1869

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__________ 

“A few thousand square miles of uninhabited territory.” 

Hendrik Van Loon, historian.

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TEACHERS NOTE: You can make a good argument that reservations for Native Americans were the same as big prisons. Let students figure it out. 

Luther Standing Bear would later describe the Rosebud Agency, where he and other Lakota live as a “government prison.”

May 10: The first transcontinental railroad is completed, but not before the two competing companies first drive right past each other, in an effort to get more free federal land. As Alistair Cooke once wrote, the rail crews opened fire on each other at one point, before cooler business heads prevailed. 

    “A century ago,” Cooke also wrote, “the railroad engine was as magical as a space ship.” (America, 228-229) 

The coming of the railroads means growing trouble for Native Americans on the Great Plains. Gilbert King, writing in Smithsonian magazine, explains: 

Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. Unlike the Native Americans or Buffalo Bill, who killed for food, clothing and shelter, the hunters from the East killed mostly for sport. Native Americans looked on with horror as landscapes and prairies were littered with rotting buffalo carcasses. The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks. Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows, leaving countless 1,500-pound animals where they died.

 

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions: 

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

 

Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands in the winter months. One hunter, Orlando Brown brought down nearly 6,000 buffalo by himself and lost hearing in one ear from the constant firing of his .50 caliber rifle. The Texas legislature, sensing the buffalo were in danger of being wiped out, proposed a bill to protect the species. General Sheridan opposed it, stating, “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.” 

 

The historian, Hendrik Van Loon, also has a say: 

Thus far the railroad contractor had followed the pioneer. Now the railroad contractor himself turned pioneer. He no longer waited until there were enough settlers in any given part of the Union to make it worth his while to build an iron road and go after their business. He first of all provided a few thousand square miles of uninhabited territory with decent means of communication and then invited farmers from the East and immigrants from Europe to settle within reasonable distance of his depots and use his road for the transportation of their cattle and their farm products. (124/410)

 

Van Loon seems blind when he speaks of “uninhabited territory,” but redeems himself a few pages later, writing, 

In this mad rush for new grazing fields and fresh wheat fields, the last remnants of the Indians (who had been given this territory as a sort of conscience money when the United States occupied their ancestral possessions in the East), those poor savages were ruthlessly pushed out of the way or were cooped up in vast concentration camps where they were allowed to vegetate and to generate as mildly interesting specimens of the original local fauna.

 

But such cruel incidents seem to be an unavoidable part of the White Man’s progress across the face of the globe. Theoretically the European and the American recognize the fact that black and yellow and copper-colored creatures also have the right to exist. In practice, however, they prefer such creatures when they “know their place” and shine their boots for them or do their masters’ laundering. When one of the races which seem to stand between the pale-face and his immediate profits declares itself too proud to become a bootblack or a dishwasher, the Caucasian does not quite know what to do with him. In such a dilemma he gets nervous and begins to play with his revolver and nine times out of ten something happens and the gun goes off. …

 

This chapter in our history is not very flattering to our pride. On every page we read the records of greed and cruelty and of broken treaties and the entire episode is steeped in the contraband room of the prairie saloon. (124/412-413)

 

Later, he writes that when the white men came, “They slew and hacked and burned and shot and hanged and generally destroyed everything the natives had built as rapidly as they could.” (124/415)

What would the natives think?

 

* 

July: Teddy Roosevelt, 11, and his family travel to Europe, where they will spend ten months. 

He keeps a diary, writing in it every day without fail. In one entry, from France, he expresses his hurt, like any boy might today. 

At supper Mamma laughed at me a great deal and made fun of me because I always say “Pretty Papa, Pretty Mama” and made me feel (and I feel now) very cut and ashamed of myself and I don't feel natural, though Mama and Papa both tried to make it up when they saw what she had done. (112/87) 

 

* 

JILL LEPORE, a bicycle enthusiast, writes: 

No one’s quite sure who came up with this idea – most historians place their bets on a French carriage-maker, in 1855 – but putting a crank on the axle of the front wheel, with pedals on either side of the hub, changed everything about bicycles, including their name: most people called the ones with pedals “velocipedes,” which is, roughly, Latin for “fast feet.” People expected velocipedes to replace horses. “We think the bicycle an animal, which will, in a great measure, supersede the horse,” one American wrote in 1869. “It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick, or die.” 

 

*

 

CONSTRUCTION begins on Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, named after Gen. Joshua W. Sill, killed in the Battle of Stones River. 

The Native American artist, T.C. Cannon, painted the following picture, “Beef Issue at Fort Sill,” and wrote the accompanying poem in the mid-1970s.

With the buffalo fast disappearing, Native Americans stuck on reservations
are forced to rely on government beef.
Painting from the internet.

Beef Issue 

Everything must be used
then else returned to the earth
for even now
the grass is black with blood 

the rainsmell fills the breeze
and the children are hungry
i can see that the sky
is yellowing again 

the fuzzy face soldiers are laughing
they are never hungry
the dogs are eager for the bones
the sky is burning down overhead 

everything must be used
the grass is black with blood. 

 

*

 

Mid-August: James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok is elected sheriff of Ellis County, in Kansas. (He will not be reelected in November.) Hays is the biggest town, filled with cowboys, and frequented by soldiers of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. One biographer says of Hickok, that he was “the handsomest man west of the Mississippi. His eyes were blue – but could freeze to a cool steel-gray at threat of evil or danger.”

 

By 1866, he could tell a reporter he had already killed about a hundred men, not counting Native Americans. He told another reporter, “As to killing men, I never think much of it…. The killing of a bad man shouldn’t trouble one any more than killing a rat or an ugly cat or a vicious dog.”

 

During his time in Hays,

 

he may have killed a man named Jack (or Sam) Strawhorn (or Strawhan) who tried to get the drop on him; he may have killed two soldiers who talked tough at him; he may have thrashed Tom Custer, a brother of General George Custer; he may have killed three soldiers whom Custer had vengefully sicced on him – all the evidence bearing on these matters is likewise fuzzy. What is certain is that Hickok left Hays in a hurry one winter night, lest he be further beset by the Seventh Cavalry. 

 

Source: an old American Heritage article, “The Wild, Wild West” by Peter Lyon (formatted on brown pages, without numbers).

 

*

“Is it possible to get further down in National degeneracy and disgrace?”

  

When a white member of Congress from South Carolina is forced to resign, having sold an appointment to Annapolis, the Republican Party sends Joseph Hayne Rainey, an African American, to fill his place. Rainey is later elected to serve a full term. (See also: 1871, 1872, 1873.)

 

The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer responds: “Is it possible to get further down in National degeneracy and disgrace?”

 

Congressman Rainey.
Photo from the internet.

 

*

 

September 24: Benjamin Andrews describes the attempt to corner the gold market and the crash known as “Black Friday.”

 

In 1869 a clique of speculators in New York thought to realize an immense fortune by cornering gold, a large proportion of the stock east of the Rocky Mountains being known to be in New York City.

 

By Wednesday, September 22d, they had pushed up the price of gold in greenbacks from 131 to 141, causing a disastrous tumble in stocks and almost a panic. The money market grew tight, and interest enormous. Loans were to be had only on the very best securities. On Thursday gold still advanced, showing that the corner remained solid. At the last call it stood at 144; at the first on Friday, September 24th, 105 [error?] was the figure. The ring was believed at this time to hold in gold and in contracts to deliver the same, over $100,000,000, while all the gold in New York outside the United States Sub-Treasury was hardly over $10,000,000. Only the Government could break the corner. At 11:00 o’clock gold was at 155, whence in half an hour it rose to 160, then to 162, then to 164. In the midst of an excitement never paralleled in the Gold Room before our since, it was announced on authority that the Government would sell. The price at once went down to 135, and the power of the clique was instantly broken. This day passed into history under the name of “Black Friday.” (356-359)

 

 

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November 6: The College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and Rutgers play the first ever college football game, with Rutgers prevailing 6-4 (goals are worth one point and scored by kicking the ball across an opponent’s goal line.) Passing and carrying the ball are illegal and teams are comprised of 25 players, including 11 “fielders” to play defense and 12 “bulldogs” whose job is to score. The remaining pair position themselves near the opponent’s goal, hoping to pick up an easy point. 

A “game” ends when a goal is scored, and ten games are played. Rutgers uses the “flying wedge” for the first time to break through the New Jersey defenses. But J.E. Michael, known as “Big Mike,” for New Jersey, soon counters, breaking through the wedge. Madison M. Bell, a wounded Civil War veteran, also impresses spectators (there are about 100), using a heel kick to stop New Jersey scoring rushes and even set up a score for his own team.