The Mammoth Book of the West

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson Publishing 1996

This new edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2001

Copyright © J. Lewis-Stempel 1996, 2001

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1–84119–354–2
eISBN 978–1–78033–700–5

Printed and bound in the EU

Jon. E Lewis
was born in 1961. His previous books include the best-selling The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: An Eyewitness History of the World, Eye-witness the 20th Century and Eye-witness D-Day. Other titles in the Mammoth series are The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War, The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast, The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure, The Mammoth Book of War Letters and Diaries, The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, The Mammoth Book of Modern War Stories, The Mammoth Book of Battles, The Handbook of SAS & Elite Forces and The Mammoth Book of Private Lives.

Introduction

Part I
The Way West

Prologue

Into the Wilderness

The Clash of Empire

Daniel Boone and the Bluegrass

The Revolution in the West

The Voyage of Lewis and Clark

Pike’s Progress, Long’s Labour

Of Mountain Men and Furs

“And Remember the Alamo”

Pioneers Across the Plains

The Donner Tragedy

Westward With God

The Gold Rush

Motive Power

Part II
The Trampling Herd

Prologue

The Cradle of the Cattle Kingdom

On the Trail

Babylons of the Plains

“Oh, To Be a Cowboy”

Bonanzaland

Billy the Kid

Snow, Sheep and Blood

Part III
The Lawless Land

Prologue

The Outlaw Breed

Jesse James and His Men

Frontier Lawmen

The Legend and Life of Wyatt Earp

Texas Rangers, Pinkerton Detectives

Wild, Wild Women

Part IV
The Indian Wars

Prologue

War Comes to the Land of Little Rain

The Great Sioux Uprising

Sand Creek

Red Cloud’s War

Blood on the Grasslands

The Struggle for the Staked Plains

Little Big Horn

Geronimo, Apache Tiger

Ghost Dancers

Part V
The Last Days of the West

Prologue

Settling the Great Plains

The Wild Bunch

The Saga of Tom Horn

Wild West Shows and Rodeos

Afterword: The West in the Movies

Appendix I: Chronology of the American West

Appendix II: Bibliography

Appendix III: The American Indian Nations of North America

Index

The American West was a time, and a place. But above all, it was a state of mind.

For pioneers staring, hip-cocked, into the virgin land of the setting sun, the West represented a new start, a future of endless possibilities, a place where a man or woman might make something of themselves. Wrote Helen Carpenter in her diary on 26 May 1857, the day she began her journey across the plains in an ox wagon: “Ho – for California – at last we are on the way – only seven miles from home (which is to be home no longer) yet we have really started and with good luck may some day reach the ‘promised land’.”

The promised land of the West did not always turn out to be the Eden of pioneer expectations. “Oh, the trees, the trees,” lamented one settler in Kentucky, faced with the awesome task of clearing the looming, claustrophobic forest. Yet, whether they liked it or loathed it, those who endured life on the remote frontier became transformed, even as they transformed the land around them. They became less urbane, less European in outlook. The frontier mentality thus formed was independent, optimistic, eager for material success, and scornful of rank, pretension, and class. Nearly all travellers to the New World noted these pronounced traits. The English writer Anthony
Trollope, visiting the USA in the early 1860s, commented in his
North America
(1862) that “there is an independence which sits gracefully on their [the Americans’] shoulders, and teaches you at first glance that the man has a right to assume himself your equal.”

This frontier spirit was born long before men and women moved to settle the big, rolling lands beyond the Mississippi. Although the decades 1860–1890 are often equated with “the American West”, the frontier, the moving edge of settlement into the “wilderness”, began on the Eastern side of the Appalachians in the seventeenth century. The final sweep of settlement, the conquering of trans-Mississippi America, was but the finale of a process which had been hundreds of years in the making. Many of those who homesteaded the Great Plains were the descendants of farmers who had toiled on land of the Eastern coastal belt. And pioneers nearly always went West, not North or South, so keeping within familiar climatic zones. New Englanders stuck to the upper reaches of the West; Virginians and Carolinians headed for Alabama, and then crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

Land for farming was the great spur which prompted men and women to go West. (The cowboy on horseback might be a more romantic, attractive figure, but it was the pedestrian “sod-buster” who tamed the bulk of the West; agriculture was the new country’s basic endeavour.) Sons of farmers, on finding the family claim too small to sustain division, left home and trekked west to find a place of their own. And then, in turn, their sons did the same. Southerners also found themselves driven westwards by soil exhaustion; their cash crops of tobacco and cotton took a heavy toll on the earth. The relative abundance of land did little to encourage good husbandry. There always seemed to be more land for the taking.

That is, for the taking from the continent’s original inhabitants, the American Indian. For the land the settlers thirsted for was not unoccupied; the Indians had to be persuaded to part with it, or prised off it by force. If the frontier mentality had attractive features, it also had ugly aspects. It justified the cleansing of Indians from their lands in the name of Manifest Destiny, and encouraged the cult of the gun, the use of firearms to settle all matters, big or small. To “win” the West took the White man nearly three hundred years of warfare.

What befell the Indian was a tragedy, even a travesty. At times something like genocide was practised against the native people of America. But it is wrong to picture the American Indian as a noble but hapless victim. There are few innocents in war. The Indians did not see themselves as a homogenous entity, just as Europeans do not see themselves as alike, but as English, French, or German. Some Indian tribes, in conflict with their aboriginal neighbours, allied themselves with the White man as a means of winning local power struggles. The example of the Crow is only the most famous. And American Indian tribes could wage war as relentlessly and bloodily as the White man. The long enmity between the 7th Cavalry and the Sioux had as one of its fillips the killing and mutilation of Frederick Wyllyams by Sioux (and Arapaho and Cheyenne) braves at Fort Wallace, Kansas, in 1867. The 7th Cavalry never forgot or forgave what had been done to Sergeant Wyllyams.

The Indian wars had their ironies, as well as their brutalities. In the 1870s the Sioux fought bitterly to keep White settlers out of the Black Hills of Dakota, which they declared to be their ancestral and spiritual home. In truth, the Sioux were settlers too, and had only been in the Black Hills country for a century or so. The much cherished freedom of the Plains Indian to ride free like the wind over
the prairie was a gift given him by the White man; the horse, after all, was introduced to America by the Spanish. And if the White man slaughtered the buffalo to near extinction, Indian hunters had long before wiped out the beast’s giant prehistoric relative – along with the mammoth, the mastadon, and more than 70 other species of large game. (This ecological disaster seems to have caused the American Indians to rethink their attitude to American fauna; certainly they came to revere animals and to be zealous in their conservation, never killing more than were needed for the maintenance of the tribe.)

None of these culpabilities, however, excuse the treatment of America’s native people by the White man. They are only given to illustrate the intricacy of the history of the West. The winning (or losing) of the American West is the greatest story ever told, bar one epic of biblical times, but it is not a simple tale of Good versus Bad, however these attributes are apportioned. Western history is infinitely shaded.

And it is even more wondrous and terrible than its fictional and mythic tellings. Few of the legends of the West, the Earps and the Jameses, have much substance when truth is applied, but even a dime novelist would blush to write a scenario where a lone gunfighter engaged 80 assailants and won – which is exactly what Elfego Baca did in 1884. Baca was no superhuman but a naive teenager who wanted to be a lawman and who had tired of local anti-Hispanic racism.