed in Texas.

White Americans seeking cheap land-and sometimes evading debt in the United States-began moving to the Spanish (and, later, Mexican) territory of Texas during the first half of the 19th century. Though the Mexican government opposed slavery, Americans brought slaves with them as they settled the frontier and established cotton farms and cattle ranches. By 1825, slaves accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population. By 1860, fifteen years after it became part of the Union, that number had risen to over 30 percent-that year's census reported 182,566 slaves living in Texas. As an increasingly significant new slave state, Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861. Though the Civil War hardly reached Texas soil, many white Texans took up arms to fight alongside their brethren in the East.

While Texas ranchers fought in the war, they depended on their slaves to maintain their land and cattle herds. In doing so, the slaves developed the skills of cattle tending (breaking horses, pulling calves out of mud and releasing longhorns caught in the brush, to name a few) that would render them invaluable to the Texas cattle industry in the post-war era.

But with a combination of a lack of effective containment- barbed wire was not yet invented-and too few cowhands, the cattle population ran wild. Ranchers returning from the war discovered that their herds were lost or out of control. They tried to round up the cattle and rebuild their herds with slave labor, but eventually the Emancipation Proclamation left them without the free workers on which they were so dependent. Desperate for help rounding up maverick cattle, ranchers were compelled to hire now-free, skilled African-Americans as paid cowhands.

"Right after the Civil War, being a cowboy was one of the few jobs open to men of color who wanted to not serve as elevator operators or delivery boys or other similar occupations," says William Loren Katz, a scholar of African-American history and the author of 40 books on the topic, including The Black West.

Freed blacks skilled in herding cattle found themselves in even greater demand when ranchers began selling their livestock in northern states, where beef was nearly ten times more valuable than it was in cattle-inundated Texas. The lack of significant railroads in the state meant that enormous herds of cattle needed to be physically moved to shipping points in Kansas, Colorado and Missouri. Rounding up herds on horseback, cowboys traversed unforgiving trails fraught with harsh environmental conditions and attacks from Native Americans defending their lands.

African-American cowboys faced discrimination in the towns they passed through-they were barred from eating at certain restaurants or staying in certain hotels, for example-but within their crews, they found respect and a level of equality unknown to other African-Americans of the era.

Love recalled the camaraderie of cowboys with admiration. "A braver, truer set of men never lived than these wild sons of the plains whose home was in the saddle and their couch, mother earth, with the sky for a covering," he wrote. "They were always ready to share their blanket and their last ration with a less fortunate fellow companion and always assisted each other in the many trying situations that were continually coming up in a cowboy's life."

One of the few representations of black cowboys in mainstream entertainment is the fictional Josh Deets in Texas novelist Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. A 1989 television miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel starred actor Danny Glover as Deets, an ex-slave turned cowboy who serves as a scout on a Texas-to-Montana cattle drive. Deets was inspired by real-life Bose Ikard, an African-American cowboy who worked on the Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving cattle drive in the late-19th century.

"I roped, threw, tied, bridled, saddled and mounted my mustang in exactly nine minutes from the crack of the gun."

The real-life Goodnight's fondness for Ikard is clear in the epitaph he penned for the cowboy: "Served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches. Splendid behavior."

"The West was a vast open space and a dangerous place to be," says Katz. "Cowboys had to depend on one another. They couldn't stop in the middle of some crisis like a stampede or an attack by rustlers and sort out who's black and who's white. Black people operated "on a level of equality with the white cowboys," he says.

The cattle drives ended by the turn of the century. Railroads became a more prominent mode of transportation in the West, barbed wire was invented, and Native Americans were relegated to reservations, all of which decreased the need for cowboys on ranches. This left many cowboys, particularly African-Americans who could not easily purchase land, in a time of rough transition.

Love fell victim to the changing cattle industry and left his life on the wild frontier to become a Pullman porter for the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. "To us wild cowboys of the range, used to the wild and unrestricted life of the boundless plains, the new order of things did not appeal," he recalled. "Many of us became disgusted and quit the wild life for the pursuits of our more civilized brother."

Though opportunities to become a working cowboy were on the decline, the public's fascination with the cowboy lifestyle prevailed, making way for the popularity of Wild West shows and rodeos.

Bill Pickett, born in 1870 in Texas to former slaves, became one of the most famous early rodeo stars. He dropped out of school to become a ranch hand and gained an international reputation for his unique method of catching stray cows. Modeled after his observations of how ranch dogs caught wandering cattle, Pickett controlled a steer by biting the cow's lip, subduing him. He performed his trick, called bulldogging or steer wrestling, for audiences around the world with the Miller Brothers' 101 Wild Ranch Show.

"He drew applause and admiration from young and old, cowboy to city slicker," remarks Katz.

In 1972, 40 years after his death, Pickett became the first black honoree in the National Rodeo Hall of fame, and rodeo athletes still compete in a version of his event today. And he was just the beginning of a long tradition of African-American rodeo cowboys.

Love, too, participated in early rodeos. In 1876, he earned the nickname "Deadwood Dick" after entering a roping competition near Deadwood, South Dakota following a cattle delivery. Six of the contestants, including Love, were "colored cowboys."

"I roped, threw, tied, bridled, saddled and mounted my mustang in exactly nine minutes from the crack of the gun," he recalled. "My record has never been beaten." No horse ever threw him as hard as that mustang, he wrote, "but I never stopped sticking my spurs in him and using my quirt on his flanks until I proved his master."

Seventy-six-year-old Cleo Hearn has been a professional cowboy since 1959. In 1970, he became the first African-American cowboy to win a calf-roping event at a major rodeo. He was also the first African-American to attend college on a rodeo scholarship. He's played a cowboy in commercials for Ford, Pepsi-Cola and Levi's, and was the first African-American to portray the iconic Marlboro Man. But being a black cowboy wasn't always easy-he recalls being barred from entering a rodeo in his hometown of Seminole, Oklahoma, when he was 16 years old because of his race.

"They used to not let black cowboys rope in front of the crowd," says Roger Hardaway, a professor of history at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. "They had to rope after everybody went home or the next morning."

But Hearn did not let the discrimination stop him from doing what he loved. Even when he was drafted into John F. Kennedy's Presidential Honor Guard, he continued to rope and performed at a rodeo in New Jersey. After graduating with a degree in business from Langston University, Hearn was recruited to work at the Ford Motor Company in Dallas, where he continued to compete in rodeos in his free time.

In 1971, Hearn began producing rodeos for African-American cowboys. Today, his Cowboys of Color Rodeo recruits cowboys and cowgirls from diverse racial backgrounds. The touring rodeo features over 200 athletes who compete at several different rodeos throughout the year, including the well-known Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo.

Roping as a Way of Life: The Proud History of Texas' Black Cowboys

Although Hearn aims to train young cowboys and cowgirls to enter the professional rodeo industry, his rodeo's goals are two-fold. "The theme of Cowboys of Color is let us educate you while we entertain you," he explains. "Let us tell you the wonderful things blacks, Hispanics and Indians did for the settling of the West that history books have left out."

Though the forces of modernization eventually pushed Love from the life he loved, he reflected on his time as a cowboy with endearment. He wrote that he would "ever cherish a fond and loving feeling for the old days on the range its exciting adventures, good horses, good and bad men, long venturesome rides, Indian fights and last but foremost the friends I have made and friends I have gained. I gloried in the danger, and the wild and free life of the plains, the new country I was continually traversing, and the many new scenes and incidents continually arising in the life of a rough rider."

African-American cowboys may still be underrepresented in popular accounts of the West, but the work of scholars such as Katz and Hardaway and cowboys like Hearn keep the memories and undeniable contributions of the early African-American cowboys alive.

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The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys

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One in four cowboys was black. So why aren't they more present in popular culture?

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Westward Expansion BrainPop

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Nineteenth-century Americans settled the western United States, but displaced Native Americans in the homesteading process. Tim and Moby look at the concept of Manifest Destiny.

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Lewis & Clark Route Map

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For more than 300 years, waves of new Americans arrived by sea. In that time, the nation's seacoasts, rivers, lakes, and canals became avenues of exploration, communication, and commerce. These waterways linked people and communities with the rest of the country.

Stories of life and work on the water-from fishers to passengers to seafarers-unfolded at the same time, through immense challenges and achievements, and occasional disasters. Ships today connect Americans to a complex web of international trade. In the age of flight, it's worth remembering that the nation still thrives on the water.

The exhibition is organized into the following main sections:

1450-1800
Over nearly four centuries, Atlantic-based trade shaped modern world history and life in America.
1800-1850
Shipbuilders, mariners, and maritime merchants helped the new nation defend itself and grow.
1840-1920
The bounty of the waters has sustained people of North America for centuries.
1820-1940
The country's vast system of rivers and lakes has helped people settle the land and create communities.
1870-1969
Ocean liners were ships of transport for immigrants and machines of leisure, status, and national prestige.
1917-1945
Merchant seamen and ships played a vital role in winning both world wars of the 20th century.
1950-Present
Maritime activity is as important as ever, and it affects the lives of people everywhere.
Lesson and activity plans teach kids about maritime history in America.

View our collection of maritime objects and artifacts.

This exhibition was made possible through the support of many generous donors.

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For more than 300 years, waves of new Americans arrived by sea. In that time, the nation's seacoasts, rivers, lakes, and canals became avenues of exploration, communication, and commerce. These waterways linked people and communities with the rest of the country.

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Living Like a Pioneer

Margaret Rodriguez on March 15 2020

Learn more about history and science with Studies Weekly! StudiesWeekly.com

Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare has gained popularity as the safest way to watch and share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

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Margaret Rodriguez on March 15 2020 Learn more about history and science with Studies Weekly! StudiesWeekly.com Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare has gained popularity as the safest way to watch and share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

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Old Texas and Frontier Heros 26m

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Westward Expansion for Students: Old Texas and the Trail Drivers

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Recounts the stories of legendary heroes, including Sam Houston, Stephen Austin, Davy Crockett, and James Bowie. Traces the evolution of cattle drives and explores the myth and reality of the American cowboy.

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About 80 young men rode for the Pony Express. When he hired the riders, Alexander Majors gave each of them a Bible and required them to sign a pledge promising not to swear, drink alcohol, or fight with other employees.

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Andrew Jackson and Native American Removal Act by Discovery Education 5m

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica | View Edit History

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cowboy, in the western United States, a horseman skilled at handling cattle, an indispensable labourer in the cattle industry of the trans-Mississippi west, and a romantic figure in American folklore. Pioneers from the United States encountered the vaquero (Spanish, literally, “cowboy”; English

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Transcontinental Railroad ‑ Construction, Competition & Impact

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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Animates and highlights some of the recorded events in the life of Sacagawea, and focuses on her role in the Corps of Discovery (commonly referred to as the Lewis and Clark Expedition). The program emphasizes Sacagawea's skill set that greatly aided the expedition, and provides details on some pivotal moments, such as her reuniting with her brother Cameahwait, saving important documents and medicine, and witnessing the Pacific Ocean.

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From California Gold Book: First Nugget, Its Discovery and Discoverers, by W.W. Allen and R.B. Avery, 1893

Early in 1848 James W. Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, picked up some glittering flakes from the American River at the site of a sawmill he was building near Coloma, California. He gathered up the pieces and sped to the office of the mill's owner, John Sutter. Urging Sutter to secrecy, Marshall showed him his findings. Sutter tested the flakes and confirmed Marshall's suspicion: gold had been found in California. Within months, Marshall's discovery was made public, bringing a flood of fortune seekers to the region. The California Gold Rush would transform California and fuel the westward push of the United States.

In the years that followed Marshall's discovery, California's population exploded. The promise of wealth and a new life lured people from around the world to California. American gold seekers traveled west from the Eastern states, migrating in such vast numbers that their passage stimulated advancements in transcontinental travel. People of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities came to California, selling their property and getting loans to afford the journey. Along the way, they risked danger and disease for a chance at gaining riches.

In 1849 alone, $10 million worth of gold was pulled from the ground, and over the next few years this number grew. In view of the huge amounts of money that could be made, and the rising lawlessness in mining settlements, politicians pushed to speed up the process of statehood. In 1850 California became the 31st state. The Gold Rush peaked in 1852, when $81 million worth of gold was extracted in California. Afterward, the number slowly declined. By the end of the 1850s the Gold Rush was over, but its legacy would continue to influence California-and the country-in the years to come.

Word of Marshall's find was carried by overland travelers and by ships that stopped at the California coast. The earliest gold seekers came from Oregon, Mexico, and South America, especially Chile and Peru. Then news spread across the Pacific, drawing hopeful miners from the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), China, and Australia. Later they were joined by Europeans, particularly from Germany, Ireland, and France.

Back in the United States, the first accounts of California gold in East Coast newspapers were skeptical. It was not until President James K. Polk confirmed the early discoveries in late 1848 that the Gold Rush ignited in the United States. The tens of thousands who rushed to California in 1849 came to be called the Forty-niners. Altogether, they numbered about 80,000. By 1853 the number of fortune seekers would rise to 250,000.

Women on the Goldfields
About 95 percent of the Forty-niners were men, typically white men from the Eastern states. Married men usually left their families at home in the East, with the promise of returning with riches. In 1850 women made up less than 10 percent of California's population.

Despite their small numbers, women participated in the Gold Rush in many ways. Because many of the men who came west were accustomed to having their wives clean and cook for them, they paid women to perform these tasks. Some women made a living by running boardinghouses, where they housed and cooked for miners. With so few women in California, those who did live there found their skills and company to be in high demand.

Gold Rush women were divided socially and labeled as either "bad" or "good." They were held to a different moral standard than men. Women who had nontraditional lifestyles or jobs were thought of as immoral and labeled "bad." One of the most famous "bad" women of the Gold Rush was Miss Ah Toy, a Chinese prostitute and businesswoman who lived in San Francisco.

American Indians
The influx of gold seekers had serious consequences for the many Native American peoples of California. The people whose ancestors had lived on the land for thousands of years shared little of the prosperity brought to California by the Gold Rush. Many American Indians were involved in the Gold Rush from its earliest days but were mistreated by white settlers and forced to work for them.

California's Indians were devastated by the many diseases that were brought by migrants during the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s. Smallpox, measles, and cholera spread quickly because the Indians had no immunity to them. Before the Gold Rush, Indians made up most of California's population, numbering about 150,000. By 1870, however, only 30,000 Indians remained. It has been estimated that disease was responsible for 60 percent of the American Indian population losses during the mid-1800s. Those who survived still felt the impact of the Gold Rush. The settlements that arose and the environmental impact of gold mining made traditional Native American lifestyles very difficult or impossible to maintain.

Whether coming from within the United States or from abroad, those who made the journey to California faced many risks. There were a number of routes to take to California. Chinese miners sailed across the Pacific Ocean, spending up to two months making the trip in small boats. The three main routes used by American gold seekers were the Oregon-California Trail, the Cape Horn route, and the Panama shortcut.

None of the routes to California was free from challenges or expense. Trips could cost $400 or more (a substantial sum at the time) and lasted several months. Each of the routes attracted a different demographic of gold seekers. Those traveling with families usually made the journey overland because it was too expensive or too cramped to do so on a ship. People traveling overland could expect six months of hardship and many unpredictable accidents along the way. Thousands of people died before reaching their destination. The sea voyage around Cape Horn could last up to eight months. Although the route through Panama offered the shortest travel time (as little as a month), it required braving the many threats of the Panama jungle.

The Oregon-California Trail
The Oregon-California Trail stretched more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from Missouri to Oregon and California. By wagon, the journey could take upwards of six months to complete. The starting point of the trail was Independence, Missouri. Heavy wagons pulled by oxen, mules, or horses usually set off in wagon trains. These were groups of wagons that made the long, hard journey together. Banding together as a team offered advantages in terms of safety along the trail. A large wagon train could intimidate bandits or hostile American Indians who might consider attacking a lone wagon.

People in wagon trains also relied on each other for support when problems arose. The varied terrain across the country was a constant challenge for travelers. In wagon trains people could share supplies or lend a hand pushing the wagon or carrying loads across tough passes. In good conditions, a wagon could cover 12 to 20 miles (19 to 32 kilometers) in a day. However, if the roads were muddy or there were rivers to cross, they were lucky to cover 5 miles (8 kilometers). Other difficulties of the journey included accidents and illness. Among the common trail diseases were cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and scurvy.

Despite the many dangers along the way, by the end of 1849 more than 6,000 wagons carrying 40,000 people had traveled to California across the Oregon-California Trail.

The Cape Horn Route
The longest route to California was the sea voyage around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. Gold seekers first boarded a ship on the East Coast of the United States, in New York City or Boston, Massachusetts. The ship traveled south around Cape Horn and then north to California, where passengers would get off at San Francisco. The voyage took about six months. The Cape Horn route covered 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 kilometers). During this lengthy trip, passengers faced illness, hunger, and poor nutrition. Ships traveling the Cape Horn route were often very crowded, which caused sickness to spread quickly.

The Panama Shortcut
A third route involved both sea and overland travel. The first step of the journey was to board a ship departing from the East Coast of the United States and sailing to the Atlantic coast of Panama, in Central America. Then travelers crossed the Isthmus of Panama, the strip of land that connects North America and South America. They canoed up the Chagres River, in central Panama. Then they rode a mule through the jungle to reach Panama City on the Pacific coast. There they boarded a ship to San Francisco.

By taking the Panama shortcut, gold seekers could cut about 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and a few months off the Cape Horn route. Unfortunately, the advantages of the Panama shortcut came at a very steep price. Diseases such as yellow fever and malaria were a huge threat to travelers through Panama.

Transcontinental Travel
The huge demand for transportation to California gave rise to important developments in transcontinental travel. The influx of travelers through Panama inspired the creation of the Panama Railroad. Stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, it was the world's first transcontinental railroad. Construction began in 1850 and was completed five years later. In 1863, a few years after the end of the Gold Rush, workers began building the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. It was completed in 1869. When the Panama Canal was built in the early 20th century, it closely followed the route of the Panama Railroad. Though only about 51 miles (82 kilometers) long, the canal had a huge impact on world trade.

The drive to get to California as quickly as possible was spurred by the fact that people were claiming mining territories on a first-come-first-served basis. Before it achieved statehood, California had no laws or government. In 1848 there was also no federal law to regulate mining. People came to California thinking that gold was free for the taking.

Rules about rights to property and how miners interacted were governed by a miners' code. This code was a system for managing property rights through the staking of claims. Miners did not own the property they claimed. However, the first person to get to a site, discover gold, and mine it was entitled to the gold he found. A person could maintain his claim to a site only if he notified other miners that it belonged to him. A miner's claim to a site lasted only as long as the miner continued to work it. If a person left his mining site, he lost his claim to it. The site was considered free to be claimed by a new miner. Taking over a marked site that was not being worked was called "claim jumping."

Miners usually claimed a site and left within a short period of time. The California Gold Rush was truly a race to find the site that would yield the most gold. Since no one knew exactly where the gold was or how much could be found, a miner would typically abandon an unproductive site quickly and then claim another.

Mining Towns
As mining camps began to form, each district established a set of rules. Without a government or other authority to enforce these rules, however, property claims were not very secure. The miners' code worked only if people were willing to follow it. Many property rights were maintained only with the threat of violence, and disputes over claims were frequently settled with weapons rather than diplomacy. California's mining districts were thought of as lawless, violent, and immoral places.

Many men came to California with the attitude that the laws that governed their behavior at home did not apply to them out west. Miners could spend 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week doing hard physical labor at their claim sites. They spent their Sundays off in mining towns, playing as hard as they worked. Alcohol was readily available in mining towns and so was opium. Without authorities to keep people in check, drunken bar brawls and petty fights could end in murder. Mining towns also presented men with plenty of opportunities to gamble.

Men in mining towns outnumbered women nine to one. The lack of women meant that mining town society was rougher and rowdier than in the East. Mining towns were, however, far more ethnically diverse than most towns in the United States during the mid-1800s. Chinese, Mexican, African American, and American Indian people interacted with each other and with white Americans to a degree that was unmatched in the East. Prejudice and racism were common, however, and some of the violence that occurred in mining towns was racially driven.

Racial Discrimination and Violence
By early 1849 an estimated 6,000 Mexicans had come to California seeking gold. California had been part of Mexico until the United States took control at the end of the Mexican-American War just a year earlier. Nevertheless, Mexican miners were treated as outsiders and often suffered discrimination. The tension between Mexican and American miners was heightened by the fact that many Mexican miners were more experienced and successful than the Americans. In 1850 California passed a Foreign Miners Tax, which forced non-American miners to pay $20 a month to the state. This tax targeted Mexican miners in an effort to drive them out of California.

In 1852 the government imposed a new Foreign Miners Tax, this time aimed at removing the Chinese. Many people had left China because of the poor economic conditions that followed the first Opium War (1839-42). The number of Chinese immigrants grew so much during the 1850s that they made up a fifth of the population in California's mining towns.

Some African American Forty-niners arrived in California as free people looking to make their own fortunes. Others were slaves brought by their owners. Free African American miners did not have full rights as American citizens and were often mistreated by white American miners. In 1850 California joined the Union as a free state, and many slaves gained their freedom. Nevertheless, slavery continued in some areas.

In 1848 American Indians made up about half of the gold diggers in California. They were expected to perform the hardest labor for the lowest price. In 1850 the California legislature passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. The act created a list of American Indian crimes and punishments and denied Indians the right to testify in court. Under the terms of the act, American Indians could be seized and forced to do involuntary labor. In effect, the act allowed white people to enslave Indians. An amendment to the act in 1860 allowed whites to take orphaned Indian children as slaves and force them to serve until they reached 35 to 40 years of age.

The Indians suffered the worst of the racial violence that occurred during the Gold Rush. When the Forty-niners flooded California, they overran Indian lands. Most white Americans felt that the Indians stood in the way of progress. They believed in Manifest Destiny-the idea that it was their divine right and duty to spread Protestant and democratic ideals across the continent. Indian communities were attacked by groups of miners who wanted to stake claims on their land. In some instances, entire villages were murdered. Many Indians were forced to march to reservations, where conditions were dismal and many people starved.

Tragically, the abuse of American Indians was widely accepted and even encouraged. In certain California districts, miners were paid for Indians' body parts and scalps. The popular attitude among whites was that Indian lives were worthless. Gold Rush miners did not just deny American Indians their right to land, they denied their right to life. The belief in white superiority and Manifest Destiny was supported by the U.S. government's brutal treatment of American Indians across the country.

Immigrants and American settlers were lured west by newspaper advertisements claiming that California was a land of "inexhaustible gold mines" where anybody could strike it rich. These ads often made light of the challenges that miners would face when they arrived. Few of the people who came to California were prepared for the grueling realities of gold mining. Some men spent hours standing knee-deep in frigid creeks as they hopefully panned for gold. Others faced extreme risks digging and blasting for gold. Most of the Forty-niners had no mining experience or skills and had to learn through trial and error. Even with very hard work, few miners actually achieved the success they dreamed of.

During the 1850s the amount of available gold began to decline. New mining techniques evolved to reach the gold that remained further below the surface. As mining technology advanced, the character of gold mining in California changed. Mining by individuals who worked their own claims was replaced by large-scale industrial mining. Rather than seeking their own fortunes, miners were hired to work in mines owned by corporations. The new mining techniques employed by these companies had a devastating impact on California's environment and landscape.

Early Techniques
Panning was the simplest way of collecting gold. It involved scooping soil or gravel from the bottom of a stream into a shallow pan. The miner would then swirl the water in the pan so that the heavier pieces of gold would sink to the bottom while the lighter material-dirt and gravel-would come to the surface. The miner tilted the pan to allow the dirt and gravel to wash away, leaving only the gold behind. Panning was the slowest and least effective method of collecting gold. Miners could typically get through 50 pans in a day and collect only a small amount of gold.

The rocker, or cradle, was a machine developed to speed up this process. A rocker was a long wooden box mounted on two curved pieces of wood similar to the curved runners of a rocking chair or baby's cradle. The box was set at a downward angle. The miner shoveled dirt into the box and then poured water over it. The material was sifted by rocking the box from side to side. As the material was washed along, barriers called riffles captured pieces of gold, which were then collected by hand.

Later devices used the same concept as the rocker but improved on it. The long tom was bigger than the rocker and therefore could handle more material. It also contained a sheet of metal with holes in it to aid the sifting process. The long tom evolved into the sluice box, an even longer version of the same device. A sluice box was placed in a running stream, making it more efficient than devices in which water had to be supplied by hand.

Hydraulic Mining
Hydraulic mining involved using jets of water to break apart hard rock to reach the gold ore inside. The water was piped through a hose and blasted out through a nozzle. The powerful stream was shot at a hillside, breaking the hard rock into pieces. The water and blasted rock flowed through sluice boxes to collect the gold. The unwanted material was washed or dumped into nearby streams and rivers.

Hydraulic mining permanently changed the landscape of northern California. The debris left behind from blasting the Sierra Nevada mountains clogged rivers and streams flowing toward San Francisco Bay. Along with blocking navigation on these rivers, the debris caused them to frequently overflow their banks. Flooding spread silt and sand over farmland in the Sacramento Valley, which was disastrous for many farmers. Mining debris also killed wildlife in the rivers and upset the natural balance of ecosystems.

Hydraulic mining was very profitable, and for some time the environmental damage it caused was overlooked because of the gold that it yielded. In time, however, the mounting issues it created led to an outcry against its use. Hydraulic mining was eventually ended as it became too problematic and too expensive.

The Gold Rush transformed the people, culture, economy, and landscape of California in profound ways. California was rapidly converted from a rural, inaccessible region to a populous territory filled with booming towns and cities. The Gold Rush spurred advancements in transportation, which made transcontinental travel in the United States easier than ever before. The influx of immigrants to California made it a place of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.

In the years that followed the Gold Rush, the period and the changes it brought about were somewhat romanticized by white Americans. This chapter of U.S. history was often told as the story of single, white, American men risking everything to go west and claim their fortunes. The American miners were portrayed as daring, hardworking, and admirable symbols of Manifest Destiny. However, white American miners represented only one version of the Gold Rush story.

Alternative Perspectives
For many white Americans, the Gold Rush represented the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. The West was "civilized" according to the common ideals of their society at the time: the American Indians were almost entirely removed, the environment was dominated and its resources plundered, and the American way of life was spread from coast to coast.

To understand the Gold Rush more fully, however, it is necessary to acknowledge alternative perspectives on the era. The discovery of gold in California fueled the region's growth and economy. However, destructive mining techniques permanently damaged the environment. The Gold Rush drew enormous numbers of immigrants from around the world, making California one of the most culturally diverse places in the United States. However, competition between ethnic groups gave rise to oppression and violence.

Government-sanctioned discrimination against Mexican and Chinese miners and the exploitation of American Indians are clear evidence that the period was not a golden age for everyone involved. Discriminatory laws against immigrant miners and the taxes that were demanded of them illustrate how minority groups were denied social, political, and economic equality. For California's Indians in particular, the Gold Rush was a tragedy. In the stampede to stake claims, Indians were systematically murdered and driven off their lands. Diseases wreaked havoc on their populations, and laws allowed white Americans to enslave them. The romanticized picture of the era has to be balanced with the viewpoints of the Indians and other groups who suffered because of the miners' lust for gold.

The Slavery Question and the Civil War
The Gold Rush, and the growth it brought, thrust California into the heated national debate over slavery. At the start of the 1850s, the African American population in California numbered fewer than 1,000. Nevertheless, California's position regarding slavery would weigh heavily in the tense relationship between the Northern and Southern states.

On September 9, 1850, California joined the United States as the 31st state. The process of granting statehood to California had been accelerated in light of the population explosion brought on by the Gold Rush. Another factor was the lawlessness that was growing there in the absence of an official state government. Although there was much momentum to bring California into the Union, there was also much controversy over its status in regard to slavery. At the time, the country had equal numbers of free states, where slavery was illegal, and slave states, where slavery was allowed. California petitioned Congress to enter the Union as a free state, which would have upset the balance of free and slave states. The dispute threatened to break up the Union.

After months of debate, Congress finally passed the Compromise of 1850. The South agreed to allow California to enter the Union as a free state and accepted the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. In return, the North allowed New Mexico and Utah to organize as territories with no mention of slavery and gave the South a stronger fugitive slave law.

The Compromise of 1850 postponed but could not prevent war between the North and the South. After the American Civil War began in 1861, California's gold proved to be an important resource for the Union. In that time of crisis, gold shipments from the Sierra Nevada funded the U.S. government and its war effort. This contribution to the Union victory was yet another legacy of the Gold Rush.

Benoit, Peter. The California Gold Rush. New York, NY: Children's Press, 2013.Collins, Terry. Stake a Claim!: Nickolas Flux and the California Gold Rush. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2014.Hall, Brianna. Strike It Rich! The Story of the California Gold Rush. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2015.Maxwell-Long, Thomas. Daily Life During the California Gold Rush. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2014.Micklos, John, Jr. A Primary Source History of the Gold Rush. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2016.Onsgard, Bethany. Life During the California Gold Rush. Minneapolis, MN: Core Library, 2015.Raum, Elizabeth. The California Gold Rush: An Interactive History Adventure. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2016.

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Early in 1848 James W. Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, picked up some glittering flakes from the American River at the site of a sawmill he was building near Coloma,...

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Texas Revolution by Discovery Education 5m

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The Cherokee Trail of Tears by Discovery Ed. 5m

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"As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some subterranean river, dripping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?"-Walt Whitman
Open Range, directed by Kevin Costner, opens in theaters today. The movie sheds light on the life of the cowboy, after what critics consider an 11-year drought in the genre of Western movies.

In the movie, the characters of Boss (Robert Duvall), Charley (Kevin Costner), Mose (Abraham Benrubi), and Button (Diego Luna) are "free-grazers" during a critical time in the history of the cowboy. In the backdrop of the movie, the Mexican cowboy, Button, represents the rarely recognized truth of how the West was really won.

Hispanic Roots

One out of every three cowboys in the late 1800s was the Mexican vaquero, says Kendall Nelson, a photographer from Idaho whose recent book, Gathering Remnants: A Tribute to the Working Cowboy, showcases the few remaining cowboys of the West. Nelson is currently working on a documentary of the same title, capping an eight-year documentation of the last cowboys.

The story of Nelson's photos and Costner's Open Range really begins in the Southwest, two decades before the pilgrims landed in 1620 on Plymouth Rock, when adventurous criollos (Spanish-born Americans) and mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indian settlers) pushed past the Rio Grande River to take advantage of land grants in the kingdom of New Mexico, which included most of the western states.

They were called caballeros, says Donald Gilbert Y Chavez, a historian of the cowboy's Spanish origins.

"One of the highest stations you could have in life was to be a caballero," said Chavez, a resident of New Mexico whose lineage can be traced to the Don Juan de Oñate colony, the caballero who was among the first cowboys in the U.S.

"Even the poor Mexican vaqueros were very proud and there were few things they couldn't do from a saddle."

Caballero is literally translated as "gentleman." The root of the word comes from caballo -Spanish for "horse." For every caballero there were perhaps dozens of independents-the true "drivers" of cattle: vaqueros.

"All of the skills, traditions, and ways of working with cattle are very much rooted in the Mexican vaquero," Nelson told National Geographic News. "If you are a cowboy in the U.S. today, you have developed what you know from the vaquero."

Vaqueros were proverbial cowboys-rough, hard-working mestizos who were hired by the criollo caballeros to drive cattle between New Mexico and Mexico City, and later between Texas and Mexico City. The title, though denoting a separate social class, is similar to caballero, and is a mark of pride."Vaquero is a transliteration of the words 'cow' and 'man.' Vaca means 'cow,'" said Chavez. "Interestingly enough, in Spanish, we call ourselves cow men; in English, it was demoted to cow boys."

Texas Longhorn for the Taking

In 1821 Anglo settlers arrived in Texas and became the first English-speaking Mexican citizens in the territory. Led by Stephen F. Austin, they arrived in San Felipe de Austin, Texas, to take advantage of the vast expanse of cattle, free for the taking.

"There were millions of longhorn cattle in the brush country of Texas that were loose, strayed, and had multiplied," says Nelson. All the new settlers had to do was round up the cattle.

It was something the vaqueros had been doing for 223 years, since 1598, when Don Juan de Oñate, one of the four richest men in New Spain (present-day Mexico) sent an expedition across the Rio Grande River into New Mexico.

Oñate spent over a million dollars funding the expedition, and brought some 7,000 animals to the present-day United States. It eventually paid off; the first gold to come from the West was not from the Gold Rush, but rather from its wool-bearing sheep and then its long-horned livestock.

Modernization and Civilization: A Cowboy's Culprits

By the conclusion of the Civil War the cattle-driving industry was at its apogee. But the top was about to spiral downwards with the invention of barbed wire in 1873, inciting a rapid rise in large private landholdings.

In Open Range, the battle between private landowners and "free-grazers"-one-third of which were vaqueros, one-fifth African American-serves as the central conflict of the plot.

"[Cowboys] don't understand why there's a traffic light. They don't like the idea of being told when to stop and go-literally," said Nelson. When barbed wire was posted across the plains, it was an eyesore to many cowboys, and the closing off of what they believed to be in the public domain. Conflicts inevitably ensued, which gave rise to the Hollywood portrayal of the gun-slinging, lawless cowboy.

"The first thing historians will tell you is that Hollywood has completely sensationalized the Western cowboy," said Nelson. "But the movies have also portrayed the cowboys in positive ways. The hardworking, rough-riding, individualistic characteristics...those are all basically true."

Disappearing?

It's been four centuries since the vaqueros first roamed the plains of Texas and New Mexico. Many say that the culture is dead, or on the verge of dying-along with the cattle-driver culture in general. Nelson disagrees.

"In doing this film [her documentary] one of the questions that I always ask the cowboys is: 'Is it disappearing?'" Nelson said. "They all say that there will always be cowboys as long as there are cattle, because they all claim that the most efficient way to work cattle is from horseback."

And the vaqueros?

"Compare the cowboy culture to a car," said Chavez. "If the vaqueros invented the car, the styles change a little bit, but you still have the basic chassis, four wheels, and a motor. I think it will stay very much the same."

Though there may be optimism about the preservation of the culture, there is pessimism about outside influences.

"When I first started photographing the cowboys, nobody had a television in the bunkhouse." Nelson said. "But now I actually walk into the bunkhouse, and there's a TV in there...I have to admit, I've gone in, and they're watching John Wayne movies.

"But they're very proud of who they are. They are very much interested in keeping their culture alive and viable."

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Vaqueros: The First Cowboys of the Open Range

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"As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some subterranean river, dripping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?"-Walt Whitman Open Range, directed by Kevin Costner, opens in theaters today.

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Westward Expansion Detailed Timeline

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Time Warp Trio: Lewis & Clark & Sacagawea 22m

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Time Warp Trio: Lewis & Clark & Sacagawea 22m

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Time Warp Trio: Lewis and Clark...and Jodi, Freddi, and Samantha

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The girls' wish for a camping trip transports them back to join Lewis and Clark on the first U.S. overland expedition to the Pacific Coast. Even with Sacagawea's help, will Jodie, Samantha, and Freddi survive life in the snow-covered, bear-populated great outdoors?

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Moving West for Gold

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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Online Resource links for all topics in Westward Expansion

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Lewis and clark met a bunch of different types of afirican

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Transcontinental Railroad- Discovery Ed. 17m

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Transcontinental Railroad- Discovery Ed. 17m

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Bodie, a town that was highly populated during the Gold Rush, is now a small ghost town. After the town ran out of gold, the population quickly decreased, eventually leading Bodie to become a ghost town. It is now a state historical park.

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it starts in Missouri and ends in oregon city

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American Indians from the Plains
Discovery Education 22m

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Students will discover the different ways of life for each tribe and the many ways the buffalo was used in day to day life. Students will also learn about a battle that erupted over the differing views of land ownership between Chief Sitting Bull and General Custer know as the Battle of Little Big Horn.

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[Cattle, horses, and people at the fair with stables in the background]Popular Graphic Arts

The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there. Chinese railroad workers further added to the diversity of the region's population.

Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were almost wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market.

The loss of the bison and growth of white settlement drastically affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, despite occasional victories, seemed doomed to defeat by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white settlers.

The cowboy became the symbol for the West of the late 19th century, often depicted in popular culture as a glamorous or heroic figure. The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however. The first cowboys were Spanish vaqueros, who had introduced cattle to Mexico centuries earlier. Black cowboys also rode the range. Furthermore, the life of the cowboy was far from glamorous, involving long, hard hours of labor, poor living conditions, and economic hardship.

The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our views of the West in the late 19th century. Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a "meeting point between civilization and savagery" in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance. Think about these differing views of the history of the West as you examine the documents in this collection.

To find additional documents in Loc.gov on topics related to the West, use such keywords as West, ranching, Native Americans, and pioneers, or search using the names of states or cities in the West.

Documents

The Architecture of the West

Denver, Colorado, 1898

Pueblo de Taos, New Mexico, 1891(?)

Old Mission Church, Los Angeles, California, between 1880 and 1899

Salt Lake City, Utah, 1896

The Old Carreta, Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico, 1890

A Mexican Home (ranchita), between 1880 and 1897

As Some Things Appear on the Plains and Among the Rockies in Mid-Summer

Beef and Beans

The Extermination of the American Bison

I Will Go West

American Indian and Oklahoma Territories Maps

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The American West, 1865-1900 | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there.

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Painting: American Progress

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lewis and clark met a lot of different types of african amaricans on there way from origan.

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Gold Rush Miners Video 5m

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People had to choose carefully what to bring with them on the trip. Those who started out bringing furniture, soon left it on the road to lighten the load for the animals. Room was needed for food.