The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

Upon the vexed question of civilian or military control the Commissioners were divided. They believed that both War and Interior departments were too busy to give proper attention to the wards, and recommended an independent department for the Indians. In October, 1868, they reversed this report and, under military influence, spoke strongly for the incorporation of the Indian Office in the War Department. "We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great roads," wrote General Sherman to his brother in September, 1868. "All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together.

The way across the continent was opened by these treaties of 1867 and 1868, and the Union Pacific hurried to take advantage of it. The other Pacific railways, Northern Pacific and Atlantic and Pacific, were so slow in using their charters that hope in their construction was nearly abandoned, but the chief enterprise neared completion before the inauguration of President Grant. The new territory of Wyoming, rather than the statue of Columbus which Benton had foreseen, was perched upon the summit of the Rockies as its monument.

Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the Nation in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking, the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his auditors have before heard."

The West in 1863

The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming followed in 1868.

In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties, the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington, Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these. Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the region of the great river valleys,—Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte, and Sweetwater,—the precious metals were not found in quantities which justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory.

The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in the spring of 1868.

Cheyenne was laid out a few weeks before the Union Pacific advanced to its site. It had a better prospect of life than had most of the mushroom cities that accompanied the westward course of the railroad, because it was the natural junction point for Denver trade. Colorado had been much disappointed at its own failure to induce the Union Pacific managers to put Denver City on the main line of the road, and felt injured when compelled to do its business through Cheyenne. But just because of this, Cheyenne grew in the autumn of 1867 with a rapidity unusual even in the West. It was not an orderly or reputable population that it had during the first months of its existence, but, to its good fortune, the advance of the road to Laramie drew off the worst of the floating inhabitants early in 1868. Cheyenne was left with an overlarge town site, but with some real excuse for existence. Most of the terminal towns vanished completely when the railroad moved on.