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| 1850 |
Five Cayuse Indians, among them
Tiloukaikt, the tribe's chief, are hanged in Oregon City for the Whitman
massacre. All five had turned themselves in to spare their people
from persecution. "Did not your missionaries teach us that Christ
died to save his people?" Tiloukaikt said on his way to the gallows.
"So we die to save our people." |
 |
| 1850 |
California enters the Union.
 With
miners flooding the hillsides and devastating the land, California's
Indians find themselves deprived of their traditional food sources
and forced by hunger to raid the mining towns and other white settlements.
Miners retaliate by hunting Indians down and brutally abusing them.
The California legislature responds to the situation with an Indenture
Act which establishes a form of legal slavery for the native peoples
of the state by allowing whites to declare them vagrant and auction
off their services for up to four months. The law also permits whites
to indenture Indian children, with the permission of a parent or
friend, and leads to widespread kidnapping of Indian children, who
are then sold as "apprentices."
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|
| 1850 |
Complaints by Americans that miners
from Mexico, South America, Canada, Australia and other parts of the
world are taking gold that "belongs to the people of the United
States" prompt the California legislature to enact a Foreign
Miners' Tax which requires all miners who are not native or naturalized
citizens of the United States to obtain a license at the staggering
cost of $20 per month. In the diggings, foreign miners stage protest
demonstrations which quickly lead to violence, and within a year the
tax is repealed, only to be reinstituted in 1852 at the eventual rate
of $4 per month. |
|
| 1850 |
Levi Strauss begins manufacturing
heavyweight trousers for gold miners, made of the twilled cotton cloth
known as "genes" in France. Strauss had intended to make
tents, but finding no market, made a fortune in pants instead. |
|
| 1851 |
The United States and representatives of the Lakota, Cheyenne,
Arapaho, Crow, Arikara, Assiniboin, Mandan, Gros Ventre and other
tribes sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, intended to insure
peace on the plains. The treaty comes as increasing numbers of whites
-- gold seekers, settlers and traders -- make the trek westward,
and as Native Americans react to this invasion by attacking wagon
trains and, more often, warring against one another for territorial
advantage.
 The
treaty divides the plains into separate tracts assigned to each
tribe, who agree to remain on their own land, to cease their attacks
on each other and on white migrants and to recognize the right of
the United States to establish roads and military outposts within
their territories. In return, the United States pledges that each
tribe will retain possession of its assigned lands forever, that
they will be protected by U.S. troops from white intruders and that
they will each receive $50,000 in supplies and provisions annually
for the next fifty years. Both sides agree to settle any future
disputes, whether between tribes or between Indians and whites,
through restitution.
Unfortunately, the chiefs who sign the Fort Laramie Treaty do not
have the authority over their tribes that the United States negotiators
assume, and the negotiators themselves cannot deliver the protections
and fair treatment they promise.
|
|
| 1851 |
James Savage becomes the first
white man to enter Yosemite Valley while pursuing a band of Indians
who had raided several trading posts in the region. |
|
| 1851 |
Federal commissioners attempting
to halt the brutal treatment of Indians in California negotiate eighteen
treaties with various tribes and village groups, promising them 8.5
million acres of reservation lands. California politicians succeed
in having the treaties secretly rejected by Congress in 1852, leaving
the native peoples of the state homeless within a hostile white society. |
|
| 1851 |
John L. Soule, in an editorial
in the Terre Haute Express, advises: "Go West, young man, go
West." But New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley gets credit
for the line. |
|
| 1852 |
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, galvanizes
public opinion against slavery and stiffens its defenders in the
South.
 By
year's end, more than 20,000 Chinese immigrants have come to America,
all but 17 arriving at San Francisco to join in the search for gold.
Most are part of a Cantonese emigrant labor pool that has worked
throughout South Asia for generations, and they view California
as but another place to practice their itinerant trade. In most
cases, they arrive indebted to Chinese merchants who have paid for
their passage, and this network of debt, reinforced by village and
kinship loyalties, makes the immigrant Chinese community highly
organized and, at the same time, keeps it insulated from mainstream
American society. Thus, even in the remotest mining camp, the Chinese
live within a system of obligations that links back to their home.
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|
| 1853 |
Willamette University in Oregon
becomes the first university west of the Rockies. |
|
| 1853 |
Kong Chow Temple is established
in San Francisco, the first Buddhist temple in the United States. |
|
| 1853 |
Domingo Ghirardelli begins selling
rich chocolates to rich San Franciscans, establishing a confectionary
that will become a landmark of the city's skyline. |
|
| 1853 |
California begins confining its
remaining Indian population on harsh military reservations, but the
combination of legal enslavement and near genocide has already made
California the site of the worst slaughter of Native Americans in
United States history. As many as 150,000 Indians lived in the state
before 1849; by 1870, fewer than 30,000 will remain. |
|
| 1853 |
San Francisco's newspaper, the
Alta California, criticizes the emergence of Chinatown, a concentration
of about 25,000 Chinese immigrants along Dupont Street [now Grant
Avenue] in the heart of the city: "They seem to have driven out
everything and everybody else." In the gold fields, anti-Chinese
prejudice leads to a ruling that Chinese miners can only work claims
that white miners have abandoned as worthless. Still they manage,
through persistence and organization, to recover enough gold to stir
fresh resentment against them. |
|
| 1853 |
Mexico agrees to the Gadsden Purchase,
selling a strip of land running along Mexico's northern border between
Texas and California for $10 million. Intended as the route for a
railroad connecting the Mississippi to the Pacific, the territory
goes undeveloped when the approach of the Civil War causes the project
to be put aside. |
|
| 1854 |
British Baronet Sir George Gore
organizes a 6,000-mile buffalo hunting expedition on the Great Plains,
leaving Fort Leavenworth for a three-year adventure. By this time,
the increasing presence of travelers on the plains has divided the
buffalo into a northern and southern herd, where once they roamed
freely from Kansas into the Dakotas. Gore's expedition represents
a more direct threat to the herd, and to the Indian peoples for whom
the buffalo defines a way of life. |
|
| 1854 |
Conquering Bear, the Lakota chief
who signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, is killed when troops
from Fort Laramie storm into his encampment to arrest a warrior who
had shot a Mormon calf. Meeting resistance, the troops open fire.
All but one of the troopers is killed in the Lakota counterattack,
and in retaliation the army sends a force against the band which kills
86 and carries off 70 women and children. Though Conquering Bear had
offered to make restitution for the calf, as the treaty required,
the incident instead proves to the Lakota that Americans cannot be
trusted to keep their word. |
|
| 1854 |
After much bitter debate, Congress
approves the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repeals the Missouri Compromise
of 1820 by allowing these two territories to choose between slavery
and free soil. |
|
| 1854 |
The Republican Party, born out
of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, declares its opposition
to slavery and privilege, and its support for new railroads, free
homesteads and the opening of Western lands by free labor. |
|
| 1855 |
 A
pro-slavery legislature is elected in Kansas when 6,300 ballots are
cast in a region with only 3,000 voters. Intimidation and ballot-box
stuffing by "border ruffians" from neighboring Missouri
account for the result. Later in the year, free-soil supporters hold
a convention at Topeka, where they declare the pro-slavery legislature
illegal and draft a constitution calling for the territory's admission
to the union as a free state. |
|
| 1855 |
Abolitionists in New England and
other parts of the North form Emigrant Aid Societies to send anti-slavery
activists into Kansas, where they can vote to keep it free. In Georgia
and Alabama similar societies send in settlers who will vote in defense
of slavery. |
|
| 1856 |
Stirred by the impunity of the
pro-slavery forces in Kansas, John Brown, a militant abolitionist,
leads his sons in a night raid on pro-slavery settlers living along
Pottawatomie Creek. Five men are dragged from their cabins and massacred.
In reaction, pro-slavery forces rampage through Lawrence, Kansas,
a free-soil stronghold, killing one man. Daniel Woodson, the territory's
recently appointed pro-slavery governor, declares Kansas in a state
of open insurrection, as a force of 300 pro-slavery men attacks Brown
at Osawatomie, where he and forty supporters drive them off. Later
in the year, Brown leaves Kansas to continue his war against slavery
in the east. |
|
| 1856 |
John C. Fremont becomes the first
Republican candidate for the Presidency, pledging to eradicate the
"twin relics of barbarism," polygamy and slavery. He wins
11 states in the election, but loses to James Buchanan. |
|
| 1857 |
Responding to complaints by federal
officials in Utah and national outrage over the Mormon practice of
plural marriage, President James Buchanan sends U. S. troops to impose
federal law in Utah. To the Mormons, this appears the onset of another
persecution, which Brigham Young is determined to resist. Rather than
engage in battle, however, he attacks the federal troops' supply lines,
burning Fort Bridger, destroying supply trains and setting fire to
the plains to deprive the advancing army of forage for its horses.
At the same time, he readies a plan to evacuate and destroy Salt Lake
City, should the federal troops get through. |
|
| 1857 |
 In
this atmosphere, a wagon train of non-Mormon settlers moving through
southern Utah on their way to California falls victim to Mormon fears.
Paiutes besiege the settlers at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah
and call on local Mormons to help destroy them, or face attack from
the Indians themselves. Perceiving the settlers as part of the general
threat to their community, the Mormons, led by John D. Lee, lure them
from their wagon train and, with Paiute help, murder all but a few
of the children. Whether Brigham Young approved this Mountain Meadows
Massacre is unclear, but once aware of it, he does nothing to help
federal authorities find the murderers. |
|
| 1857 |
In Kansas, pro-slavery forces meeting
at Lecompton draft a constitution making the territory a slave state.
They submit to local voters only the question whether they approve
a "constitution with slavery." Free-soil supporters boycott
this election, and the "constitution with slavery" is submitted
to Congress. But the free-soilers convince the territory's acting
governor to convene a special session of the legislature, which calls
for a second vote on the Lecompton constitution itself. In this referendum,
Kansans reject the pro-slavery constitution by an overwhelming margin. |
|
| 1858 |
Political supporters secure a federal
pardon for the Mormon's alleged violations of federal law, and two
weeks later federal troops move through a nearly deserted Salt Lake
City to establish an outpost forty miles away, bringing the "Mormon
War" to a close. |
|
| 1858 |
President Buchanan, under pressure
from the South, urges Congress to admit Kansas to the union under
the Lecompton constitution. Instead the House calls for yet another
vote. Kansans again reject the pro-slavery constitution by nearly
ten-to-one. |
|
| 1858 |
The first non-stop stage coach
from St. Louis arrives in Los Angeles, completing the 2,600 mile trip
across the Southwest in 20 days. |
|
| 1859 |
Gold is discovered in Boulder Canyon,
Colorado, sparking the Pikes Peak gold rush which brings an estimated
100,000 fortune-hunters to the Rockies under the banner "Pikes
Peak or Bust." |
|
| 1859 |
Oregon enters the union as a free
state. |
|
| 1859 |
Silver is discovered at the Comstock
Lode in Nevada, turning nearby Virginia City into a boom town. |
|
| 1859 |
Free-soil and pro-slavery forces
meet in convention at Wyandotte, Kansas, drafting a constituion that
will make the territory a free state. Voters approve the new constitution,
but Southerners in Congress delay its acceptance. |
|
| 1859 |
 Juan
Cortina, member of a prominent Mexican family living near Brownsville
on the Rio Grande border, leads an uprising against the mistreatment
of Mexicans by Texans. He and his supporters occupy Brownsville and
proclaim the Republic of the Rio Grande with the shout, "Death
to the gringos!," but they leave the city unharmed. Cortina defeats
a force of Texas Rangers and local authorities, but when they are
reinforced by army troops, he retreats into Mexico where he continues
his guerilla war against Anglo injustice for another ten years. |
|
| 1859 |
John Brown is hanged for his attempt
to incite a slave uprising at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. |
|
| 1859 |
During this decade, a tidal wave
of 2.5 million immigrants enter the United States, including 66,000
Chinese. |
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