This chapter opens with the story of the Exodusters, black southerners driven from the South by poverty and violence and drawn to the West by the opportunities of cheap land. It shows that while the history and geography of the South and the West differ in most ways, important similarities link both the region from which these Exodusters departed and that at which they arrived. Both sections had underdeveloped public sectors, depended on outside human and capital resources, and viewed themselves as colonial economies. Both provided the nation's industrial centers with vital raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. And both resorted to segregation and violence to maintain racial caste systems.

The Southern Burden

After the Civil War, many southerners saw industrialization as one way to restore prosperity. The southern economy, however, remained wedded to cotton. The shortage of credit and cash for wages gave rise to tenancy and sharecropping. That system left most poor black and white farmers, like many of their counterparts around the world, hopelessly in debt. Even the rapid growth of industries such as railroads, textiles, and tobacco could not overcome the poverty of the region. The problems of the South did not occur primarily, as many of its regional advocates claimed, because it was a "colony" of the industrial North. Instead, the rapid natural increase in population and low wages in southern agriculture made it difficult to attract skilled labor and enough outside capital to help the South develop a more diversified economy.

Life in the New South

Southerners worked not only to rebuild the region's economy after the Civil War, but also to construct a new social system to replace slavery. Once the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and thus ceased its efforts to support the newly freed men and women, southerners gradually began to create a "Jim Crow" system of segregation. Newly erected legal codes forbade blacks and whites from mingling in almost any public place. Blacks and whites remained socially separated, and blacks could not compete for most jobs. The Supreme Court gave constitutional authority to these segregation laws in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In this case, the Court refused to view separate facilities as discriminatory unless they were also unequal, a decision that in practice placed an almost impossible burden of proof on opponents of "Jim Crow."

Southern social life separated along gender as well as racial lines. Most social activities reflected the rural character of the South. Men hunted, gambled, and courted danger through activities such as cockfighting and boxing. Women's social lives centered around more domestic activities such as quilting. Most rural folk looked forward to trips to town—especially during court week, which offered a variety of entertainments and opportunities to do business. More than towns, however, churches stood at the center of southern life; religious services offered spiritual uplift as well as a welcome chance to socialize. In this realm too, though, discrimination prospered, as blacks and whites worshiped at separate churches and services remained generally divided along gender lines.

Western Frontiers

Racial perspectives also affected the changing settlement of lands beyond the Mississippi. That came about in part because Indians and newly arrived white settlers held markedly different attitudes toward the land. Europeans saw nature as a resource to exploit systematically, and they attempted to do so by connecting the region to a system of world markets. Indians exploited the land in their own ways, but their populations remained less dense and their religious beliefs encouraged a view of the land as a complex web of animals, plants, and other natural elements, all with souls of their own.

The intense development of the West's resources thus threatened the Indian way of life. Beyond Indian resistance, two barriers limited white settlement: the difficulty of transportation over vast distances, and the scarcity of water. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad by 1869 made settlement and development more attractive in the West, but regional promoters such as William Gilpin underestimated the limits imposed by the limited supply of water. John Wesley Powell had a more realistic view of the water problem, but his ideas imposed too many restrictions on those who saw the West as a new garden landscape.

War for the West

To remove the Indians, whites adopted a policy of concentration that forced the natives onto reservations, an approach that led to decades of recurring violence. After the 1862 uprising of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota, sporadic guerrilla wars erupted between whites and Indians. One climactic battle occurred when Sioux and Cheyenne forces trapped and soundly defeated Colonel George Custer's cavalry along the Little Big Horn River in 1876.Such victories, though, could not stem the flood of white settlers, the spread of disease, or the slaughter of the buffalo, all of which undermined Indian cultures. Under the Dawes Act, reformers tried to draw Indians out of communal tribal cultures and turn them into independent farmers. That well-intended reform struck as hard a blow to Indian life as did the constant armed conflicts with the U.S. army and white settlers.

Similarly, Hispanics in the Southwest saw their way of life challenged by the spread of Anglos to their region. Sometimes through violence but more often by legal and political means, Anglos deprived Hispanics of their land and political influence. A new wave of immigration from Mexico, more seasonal in character and more concentrated in barrios in new cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, also changed the character of the Hispanic Southwest in response to the influences of market capitalism that began to transform the region.

Boom and Bust in the West

As in other areas of the world, silver and gold strikes brought the earliest waves of fortune-hunters into the West, particularly in California, Nevada, and parts of the Rockies. The railroads came next, linking the region to urban markets in the East and Europe. The builders of the railroads often resorted to ruthless and corrupt means, particularly in their exploitation of Chinese and Irish laborers, as they raced to connect West to East. The railroad companies' control of transportation gave them enormous influence over the region's economic and political life.

Cattle ranchers soon moved huge herds of steer into the vacated grasslands and drove them along the cattle trails to the new railheads. As with the railroads, large corporations came to dominate the cattle industry. Violence sometimes erupted between sheep and cattle interests. In the end, though, nature proved even more violent, as blizzard and drought from 1886 to 1887 helped to end the boom in the cattle business.

The Final Frontier

The growing demand for food and the lure of cheap land under the Homestead Act also brought farmers into the once lightly-settled high plains. Conflict often erupted as ranchers and farmers each tried to impose their ways on the land. However, the farmers, like the ranchers, eventually ran up against harsh realities. The best lands were expensive, and farmers required costly equipment in order to overcome the conditions of the western environment. Droughts, grasshopper plagues, prairie fires, blizzards, and rural isolation were among the difficulties facing farm families in the western plains. Many left defeated, but among those who stayed, the church offered some solace and social life. Eventually, the frustrations of western farmers boiled over into an agrarian revolt (which will be described in Chapter 21).

The conflicts and dangers of the region also became part of a romanticized image of the "Wild West" that entrepreneurs such as "Buffalo Bill" Cody promoted to more settled populations in the East and in Europe. This commodification of the dangers settlers faced and of the plight of Indian peoples both revealed and furthered the West's growing connection with world markets. Through both their excitement and their cruelty, Cody's shows revealed the tremendous changes occurring in the United States to much of the rest of the world.