Transcript
DONE
May 10, 1869
Promontory Summit, Utah Territory May 10, 1869
Western Union operator at Promontory Almost ready. Hats off; prayer is being offered.
Two railroads had raced toward each other for six years. One started in Sacramento, one in Omaha.
The ceremony ran two days late. Unpaid workers chained a vice president's car to a siding until he wired for their pay.
Western Union operator at Promontory The signal will be three dots for the commencement of blows.
Wires ran from spike and maul, so the country could hear each blow.
Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific, lifted a silver-plated maul. Hold it there. The crews who built this railroad are all around him.
By most accounts, he missed.
Western Union operator at Promontory DONE.
The operator sent it anyway.
Then everyone posed for the Union Pacific's photographer, Andrew J. Russell. Look for the men who laid the Central Pacific's track.
Russell had photographed the Chinese crew laying the last rail minutes earlier. Almost nobody reprinted that picture.
Right after the ceremony, the golden spike came out. An iron one went in.
Washington gave the West away. The land was free.
So why did the people who farmed it end up owing everybody, and what did they do about it?
The Gilded Age
1865–1898
The word didn't stay at Promontory. Follow the wire.
The news reached every big city at once. New York, Harper's Weekly reported, took it calmly. Then it rang Trinity Church's chimes.
In 1865, the country had 35,000 miles of railroad. By 1890, nearly 167,000. By 1898, the largest economy on earth.
None of it came from nowhere. From the market revolution, canals and railroads. From the Mexican War, California and its gold. In 1862, with the South's seats empty, Congress passed three laws. The Homestead Act. The Pacific Railway Act. A land-grant college act.
On November 18, 1883, the railroads put the country on four time zones. Congress made it law in 1918.
In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner named the age with a novel: The Gilded Age. Gilded means a thin coat of gold over something cheaper.
Period 6 asks who gets the new wealth, and what government owes everyone else. It starts out West, where Washington gave the land away.
Paid by the Mile
1862–1873
Congress didn't build the railroads. It paid for them, by the mile.
The Pacific Railway Act paid two ways. Loans: sixteen thousand dollars a mile on flat ground, forty-eight thousand in the mountains. And land.
Every other square mile along the track: a checkerboard, doubled in 1864. In all, railroads got more land than California.
Both companies were paid by the mile. So in Utah, their crews passed each other and kept grading. Until Congress named a meeting place.
Short of workers for the Sierra Nevada, the Central Pacific hired Chinese immigrants. By 1867, nine in ten were Chinese.
Leland Stanford Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.
Leland Stanford As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.
Same man, three years apart. In 1862, a governor addressing the legislature. In 1865, a railroad president writing to Washington, who needed those workers.
In the winter of 1866 and 1867, forty-four storms hit the Sierra. Avalanches swept away camps of Chinese workers.
The Central Pacific kept no record of its workers' deaths. No letter, diary or memoir by a Chinese railroad worker is known to survive.
Chinese workers earned about thirty dollars a month and bought their own food. White workers got meals with their pay.
Edwin B. Crocker No danger of strikes among them.
In June 1867, some three thousand Chinese workers put down their tools on the same day. They wanted forty dollars a month and shorter shifts. The company cut off their food. After eight days, they returned.
The Union Pacific's crews: Irish immigrants, veterans of both armies, freedmen, Mormons. Their track crossed Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho country. Those nations fought it. That's the next film.
By 1893, four more lines crossed the West, some far ahead of any customers.
In September 1873, the bank selling Northern Pacific bonds closed its doors. The bubble had burst.
A City Under the City
1859–1880s
Western mining followed one pattern. First, one person with a pan in a cold creek.
In 1859, prospectors struck the Comstock Lode in Nevada: silver and gold, under a mountain.
Mark Twain Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.
Mark Twain Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth.
At the bottom it could be 130 degrees. Tons of ice went down every day. Miners earned four dollars a shift, and formed a union.
Mark Twain Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines.
So the mines belonged to companies, and the companies belonged to shareholders in San Francisco.
Twain tried prospecting too. By his own telling, he and two partners staked a rich claim, then missed the ten-day deadline to work it.
Mark Twain I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.
Twain's ten-day rule was local. In 1872, Congress made one for everybody: keep working the claim, and it stays yours.
Strikes made towns overnight, and some emptied just as fast. In 1874, gold turned up in the Black Hills, on land the United States had promised the Lakota. That's the next film.
The Cattle Kingdom
1866–1887
After the war, wild longhorns, descended from Spanish cattle, filled Texas. A steer was worth about four dollars there. Up north, as much as forty.
Joseph McCoy built stockyards beside the railroad at Abilene, Kansas, in 1867. About 35,000 cattle came the first year.
Over twenty years, somewhere between five and ten million cattle walked north. The hands who drove them earned about thirty dollars a month.
The crews were young and mixed. Historians estimate one cowboy in four was Black. The job came from Mexican vaqueros, and so did its words: lariat, rodeo, chaps, bronco, stampede.
Bose Ikard was born enslaved in Mississippi. In 1866 he went up the trail with Charles Goodnight.
Charles Goodnight Served with me four years on 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.
Cow towns boomed where the rails met the trails. In 1883 the Dodge City Times promised a market “so long as there is an unobstructed trail.”
In 1874 an Illinois farmer, Joseph Glidden, patented a better barbed wire. That year, 10,000 pounds sold. By 1880, more than 80 million. Farms and ranches fenced the range.
Too many cattle had eaten the grass down. Then came drought, and a terrible winter. Some ranchers lost half their herds. Some lost nine in ten.
When their owner wrote to ask about the herd, a young cowhand named Charles Russell painted the answer.
The open range lasted about twenty years. Then came fences, winter hay, and investors from back East and Britain. The cattle rode to Chicago by rail.
160 Acres
1862–1890
Free land. Plus about eighteen dollars.
The Homestead Act let a settler claim 160 acres by living there and farming it for five years. Immigrants qualified. So did women who headed households.
Railroads had land to sell, and they advertised it across Europe. A farm meant freight, and freight paid the railroad.
The Burlington named its Nebraska stops alphabetically: Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, and on to Lowell. The Northern Pacific named a Dakota town Bismarck, hoping for German money. The chancellor sent a thank-you note.
The land was not empty. Pawnee, Otoe, Kaw, Osage, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other nations lived there. As the claims filled in, the government moved them to reservations.
For settlers, the catch was rain. West of about the 100th meridian, most years brought under 20 inches.
Charles Wilber, a Nebraska promoter, had a theory.
Charles Dana Wilber To be more concise. Rain follows the plow.
John Wesley Powell Experience teaches that it is not wise to depend upon rainfall where the amount is less than 20 inches annually.
Congress ignored Powell. A run of wet years made Wilber look right.
Settlers built houses from bricks of sod, and burned dried cattle dung for fuel.
In 1874, grasshoppers came in clouds that blocked the sun. They ate the crops, the wool, the laundry, even the wooden tool handles.
The farmers who stayed leaned on machines. A horse-drawn binder cut the wheat and tied the sheaves in one pass.
On a well-equipped farm in 1830, 100 bushels of wheat took 250 to 300 hours of work. By 1890, it took 40 to 50.
American wheat harvests doubled, and Russia, India and Argentina grew more too. Prices dropped a third by 1889, and half by 1894.
After the Panic of 1873, Northern Pacific bondholders swapped their bonds for Dakota land and farmed it like a factory. A family with 160 acres was selling against them.
What's a Bushel Worth?
1889
The wheat is in. Next comes the price.
Central Kansas, August 1889, and a good harvest. A typical family here earned title to its 160 acres years ago.
Since then, they've mortgaged the farm and bought a twine binder on credit.
The price comes in by wire from Chicago, and Chicago watches Liverpool. Nobody in Kansas sets it.
Add it up. The harvest was good. The money was not.
By December, farmers near Hiawatha, Kansas, were burning corn in their stoves. Corn sold at twenty cents a bushel. Coal cost a little more.
Drought came back after 1887, and thousands gave up. Some wagons heading east carried an old slogan.
But the farmers who stayed had been organizing for twenty years.
I Feed You All!
1867–1890
Farmers had a problem. They started with a supper.
In 1867, Oliver Kelley, a Minnesota farmer clerking at the Department of Agriculture, founded the Grange. A club for lonely farm families: suppers, lectures, picnics.
It also had secret rituals, and officers named for Roman goddesses: Ceres, Pomona and Flora. Women held those offices. Kelley's niece, Caroline Hall, had insisted that women be full members.
After the Panic of 1873, farmers poured in: about 800,000 members by 1875.
Around 1875, this print put the farmer in the center: I Feed You All. The lawyer pleads for all. The railroad carries for all.
The doctor: I Physic You All. The broker: I Fleece You All. A landowner's view: no hired hands, no tenants, no farm women.
Granges bought supplies together, and ran their own stores and grain elevators. These were cooperatives, and many failed.
Then they went into politics. Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin passed Granger laws, capping what railroads and grain elevators could charge.
Elevator owners sued. The Supreme Court sided with Illinois.
Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large.
In the 1880s the Farmers' Alliances pushed further, sending lecturers out from Texas. They built bigger cooperatives, too.
By 1890 they claimed about a million members.
White Southern Alliances kept Black farmers out, so Black farmers built their own. In the South of the 1890s, organizing Black farmers was dangerous.
Rev. J. L. Moore We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man's interests and the laboring white man's interests are one and the same.
In December 1890, at Ocala, Florida, the Alliance listed its demands. Loans on stored crops at two percent. More money in circulation. A graduated income tax. Senators elected by the people.
Congress had given the railroads millions of acres. The Alliance wanted the extra back, for actual settlers only. Next, they would try a party of their own.
In the Picture
1890 → 2014
By 1890, the people farming the West knew exactly who took a cut of every bushel. They had learned to organize.
One more picture. In 2014, the photographer Corky Lee brought Chinese Americans to Promontory Summit to take it again. Some were descendants of railroad workers. He called it photographic justice.
Absolute and Undisturbed Topic 6.3
The railroad maps showed the plains as empty land, waiting for farms. It wasn't empty.