1. A Frontier Society in Transition
Chapter 7
A Frontier Society in Transition

2. "This frontier society was in transition, to be sure, but even as more modern trends came to predominate by the 1890s and early twentieth century, Texans continued to honor the old heritage.” (p. 175)
Demographics: The population increased fivefold between 1860 and Immigrants were mainly white southerners attracted by inexpensive land.
Texas Population:
1860: 604,215
1900: 3,048,710
Signs of Modernity
1. Towns
2. Railroads
3. Labor Unions
Education
Ties to Frontier Roots
1. Rural
2. Towns small and agrarian
3. Primitive transportation
4. Population young and male
5. Horse and gun culture
Wagon Trains from Tennessee and Alabama entered Texas after the Civil War. Early day Blueridge settlers were looking for a fresh start, and Texas seemed to be the best place to find it.

3. 1874 Red River view. Early immigrants make their way in an overcrowded boat down the swollen Texas river.
Source:

4. Table 7.1 Makeup of the Texas Population
Year
Total
Urban
Rural (%)
Blacks (%)
1860
604,215
26,615
577,600 (96.4)
182,921 (30.0)
1870
818,579
59,521
764,058 (95.6)
253,475 (31.9)
1880
1,591,749
146,795
1,444,954 (93.7)
393,384 (25.0)
1890
2,235,521
349,511
1,886,016 (90.5)
488,171 (21.8)
1900
3,048,710
520,759
2,527,951 (84.5)
650,722 (20.0)
While Texas cities did experience some growth, the state, overall, remained overwhelming rural and agricultural.
Calvert, DeLeón, Cantrell, p. 177.

5. In South Texas, many Mexicans lost their land:
1. Fraud
2. Taxes
3. Declining price of beef and droughts
4. Reluctance of independent ranchers to commercialize

6. Until the 1870s, the dominant powers on the plains of West Texas were the Comanches and Kiowa.
Warrior tradition
Military tactics
Westering Texans stopped short of Comanche and Kiowa territory.
The nomadic lifestyle meant the Indians had no farms, storehouses, or munition stock piles to attack.

7. Kiowa and Cheyenne leaders pose in the White House conservatory with Mary Todd Lincoln (standing far right) on March 27, 1863, during meetings with President Abraham Lincoln, who hoped to prevent their lending aid to Confederate forces. The two Cheyenne chiefs seated at the left front, War Bonnet and Standing In the Water, would be killed the next year in the Sand Creek Massacre.

8. Southern Plains Indian tribes during the Red River War and location of reservations.
Map courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission.

9. The threat of Indian raids was a constant source of anxiety for settlers on the Texas frontier, particularly after U.S. troops left Texas during the Civil War years. Painting by Nola Davis, courtesy of Fort Richardson SHS, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

11. Why were the buffalo exterminated?
Indians slaughtered more buffalo for sustenance and for trade.
Domesticated animals exposed buffaloes to fatal diseases.
Increased population and livestock reduced timberland and grazing land.
Droughts reduced the number of buffaloes.
Whites slaughtered the buffalo.

12. Why did whites slaughter the buffalo?
1. "Sportsmen"
2. Suppliers of meat for railroad crews
3. Traders in buffalo hides
4. To destroy the Plains Indians' economy

13. Rath & Wright's buffalo hide yard, showing 40,000 buffalo hides baled for shipment. Dodge City, Kansas, The virtual extermination of the buffalo aided the defeat of the Comanches and Kiowas by destroying their economy and way of life.

15. Kiowa brave. Tow-An-Kee, son of Lone Wolf. Killed in Texas in 1873
Kiowa brave. Tow-An-Kee, son of Lone Wolf. Killed in Texas in Photo, ca , courtesy of the Center for American History, Caldwell Collection (#03962), The University of Texas at Austin.
Kiowa camp, ca Photograph courtesy of the Center for American History, Frank Caldwell Collection (#10187), The University of Texas at Austin.

16. A Kiowa ledger drawing possibly depicting the Buffalo Wallow battle in 1874, one of several clashes between Southern Plains Indians and the U.S. Army during the Red River War.

17. After the Civil War, the U. S
After the Civil War, the U. S. Grant administration attempted a peace policy toward the Plains tribes. At the Salt Creek Massacre (1871), Satanta, a Kiowa chief, and between 100 and 150 followers attacked a supply train, killing and mutilating seven of the twelve drivers. In response, the U. S. Army took the offensive against the Plains Indians. Comanche raids decreased.
Indian resistance failed:
defeat on the battlefield
no system of supply depots and armories
no support network of factories, farms, or efficient infrastructure
weapons ineffective in a conflict against a well-armed and well-financed opponent.
disease and alcoholism
elimination of the buffalo

18. In 1871, Salt Creek Massacre resulted in a new military offensive in Texas against the Indians by the U.S. army.
U.S. Army columns of the Red River War. Courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission.

19. Satanta was a Kiowa chief who fiercely resisted Anglo incursions, and who carried out the Salt Creek Massacre.
As a result of the Red River War in the mid-1870s, most of the West Texas Indians were killed or forced onto reservations.
These are Kiowas waiting for their monthly food ration from the reservation commissary around It gives a little insight into what life must have been like on the reservation. (
There had never been trouble between the Indians and the Quakers. The first tenet of their religion was, "Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men." They never went armed, but always relied upon their faith and the goodness of God for their protection. Lawrie Tatum of Iowa was the first Quaker agent. He was a man with a big heart, who had great faith and a strong personality. He had the advantages of a good education, and had executive ability.
The following letter written by Lawrie Tatum from Fort Sill dated May 30, 1871, tells an interesting story of an epochal event in the history of Southwestern Oklahoma, in which, Santanta was the leading character.1
1Santanta was recognized as a leader of the most belligerent and blood thirsty faction of the Kiowa Indians. He thought himself a patriot and orator. He attended the Medicine Lodge peace council in October 1868—as one of the chiefs representing the Kiowa tribe. Henry M. Stanley who afterwards became famous for his explorations in Darkest Africa attended this council, as the correspondent of several metropolitan papers, reported the speech of Santanta in part as follows: "All of the chiefs of the Kiowa-Comanche and Arapahos are here today. They have come to listen to the good word. We have been waiting here for a long time to see you and we are getting tired. All the land south of the Arkansas River belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches and I don't want to give away any of it. I love the land and the buffalo, and will not part with any. I want you to understand that the Kiowas don't want to fight and have not been fighting since the treaty two years ago. I hear a great deal of fine talk from these gentlemen, but they never do what they say. I don't want any of these medicine houses built in the country; I want the children brought up exactly as I am "When I look upon you, I know that you are big chiefs and while you are in the country we go to sleep happy and are not afraid. I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don't want to settle there. I love to roam over the wide prairie, and when I do it I feel free and happy; but, when we settle down we grow pale and die. "Harken well to what I say. I have laid aside my lance, my bow and my shield, and yet I feel safe in your presence. I have told you the truth. I have no little lies hid about me, but I don't know how it is with the commissioners; are they as clean as I am? A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers, but when I go up the river I see a camp of soldiers, and they are cutting my wood down or killing my buffalo. I don't like that; when I see it my heart feels like bursting with sorrow. I have spoken."

20. Topin Tone-oneo, daughter of Kicking Bird
Topin Tone-oneo, daughter of Kicking Bird. The only one of the great Kiowa chief's children to survive him, she was with the first group sent to Carlisle Indian School in 1879.
Source:
Indians at Fort Marion. Indians of various tribes who were captured in the Texas Red River Wars and other Indian battles of the late 19th century were imprisoned at this Florida military fort. Photo ca. 1860s-1930s, courtesy the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (Lot 90-1 INV ). Source:

21. Pupils at Carlisle Indian school, Pennsylvania
Pupils at Carlisle Indian school, Pennsylvania. Established in 1879 by Richard Pratt, the school attempted to assimilate Indian children into the "white man's world" through education and financial support. Among its students were four of Comanche chief Quanah Parker's children and those of others involved in the Texas Indian Wars Source:

23. Texas Cattle Trails
Before the Civil War, the Shawnee Trail (far right) led Texas cattlemen to markets in Kansas City and St. Louis. Following the war, increased settlement closed that route, and in 1866 Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving blazed a trail west to the New Mexico and Colorado markets, called the Goodnight-Loving Trail (far left). Soon, however, railheads in Kansas led cowboys up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, and up the Western Trail to Dodge City and points north.

24. The earliest out-of-state destination for the great long-distance cattle drives was Sedalia, Missouri.

25. Roundup on Texas Ranch

26. Cover of The Beef Bonanza: How to Get Rich on the Plains, by Gen. James. S. Brisbin, one of the books that helped fuel the cattle boom of the early 1880s.
(Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)
The Matador Land and Cattle Company and the Spur Ranch were British-owned.

27. Bucking Broncos

29. Cowboys branding mavericks in the 1880's

30. "Second Guard." A cowboy camp at night in the 1880's, with some cowboys bedding down while others prepare to head out for night duty watching over the herd. Photograph by F. M. Steele.

31. Cowboys branding "mavericks" in the 1880's
Cowboys branding "mavericks" in the 1880's. This cowboy name for cattle without a brand can be traced to Texas rancher Samuel Maverick, whose habit of neglecting to brand his herd led his neighbors to call an unbranded steer "one of Maverick's." Photograph by F. M. Steele.

32. Cowboys eating dinner on the range
Cowboys eating dinner on the range. A typical chuck wagon, like the one shown here, carried potatoes, beans, bacon, dried fruit, cornmeal, coffee and canned goods.
(Library of Congress)

33. "Where we shine." Cowboys at the end of an 1897 roundup in Ward County, Texas, pose with their herd of almost 2,000 cattle. By this time, barbed wire had closed down the long cattle trails for nearly two decades. Photographed by F. M. Steele.

34. 1871 Kansas-Transport of Texas Beef on the Kansas-Pacific Railway-Scene at a Cattle-shoot in Abilene, Kansas. This beautiful, hand colored engraving is from the August 19, 1871 issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Source:

35. 1882 Picture of a capture of a Texas Town by cowboys
1882 Picture of a capture of a Texas Town by cowboys Source:

36. In 1877, George Wilkins Kendall first attempted to make sheep raising a viable concern. The Rio Grande Valley (known as the Wild Horse Desert) became the state’s leading sheep and goat raising region. Sheepmen and cattlemen frequently came into violent conflict over grazing rights.
1882 Texas-Herders Driving Their Sheep, Menaced by a Prairie Fire, To a Place of Safety. Source:

37. Dignitaries and railworkers gather to drive the "golden spike" and join the tracks of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, The Central Pacific's wood-burning locomotive, Jupiter, stands to the left, the Union Pacific's coal-burning No. 119 to the right.

38. The starting line for the first Oklahoma Land Rush, April 22, 1889.

39. Homesteaders photographed in the 1880's by Solomon Butcher in Custer County, Nebraska.

40. Exodusters waiting for a steamboat to carry them westward in the late 1870's.
(Library of Congress.)

41. Homesteader Omer Yern and family photographed by Solomon Butcher in Custer Country, Nebraska, (Courtesy Nebraska State Historical Society.)

42. David Hilton and family pose for homestead photographer Solomon Butcher, showing off their prize possession, a pump organ. Butcher noted that Mrs. Hilton insisted on having the organ hauled into the yard, so her family portrait would not reveal that the Hilton's still lived in a sod house.

43. While preserving some traditions of their homeland, settlers on the Texas frontier were transformed by their experiences, becoming "westerners."

44. Fenced in Ranch

45. Frederic Remington’s The Fall of the Cowboy

46. In the mid-1880s, Texas cattlemen confronted calamitous freezes and droughts.
A winter cattle drive photographed by Charles Belden.
(Library of Congress.)

49. Theodore Roosevelt on horseback in the Dakota Territory in the 1880's, when he had moved west to live as a cattle rancher.
(Library of Congress.)

50. In the 1880s, the cattle boom waned:
Cattle lost too much weight on the trail.
Costs for provisioning the cowboys rose.
Kansas passed laws banning Texas cattle.
Pastures grew thinner on the trail.
The introduction of barbed wire fenced off the cattle trails.
In the mid-1880s, Texas cattlemen confronted calamitous freezes and droughts.

52. Violence and lawlessness: Why?
Bitterness from the Civil War
Indian warfare
Banditry
Conflicts resulting from the cattle industry
Agrarian discontent
Political conflicts
Tensions caused by modernization
Racial conflicts
The determination of some to bring law and order to the frontier

53. Lawlessness:
Vigilantes: Between 1865 and 1900, East Texas had incidents of vigilantisms.
Feuds: Historians have identified about eight major feuds. The most notorious was the Sutton-Taylor feud arose out of the bitterness of the Civil War.
Gunfighters: The most prominent gunfighter was John Wesley Hardin, a defender of the Confederate cause and a hateful racist, who killed more than twenty men.
Lynching: Between 1870 and 1900, white Texans lynched about 500 blacks, a number exceeded only by Georgia and Mississippi. In 1897, the legislature passed an anti- lynching law, but it was ineffective.

54. Gunfighters
The most prominent and dangerous Texan gunfighter was John Wesley Hardin. Hardin slew more than twenty men, and he is acknowledged to have sent more rival to their grave in one-on-on shootouts than any other western desperado.
As a hateful racist, he terrorized blacks, as an unrelenting supporter of the Confederate cause, he vented his anti-northern rage on the state police (that Governor Davis had organized), as a rancher, he had countless clashes with rustlers and competing cattlemen, and as a hired gun, he shot down many a man, as he did on behalf of the Taylor in the Sutton-Taylor feud. The legal system in 1878 sent Hardin to prison for murdering a deputy sheriff. In 1895, only a year after his release from prison, another Texas gunman named John Selman shot and killed Harden in El Paso.
Bill Longley became known as “the nigger killer” for his arbitrary murder of blacks. But Longley amassed a record of killings that included men of every color and persuasion: by the time the law hanged him in 1878, his list of crimes included thirty-two murders.

55. VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACKS: In the “Black Belt” counties (among them Washington, Matagorda, Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Wharton) white men in the 1880s used a variety of pretexts—among them the desire to dilute the strength of the black vote or drive black office holders from power—to persecute blacks. Lynching or a threat of it by “white cappers” (white racist vigilantes) and loyalists to the defunct Ku Klux Klan was common practice.
(Calvert, De León, Cantrell, p. 160.)

56. Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith. Between 1870 and 1900, Texas exceeded all but two other southern states in the number of blacks lynched.

57. The “buffalo soldiers” were black U.S. army troops.

58. Among European ethnic groups in late nineteenth-century Texas, the most numerous were the Germans.

59. Violence Against Tejanos
When whites moved into South and West Texas, they lynched Tejanos suspected of crimes or collusion with raiders from Mexico.
In , Catarino Garza used South Texas as a base for launching a revolution against the Mexican government.
In the 1870s, the Salt War was a conflict between Anglos and Mexican Americans over salt deposits in the El Paso Valley.

60. Guadalupe Salt Lakes The Salt War (p. 190.)
The Salt War of 1877 was a conflict between Mexican Americans and Anglos.
Guadalupe Salt Lakes
The Salt War (p. 190.)

61. In 1874, the state government re-established the Texas Rangers
In 1874, the state government re-established the Texas Rangers. They carried out their duties effectively, but frequently used unjustified violence and overstepped the laws they were supposed to enforce. (pp )

62. Cities:
San Antonio: Its population of 12,256 in 1870 grew to 50,000 in It continued to be a military center and a point of departure for western expeditions.
Houston: In 1869, the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company began dredging Buffalo Bayou. Houston was the major port for the exporting of cotton.
Galveston: Continued to be an important port until a hurricane in 1900 devastated the city.
Dallas: Became an important transportation center for farmers and ranchers when railroads reached the town in the 1870s. Dallas was the leading industrial center in Texas in 1905, with flour and grist milling and printing as its major industries.
Fort Worth: In the 1860s-70s, the cattle trade energized Fort Worth. Cattle en route to Kansas passed through the city and the arrival of the railroad in 1876 made Fort Worth a major shipping point for the cattle industry.

63. A majority of Texas women in the late 19th century did not work outside the home.
The teaching profession in the 1870s was dominated by men

64. 1890 Views In Texarkana, Arkansas and Texas
1890 Views In Texarkana, Arkansas and Texas. This engraving is from the May 3, 1890 edition of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. It shows scenes of the following: Office of J. Duetschman, Broad Street, residence of W.A. Kelsey, Union Depot, Cosmopolitan Hotel, Texarkana Ice Co., Water Works, Kizer Lumber, Benefield Hotel, O.P. Taylor Real Estate, and Huckins House. Source:

65. 1888 Pictures of Dallas, Texas
1888 Pictures of Dallas, Texas. Hand colored engraved images titled, " Texas.-The City if Dallas, Its Progress and Its Prospects-Views of Its Public Buildings, Streets, Etc., City Hall Buildings, in course of Construction, view on Commerce Street, View on Elm Street, Alliance Exchange Building, Private Residences, Corner of Commerce and Elm Streets, Merchant's Exchange, Bird's Eye View of the Texas State Fair Grounds and Dallas Club House," from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Shows scenes of Dallas, Texas and its landmarks and buildings. Source: