MAKING THE WHITE MAN’S WEST Whiteness and the Creation of the American West Jason E. Pierce Making the White Man’s West Making the White Man’s West Whiteness and the Creation of the American West Jason E. Pierce UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO Boulder © 2016 by University Press of Colorado Published by University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of The Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University. ∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). ISBN: 978-1-60732-395-2 (cloth) ISBN: 978-1-60732-396-9 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pierce, Jason (Jason Eric) Making the white man's West : whiteness and the creation of the American West / by Jason E. Pierce. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-60732-395-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-1-60732-396-9 (ebook) 1. West (U.S.)—Race relations—History. 2. Whites—West (U.S.)—History. 3. Whites—Race identity—West (U.S.)—History. 4. British Americans—West (U.S.)—History. 5. Racism—West (U.S.)—History. 6. Cultural pluralism—West (U.S.)—History. 7. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.) 8. West (U.S.)—History—19th century. 9. West (U.S.)—History—20th century. I. Title. F596.2.P54 2016 305.800978—dc23 2015005246 25 24 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photograph: Charles Fletcher Lummis dancing with a member of the Del Valle family. Courtesy, Braun Research Library Collection, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA. For my loving and patient Mondie, my ebullient boys, and my teachers for whom this is a small payment on a large debt. CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xix A Note on Terminology xxiii Introduction: Whiteness and the Making of the American West 3 Part I: From Dumping Ground to Refuge: Imagining the White Man’s West, 1803–1924 1 “For Its Incorporation in Our Union”: The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion 29 2 A Climate of Failure or One “Unrivaled, Perhaps, in the World”: Fear and Health in the West 51 3 “The Ablest and Most Valuable Fly Rapidly Westward”: Climate, Racial Vigor, and the Advancement of the West, 1860–1900 65 vii viii CONTENTS 4 Indians Not Immigrants: Charles Fletcher Lummis, Frank Bird Linderman, and the Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America 95 Part II: Creating and Defending the White Man’s West 5 The Politics of Whiteness and Western Expansion, 1848–80 123 6 “Our Climate and Soil Is Completely Adapted to Their Customs”: Whiteness, Railroad Promotion, and the Settlement of the Great Plains 151 7 Unwelcome Saints: Whiteness, Mormons, and the Limits of Success 179 8 Enforcing the White Man’s West through Violence in Texas, California, and Beyond 209 Conclusion: The Limits and Limitations of Whiteness 247 Bibliography 263 Index 281 PREFACE The trans-Mississippi West seemed destined to foster and shelter the white race. Concretions of myth and reality built up a society in which whites occu- pied the pinnacle, exercising power and control over non-white peoples. Myth and reality became inseparable, each supporting the other. The resulting society appeared as a refuge where Anglo-Americans could exist apart from a changing nation, a nation increasingly inhabited by non-Anglo and poten- tially incompatible immigrants. The overwhelmingly white population in certain areas of the West (the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains) reified the ideology of a white-dominated West, while the mythology obscured the presence of Indians, Hispanics, and Asians in California and the Southwest. The resulting society appeared, therefore, as a homogeneous population of Anglo-American whites, and this became the white man’s West. The purpose of this work, then, is to look at how the idea of the West as a white racial refuge and the settlement of the region by Anglo-Americans interacted to cre- ate a region dominated by white Americans. Together, the continuing settle- ment of supposedly desirable Anglo-Americans and intellectual justifications ix x PREFACE underlying and supporting this settlement formed something of a feedback loop. The myth supported the reality, and reality supported the myth. Beginning in the 1840s, white Americans increasingly saw opportunity in the West, finding a sense of mission in expansion to the ocean, a belief encapsulated in the term Manifest Destiny (and the bane of students in introductory courses in US history). Accomplishing this conquest fell to the rugged, individualistic white settler, the homespun hero of a new American nation. In The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, for example, celebrated white frontiersmen, “the restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged frontier farmers [who] by dint of grim tenacity overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred years before Saxon and Angle had overcome and displaced Cymric and Gaelic Celts.” Driven by instinct and desire, these intrepid settlers fought to claim a new continent. “They warred and settled,” he continued, “from the high hill-valleys of the French Broad and the Upper Cumberland to the half-tropical basin of the Rio Grande, and to where the Golden Gate lets through the long-heaving waters of the Pacific.”1 Roosevelt argued that these men, while inheritors of a Germanic-English ancestry, stood as representatives of a new people. “It is well,” he warned, “always to remem- ber that at the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as name; the word American already had more than a merely geographic signification.”2 A continent tamed, the native population defeated, and American institutions rooted in new soil— all marked the legacy of the white man’s West. Roosevelt saw in this process a clear demonstration of the continuing march of Anglo civilization. Just as the Saxons and Angles had conquered the ancient Celts, their descendants wrested control of North America from inferior Indians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen. These lesser groups, in particular American Indians, played merely the foil to the heroic frontiersman. Indeed, Roosevelt’s use of racialized terms like blood signified his view that race played the key role in determining the suc- cess of these new “Americans,” a group he saw as having a very narrow racial and ethnic composition. Roosevelt’s ideas on race and American superiority were remarkable only in their conformity to the common view of the day: the West had been settled by tough, individualistic, freedom-loving Anglo- Americans. This mythology, and the society it helped create and justify, soon came to seem natural and self-evident. Had not these brave whites tamed and settled the Wild West after all? Preface xi While historians and novelists could celebrate a white man’s West, the real- ity proved more problematic. Non-whites had played important roles in the settlement of the region, roles that largely went unnoticed for decades. The West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included the largest popula- tions of Hispanics, American Indians, and Asians in the nation—hardly the racial monolith celebrated in the imagination. Yet there nevertheless existed kernels of truth in the idea of a white man’s West. The presence of those racial and ethnic groups had indeed been obscured and their positions in society marginalized. In various ways, religion, political values, economic motives, and violence helped carve out areas of the West where whites com- posed the vast majority of the population (as in the Dakotas) or presided over non-white groups through political control and intimidation, as in California. Through these mechanisms, whites came to control the West, fashioning it into something that approximated the white man’s West of the imagination. In the twentieth-first-century West, the legacy of a society dominated by whites remains powerful, an insistent echo that somehow refuses to die. At issue is the question of who controls the region. As the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick asked, “Who [is] a legitimate Westerner, and who [has] a right to share in the benefits of the region?”3 When white Americans con- quered the West, they instituted a process of control based around racial identity that forced the region’s many minority groups to cling to the periph- eries of power, society, and even space, as in the case of Indian reservations.4 Despite its long history of racial diversity, many promoters, developers, and dreamers touted the West as the ideal location for a society of Anglo- Saxon whites. Blessedly free of undesirable immigrants—those Eastern and Southern European hordes, descending upon the Eastern Seaboard in the thousands—the Anglo-American could find refuge and respect in the West. This dream of a white refuge never fully died. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Arizona’s new immigration bill serves as one recent example of the battle over control of the West. Senate Bill 1070, signed into law by Arizona governor Jan Brewer in April 2010, was seen as the strictest immigration law in the country.5 It mandated that immigrants carry documentation showing their status and allowed police officers to detain and arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. Governor Brewer and other supporters of the bill argued it would not be used to single out Hispanics.