The Last American Frontier

[3] This chapter follows, in part, F. L. Paxson, "The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol. I, pp....

It has long been the custom to attribute the dangerous restlessness of the Indians during and after the Civil War to the evil machinations of the Confederacy. It has been plausi...

Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke Indian wars. The tribes themselves consist...

The struggle for the possession of the plains worked the displacement of the Indian tribes. At the beginning, the invasion of Kansas had undone the work accomplished in erecting...

In the end of the thirties the "right wing" of the frontier, as a colonel of dragoons described it, extended northeasterly from the bend of the Missouri to Green Bay. It was an...

In a national way, the South struggling against the North prevented the early location of a Pacific railway. Locally, every village on the Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf...

The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Ke...

The story of the settlement and winning of Oregon is but a small portion of the whole history of the Oregon trail. The trail was not only the road to Oregon, but it was the chie...

Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868, and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the plains had been cleanly split into two m...

The long line separating the Indian and agricultural frontiers was in 1850 but little farther west than the point which it had reached by 1820. Then it had arrived at the bend o...

A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the continent. It increased the area of dange...

Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold fields, drew population aw...

The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which, within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the light of exploration and settlement upo...

That the fate of the outlying colonies of the United States should have aroused grave concerns at the beginning of the Civil War is not surprising. California and Oregon, Carson...

The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without...

The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon its long career when trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the forty-second parallel intersects the contin...

Twenty years before the great tribes of the plains made their last stand in front of the invading white man overland travel had begun; ten years before, Congress, under the insp...

England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio Grande and the Pacific for more th...

On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont had worked his way south over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found himself in the valley of the Sacra...

The main defence of the last frontier by the Indians ceased with the termination of the Indian wars of the sixties. Here the resistance had most closely resembled a general war...

It has been pointed out by Davis in his history of the Union Pacific Railroad that the period of agitation was approaching probable success when the latter was deferred because...

The story of the United States is that of a series of frontiers which the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage, and which courage and foresight have gradually tr...