America 1870-1900 - THE FRONTIER - The Promised Land

Paragraph one - Calamity Jane is mentioned, a woman. Also the word flamboyance is used, although not in a specially gay context. TL describes the story of the frontier as “the story of plain people struggling for land.”

Jane Grout said, “The further [west] we go better I like it.” But it was not a land of milk and honey as described. In 1875 the army distributed 2 million rations in order to “prevent starvation.” Those damned welfare frontiersman. (FYI - Pa Ingalls was on the dole a bit. No shame, unless of course his granddaughter insisted that charity was for the weak. Oh wait, she did...)

The Indian Wars were dispatched with a fairly true hand. TL basically says, “We screwed them hard and we shouldn’t have. Now on with the rest of the story!” and proceeds to move onto railroad men and cattlemen. I am sure those fellas are going to get along great. I’ve seen OKLAHOMA. Sure, it’s farmers in the show, but same dynamic - a pissing contest over who has the biggest...bank account. The love of money being the root of all evil is well proven here. 

I just saw someone say this week - either John Oliver or Trevor Noah, the only two people I can bear to hear talk about the current state of the world - that once your net worth reaches a billion dollars, you should get a certificate that says you are the best at making money and everything else you earn has to go to charity. Seriously…

Mrs. James McClure is mentioned as the litany of ways in which women suffered on the frontier is rendered. Isolation was a huge way. Although in the same paragraph it mentions that she “had not seen a white woman in a year” which speaks to the idea of fear of the other. Mrs. McC and the unnamed non-white women with whom she was in contact feared each other because they didn’t know each other. Had they not been separated by language, power structure and physically looking “other” they could have been friends. 

But actually, is that true? Ms McC is encroaching on Ms Non-white Lady’s way of life. Maybe Ms NwL is right to fear her, but what is the option? Learn to accept one another and treat one another fairly I guess. Maybe the women would have found a way to do that. Sadly, the frontiersmen doubled down and went the other way. They mention April 22, 1889 in Oklahoma. “By that night, Guthrie and Oklahoma City were established, every last acre had been claimed and men sat with guns and guarded their land.” And we know who they were guarding it from. 

Wovoka, Paiute Chief, in 1891 advises to travel, “the white man’s road.” But that didn't go well. On page 86 there is a double spread of Nelson Miles on January 16, 1891 - 19 days after Wounded Knee, looking over the crime scene. Heartbreaking. It’s a big country, if the white settlers didn’t consider themselves superior to the indigenous people they couldn’t have slaughtered them that way.

Yes, there was "Indian on white crime", but only one side was getting their way of life destroyed as the other group tried to get rich off their loss.  Social equality leads to financial equity and until you treat the co-inhabitants as human beings you will never be able to come to consensus with them.  If two groups come together they can hash out their stuff. As evidenced by my in-laws mixed marriage. A French-Catholic boy and an Irish-Catholic girl - The scandal!

The rest of this section is just pictures with captions. A rail crew building the Northern Pacific Railroad is pictured from 1885. Pa Ingalls worked on the railroad. All the livelong day! Rabbi  Avram Belinski worked it too. There is one Chinese worker in the picture and so far no mention of the impact of Asian immigration on the railroads. According to the Guardian - “From 1863 and 1869, roughly 15,000 Chinese workers helped build the transcontinental railroad. ... During the 19th century, more than 2.5 million Chinese citizens left their country and were hired in 1864 after a labor shortage threatened the railroad's completion. But you wouldn't know it from TL.

On page 91 It appears that the railroad is trying to offload some less than prime Nebraska  real estate on some unsuspecting rubes. PRAIRIE FIRES talked about how the land in South Dakota was crap and people were basically tricked into it. Perhaps Nebraska was better. 

Ole Nielson writes about the death of Ole Medgaaren who died of cold on the prairie. He also mentions the cook for the funeral was “a Jew...who managed very well, in the American manner, of course.” I would cry anti-semitism, but they are just mentioning his background. And also, I have made many a Ole joke in my lifetime and it’s all I can do not to make one now, Moving on…

How interesting that the Swedes are described as "immigrants" but the Russians are "peasants” in the Dakota prairie, “which resembles their native steppes.” First off, now that they are in America are they not no longer peasants?? This was in the middle of the cold war - 1970 - Vietnam and the domino effect were in full swing. Dear God, what is going to happen when they get to the 60s? I hope I make it. 

According to TL,  Mrs A.M. Green of Greely Colorado is very tired of frontier life and has written a song about it. I could not find the song, but I bet it is in her memoir Sixteen Years on the Great American Desert or Trials and Triumphs of a Frontier Life. But I don't have the patience to go looking for it. Or set it to a tune.

Dakota farm women love quilting! They “take a rare break from their chores to get together in a neighbor’s house and exchange gossip at a quilting bee.” Not to brag, but I’ve been to my share of quilting bees I attended at the Yankee Peddler Festival every summer from 1969-1976! I have a quilt to work on and I am thinking of having a socially distant quilting bee for the little kids from church. Maybe I can get some hoops for them to roll too. Maybe that sounds like a lot of work and I’ll think about it later…

Back to the frontier. It was not easy on women and The Outlook knows this and tells us about it on January 6, 1894. "Out in the midst of level stretches of prairie even to cook and eat the very limited variety that the table affords is a task that makes heavy demands upon the weary woman with her family to care for, the garden-patch to cultivate, the cows to milk, and the plow-handles to hold in the intervals. Yet she accomplishes it all - and more."

According to TL, the frontiersmen made educating their children a priority. There is a picture of these kids playing "Ring-a-Rosie" in their schoolyard in the Rockies and they need a break because they have a super dull afternoon of ciphering ahead of them. 

The tips for stage riders are the same ones that Rich and I followed on our summer of love bus trip to San Francisco in the summer of 1988. Gosh, that was a time. The caption about the Overland stage at Calum, Montana informs us that the wagons went 10 miles between fresh teams. Every fourth of fifth stop “was a home station where passengers could get grub, whiskey and a bed.” No wonder the stages always got robbed! They were full of rich folk who could afford such luxury.

The City of Worcester was a private rail car that brought rich greenhorns out west, some of whom had never been on horses, to kill buffalo for fun. It is kind of a hoot that Worcester  (that's pronounced WOOST-ah) had such a fancy vibe back then. Not so much anymore. The quote from Scribner's Magazine, published in September of 1892  about rich white folk  hunting buffalo for sport sounds scolding now, considering what we know about the slaughter of the buffalo, but in the time that it was written it was probably just informative. 

There is a picture of Creede, Colorado which was a boom town that is theoretically (as of 1970) now a ghost town. But through the magic of google, I found that it is not! There are easily over 200 people who live there now!

The Sporting Ladies of Paradise Alley in Dawson - a Yukon gold rush town - are shown. Why these soiled Canadian doves are being shown in this book about the USA is a question. Perhaps American working girls were unavailable. Even with all that we know about sex workers now, they are treated like garbage, imagine that life circa 1900. Maybe they were the GTOs of their day and lived without regrets, but I imagine they didn’t live long. 

And next up, we go back to polite society and the exhilaration of the brand new invention - THE BICYCLE! 

All quotes and images are from TL unless otherwise noted.

DeVault, Jerry R., [Picture of Downtown Creede, Colorado.] 2005. 

Sayej, Nadja, "Forgotten by Society - How Chinese Migrants Built the Transcontinental Railroad." The Guardian. July 18, 2019.