4.11 Life and Culture in the West

Before the Mexican War, the West for most Americans still referred to the fertile area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River with a slight amount of overspill beyond its banks. With soil exhaustion and land competition increasing in the East, most early western migrants sought a greater measure of stability and self-sufficiency by engaging in small-scale farming. Boosters of these new agricultural areas along with the U.S. government encouraged perceptions of the West as a land of hard-built opportunity that promised personal and national bounty.

Women migrants bore the unique double burden of travel while also being expected to conform to restrictive gender norms. The key virtues of femininity, according to the “cult of true womanhood,” included piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. The concept of “separate spheres” expected women to remain in the home. These values accompanied men and women as they traveled west to begin their new lives.

While many of these societal standards endured, there often existed an openness of frontier society that resulted in modestly more opportunities for women. Husbands needed partners in setting up a homestead and working in the field to provide food for the family. Suitable wives were often in short supply, enabling some to informally negotiate more power in their households.¹

Americans debated the role of government in westward expansion. This debate centered on the proper role of the U.S. government in paying for the internal improvements that soon became necessary to encourage and support economic development. Some saw frontier development as a self-driven undertaking that necessitated private risk and investment devoid of government interference. Others saw the federal government’s role as providing the infrastructural development needed to give migrants the push toward engagement with the larger national economy. In the end, federal aid proved essential for the conquest and settlement of the region.

Economic busts constantly threatened western farmers and communities. The economy worsened after the Panic of 1819. Falling prices and depleted soil meant farmers were unable to make their loan payments. The dream of subsistence and stability abruptly ended as many migrants lost their land and felt the hand of the distant market economy forcing them even farther west to escape debt. As a result, the federal government consistently sought to increase access to land in the West, including efforts to lower the amount of land required for purchase. Smaller lots made it easier for more farmers to clear land and begin farming faster.²

More than anything else, new roads and canals provided conduits for migration and settlement. Improvements in travel and exchange fueled economic growth in the 1820s and 1830s. Canal improvements expanded in the East, while road building prevailed in the West. Congress continued to allocate funds for internal improvements. Federal money pushed the National Road, begun in 1811, farther west every year. Laborers needed to construct these improvements increased employment opportunities and encouraged nonfarmers to move to the West. Wealth promised by engagement with the new economy was hard to reject. However, roads were expensive to build and maintain, and some Americans strongly opposed spending money on these improvements.

The use of steamboats grew quickly throughout the 1810s and into the 1820s. As water trade and travel grew in popularity, local, state, and federal funds helped connect rivers and streams. Hundreds of miles of new canals cut through the eastern landscape. The most notable of these early projects was the Erie Canal. That project, completed in 1825, linked the Great Lakes to New York City. The profitability of the canal helped New York outpace its East Coast rivals to become the center for commercial import and export in the United States.³

Early railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio line hoped to link mid-Atlantic cities with lucrative western trade routes. Railroad boosters encouraged the rapid growth of towns and cities along their routes. Not only did rail lines promise to move commerce faster, but the rails also encouraged the spreading of towns farther away from traditional waterway locations. Technological limitations, constant repairs, conflicts with American Indians, and political disagreements all hampered railroading and kept canals and steamboats as integral parts of the transportation system. Nonetheless, this early establishment of railroads enabled a rapid expansion after the Civil War.

Economic chains of interdependence stretched over hundreds of miles of land and through thousands of contracts and remittances. America’s manifest destiny became wedded not only to territorial expansion but also to economic development.⁴

The constant struggle between expanding American settlers and native peoples, while not always violent, existed as an ebb and flow down to the smallest scale of individual families scattered across a landscape not yet fully unified by the rapidly advancing technologies of movement and communication.  Trade, learning, and intermarriage happened more often than violence, though these were often unequal.  And while hatred certainly simmered from the experiences of all those caught up in violence and inequality, so did the construction of new families of people of mixed ancestry.  Non-racist terms for these people in American English are few, but in Spanish-speaking lands mestizos come from mestizaje, while in French-speaking lands métis come from métissage.  Many of these people carried tribal affiliation, but many more “passed as white” or forgot, over generations, their ancestry.

The violence that did erupt was not always, or even most often, driven by powerful leaders and organized political or military forms.  Weapons of many kinds, for many purposes, existed in the hands of most the peoples of the West, and the frontier was not a sharply defined as many imagined – then and now.  It was rather outposts of different groups and cultures dotted across the land, with native groups numbers decreasing and retracting to smaller areas over time as Americans – and, in the Southwest, Mexicans – moved in to settle.  Arguments turned violent, grief or desperation turned violent, and hatreds learned by rote or learned by trauma turned violent.

All of these interactions, positive and negative, proved impossible for any political authority – native or American – to fully control or even manage.  Once America took control of what had been northern Mexico, and eventually conquered all of the native peoples in the region, new Spanish-speaking peoples – many of whom spoke native languages as well, some as members of tribal nations – brought yet more complexity to the interactions.  From this, combined with the eventual expansion of post-Civil War capitalism and further waves of American settlement, emerged the American West.

Western expansion was fraught with problems, and great rewards. The pioneers can be viewed as both people of great, indomitable spirit, and a misguided belief that their culture and institutions were mandated by a higher power. They were neither good, nor evil, but instead a people of their times pushing forward to reshape the continent into the image they imagined. The US government’s and their reckless disregard and dismissal of the beliefs and rights of others would lead to further conflict both within and without and ultimately to war.

Notes

1. Adrienne Caughfield, True Women and Westward Expansion (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005).
2. Murray Newton Rothbard, Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).
3. Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).
4. For more on the technology and transportation revolutions, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).