Although many Americans revere the conquest of the American west as a series of romantic deeds, it is actually a tale of backbreaking toil and the subjugation of peoples and land. The west was our first legend, our first final frontier. Opinions are beginning to change though, as a new generation of historians brings to light new evidence. The new studies are saying that the west was not some rough-and-tumble free-for-all, but a land dominated by big money and big government. These historians struggle to be heard however; they are forced to do battle with AmericanÃÂs deep ideological attachments to the fantasies of the frontier. The idea of the self-sufficient individual is one of these treasured fantasies; unfortunately, what worked in the lush valleys of Virginia failed in the arid deserts of the West. Most homesteaders went broke as their fields dried up and they had to sell to large landowners.
Census maps of the American West
West Seattle
Native American statue, West LawnThese landowners amassed huge tracts of land, sometimes totaling 1,000,000 acres. By the 1890s, seven-eighths of all land west of the Mississippi was owned by non-farmers. These landowners organized their empires around water and turned the west into a model of upper-class, imperialistic power. Monopolies came to power in the mining and ranching areas too, as Eastern financers were the only peoples with the money for deep-mining and large scale cattle herding. Apart from shattering our visions of a romantic West, these new historians are revealing what an economic disaster this West was. The damage was vast: ground water was polluted or depleted, topsoil was lost to wind and over farming, and entire species were lost to hunting. The slaughter of the buffalos highlights this disaster. 60,000,000 animals were destroyed and replaced by cattle, disrupting the ecology and exhausting the land. The problem was greed; the west in the...