In historical narratives the story of Reconstruction in the South has overshadowed the  genocide taking place in the West at the same time. Historians today argue that the de-humanizing of the Indian nations in the West paved the way for the lynching and domestic terrorism in the East. The balance of Chapter Five of The Broken Heart of America,  follows the events in the West concurrent with Reconstruction.

President Abraham Lincoln’s base was the “free soil” wing of the Republican Party, which Walter Johnson describes as:

• antislavery
• white supremacist
• imperialist
• removalist

The white supremacy was born out by a desire to segregate, despite the “antislavery” plank in the platform. Lincoln, himself, had hoped to claim land in Panama or the Caribbean that could be reserved strictly for Blacks to inhabit apart from white society. Days before he died he wrote of the Black Army Veterans: “I believe it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves” (qtd in Johnson: James D, Richardson, The Messages and papers of the President, 1789-1897 (New York:Bureau of National Literature, 1902, 127.)

As for the “removalist” plank, that referred to removing Indians from their land. The essence of it, according to Johnson was “the idea that land in the West was there to be used as the standing reserve of white freedom, settler, liberal or radical. All of the elements of the party were imperialist, and all grounded their politics and their hopes on Indian land” (Johnson 161). This removal of Indians from their land was as natural as the air breathed in the nineteenth century. If there were any dissenting voices, they were faint.

The Homestead Act (May 1863) provided white settlers free access to 160 acres if they settled west of the Mississippi. 1.5 million settlers took advantage of the offer following the War, taking 300 million acres of the West. In August 1862, Dakotas swept down on what is today known as Minnesota against white homesteaders, killing as many as eight hundred in a thirty-seven day war. Two thousand of that tribe were rounded up by the US Army and 392 were tried for murder.

On the day after Christmas in 1862, a week before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln ordered  the simultaneous  execution by hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men, in an exemplary act of retribution that remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States ( as well as marked contrast from the emergent laws of war that governed the treatment of Confederate prisoners of war). (163)

Remembering the Largest Mass Execution in U.S. History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg5ymYY09l8

• September, 1863 – US army attacked Dakota and Lakota in the summer killing 400, mostly women and children (163).
• November, 1864 – Colorado volunteers under Colonel John Chivington massacred 200 Cheyenne and Arapahos at Sands Creek, Colorado territory, celebrating with a desecration and sexual mutilation of the dead (163).
• 1868- Treaty of Fort Laramie allowed the construction of the transcontinental railroad through territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Dakota and in turn granted 70 million acres of present-day South Dakota and Wyoming, including 32 million acres of “permanent reservation.”  This has become the legal grounds for their descendants to sue for this territory, which is considerably larger than the small tract on which they currently reside.
• 1867 – U.S. Grant, commanding general, declared the completion of the transcontinental railroad would “go far toward a permanent settlement of our Indian difficulties.”
• 1871 – A federal law is passed that the United States would make no further treaties with the Indians. The strategy was to herd them onto reservations or keep driving them west.
• 1874 – Grant’s successor, the Civil War hero W. T. Sherman moved the army headquarters to St. Louis, saying, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress [of the railroads].”

The railroad represented the colonization of the West and a linking with the nations bordering the Pacific, so the financial ambitions of the merchant class drove the completion of it at all costs. Johnson emphasizes how the armies of both the Union and Confederacy were redeployed to St. Louis to train  at Jefferson Barracks for the clearing of the West. “In these years the reunification of the United States was accomplished not through the pacification of the southern whites and the revolutionary elimination of white supremacy, but in continental conquest in the service of capitalist expansion” (166).

The Black soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries (“Buffalo Soldiers”) were also trained at Jefferson Barracks and made up ten percent of the army’s mounted units. Johnson objects to the romanticizing of these soldiers as “men so devoted to freedom that they were willing to suffer injustice in order to exemplify a better pathway to their white antagonists” (166). Rather, it was sadly ironic that the segregated and abused Black unit participated in the domination of another oppressed race to fulfill the white man’s dreams of exploiting the West for profit.

Carl Schurz,  German-born and formerly of St. Louis, was now Secretary of the Interior and took control of Indian removal and re-education through the infamous Indian boarding schools of the nineteenth century, such as Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The founder of Carlisle was William Henry Pratt, a retired lieutenant from the Tenth Cavalry. He was famous for the philosophy “kill the Indian, save the man.” Schurz was a big fan of the model, according to Pratt. Three-quarters of Native children were taught in Boarding Schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, one-third in off-reservation schools.

In the latter nineteenth century St. Louis was a commercial and transportation rival to Chicago, building on the growth of the railroad and commerce with the southwest into Mexico. In 1874 the completion of Eads Bridge across the Mississippi was the first East-West connection. The designer Eads developed an underwater caisson inside of which the bridge piers could be built up to the surface, but rapid decompression in the workers’ bloodstream caused 119 men to become severely ill and 14 died, as the bridge was completed at human cost. Subsequently the financier J. P. Morgan used suspect financial maneuvers to take control of the bridge.

The pursuit of land in the southwest for the railroads (Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad) provoked the Red River War of 1874, which drove the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho from their lands and onto small reservations.

In 1894 the massive Romanesque Union Station was completed, and St.Louis had the most railways converging through it in the United States– twenty-two. The financier Jay Gould controlled enough of the traffic across the Eads Bridge that he was able to  set rates from transportation of coal across the river.

Other industries that depended on the transportation and or provided industry to St. Louis:

• meat-packing (“Republic of Red Meat”)
• milling flour
• pressed cotton
• brewing beer
• cigar manufacture
• streetcar, carriage, railcar, locomotives
• stove-works
• shoes
• rifles, revolvers, ammunition
• horses, mules, saddles

The merchants and manufacturers of St. Louis were enthusiastic proponents of the 1898 Spanish-American War, because of the opportunity to extend their markets to the Philippines and Cuba and northern Mexico. Anheuser-Bush reported a 50% rise in global sales over 1899. “By 1900, the city’s power brokers had come to be known collectively as ‘the Big Cinch.’ The heirs of the old families and sons of the new ones lived within a few blocks of one another and the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway (and Vandeventer Place), and their names –Carr, Glasgow, Maffit, O’Fallon,Lucas—still adorn the street signs and city limits that define the space in the St.Louis metropolitan area” (177).

On May 8, 1900 3,325 streetcar workers struck to receive recognition of their union and the ten-hour workday. The battle for supremacy raged most of the summer with protest marches and the occasional brick-throwing. Eventually twenty of the striking marchers were arrested and a counter posse of 2500 deputies was raised. By September the strike was broken asserting the power of a ruling class. The streetcar workers were forced to apply for their old jobs. On this note St. Louis entered the twentieth century.