|
| |
|
| 1880 |
President Benjamin Hayes signs
the Chinese Exclusion Treaty, which reverses the open-door policy
set in 1868 and places strict limits both on the number of Chinese
immigrants allowed to enter the United States and on the number allowed
to become naturalized citizens. |
 |
| 1880 |
Backed by the National Women's
Christian Temperance Union, Kansas Governor John St. John forces through
prohibition legislation, making Kansas -- the site of towns like Dodge
City where the saloon has been almost a symbol of civic life -- the
first state in the nation to "go dry." |
|
| 1881 |
 Sitting
Bull returns from Canada with a small band of followers to surrend
er to General Alfred Terry, the man who five years before had directed
the campaign that ended in the Lakota Chief’s victory at Little Bighorn.
After insulting his old adversary and the United States, Sitting Bull
has his young son hand over his rifle, saying, "I wish it to
be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my
rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how
he is going to make a living." |
|
| 1881 |
Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A
Century of Dishonor, the first detailed examination of the federal
government’s treatment of Native Americans in the West. Her findings
shock the nation with proof that empty promises, broken treaties and
brutality helped pave the way for white pioneers. |
|
| 1881 |
Late summer brings the last big
cattle drive to Dodge City. With livestock plentiful on the plains,
the long trek up the Western Trail is no longer profitable, and most
states now prohibit driving out-of-state cattle across their borders.
The increasing use of barbed wire to enclose farms and grazing land
has ended the era of the open range. In the fifteen years since Texas
cowboys first hit the trail, as many as two million longhorns have
been driven to market in Dodge. |
|
| 1881 |
Legendary outlaw Billy the Kid,
charged with more than 21 murders in a brief lifetime of crime, is
finally brought to justice by Sheriff Pat Garrett, who trails The
Kid for more than six months before killing him with a single shot
at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. |
|
| 1881 |
Tombstone, Arizona, Deputy Marshall
Wyatt Earp and his brothers gun down the Clantons in a showdown at
the O.K. Corral. |
|
| 1882 |
 Intensifying
its anti-Chinese policies, Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act,
which completely prohibits both immigration from China and the naturalization
of Chinese immigrants already in the United States for a period of
ten years. The bill comes amid increasing outbreaks of anti-Chinese
violence, stirred up by the belief that low-paid Chinese workers are
taking jobs away from Americans. Within the year, immigration from
China drops from 40,000 in 1881 to just 23. |
|
| 1882 |
Congress passes the Edmunds Law,
making polygamy a federal crime punishable by up to five years in
prison and denying convicted polygamists the right to vote, to hold
office and to serve on juries. The law increases federal pressure
on Mormons to renounce their practice of plural marriage and sends
many Mormon leaders into hiding. |
|
| 1882 |
Jesse James, the notorious outlaw
who was a veteran of Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War, is
shot in the back by Robert Ford, a kinsman who hoped to collect a
$5,000 reward. James' death ends the career of an outlaw gang that
terrorized the West for more than a decade. |
|
| 1883 |
Texas purchases The Alamo from the Catholic Church to preserve
it as an historic shrine.
 "Buffalo
Bill" Cody stages his first Wild West Show at the Omaha fairgrounds,
featuring a herd of buffalo and a troupe of cowboys, Indians and
vaqueros who re-enact a cattle round-up, a stagecoach hold-up and
other scenes drawn from Cody's own life on the frontier.
|
|
| 1883 |
A delegation of U.S. Senators meets
with bitter resistance from Sitting Bull when they propose opening
part of the Lakota's reservation to white settlers. Despite the old
chief's objections, the land transfer proceeds as planned. |
|
| 1883 |
The Northern Pacific Railroad,
connecting the northwestern states to points east, is finally completed,
after a 19-year struggle against treacherous terrain and intermitent
financing. Along the line, crews blast a 3,850-foot tunnel through
solid granite and construct a 1,800-foot trestle. As a result, the
round trip to the Columbia River that took Lewis and Clark two-and-a-half
years in 1803 now takes just nine days. |
|
| 1883 |
Buffalo hunters gather on the northern
Plains for the last large buffalo kill, among them a Harvard-educated
New York assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt, who hopes to bag a
trophy before the species disappears. Hunters have already destroyed
the southern herd, and by 1884, except for small domestic herds kept
by sentimental ranchers, there are only scattered remnants of the
animal that more than any other symbolizes the American West. |
|
| 1883 |
A group of clergymen, government
officials and social reformers calling itself “The Friends of the
Indian” meets in upstate New York to develop a strategy for bringing
Native Americans into the mainstream of American life. Their decisions
set the course for U.S. policy toward Native Americans over the next
generation and result in the near destruction of Native American culture. |
|
| 1884 |
When his wife and mother die within
hours of one another in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt heads west
to become a Dakota cattle rancher and escape his grief. He will emerge
from the experience with an attachment to the Western landscape and
a respect for Western society that help shape his conservation and
land development policies as President. |
|
| 1885 |
President Grover Cleveland warns
so-called "Boomers" to stay off Indian Territory lands in
present-day Oklahoma. |
|
| 1885 |
Federal troops are called in to
restore order in Rock Springs, Wyoming, after British and Swedish
miners go on a rampage against the Chinese, killing 28 and driving
hundreds more out of town. This "Rock Springs Massacre"
follows a similar race riot in Tacoma, Washington, where whites force
more than 700 Chinese immigrants to spend the night crowded onto open
wagons, then ship them to Portland, Oregon, the next day. |
|
| 1886 |
Anti-Chinese mobs in Seattle kill
five and destroy parts of the city before forcing 200 Chinese aboard
ships bound for San Francisco. Leaders of the race riot vow to sweep
the city clean of Chinese within the month. |
|
| 1886 |
Geronimo, described by one follower
as “the most intelligent and resourceful...most vigorous and farsighted”
of the Apache leaders, surrenders to General Nelson A. Miles in Skeleton
Canyon, Arizona, after more than a decade of guerilla warfare against
American and Mexican settlers in the Southwest. The terms of surrender
require Geronimo and his tribe to settle in Florida, where the Army
hopes he can be contained. |
|
| 1887 |
 Congress
passes the Dawes Severalty Act, imposing a system of private land
ownership on Native American tribes for whom communal land ownership
has been a centuries-old tradition. Individual Indians become eligible
to receive land allotments of up to 160 acres, together with full
U.S. citizenship. Tribal lands remaining after all allotments have
been made are to be declared surplus and sold. Proponents of the law
believe that it will help speed the Indians’ assimilation into mainstream
society by giving them an incentive to live as farmers and ranchers,
earning a profit from their own personal property and private initiative.
Others see in the law an opportunity to buy up surplus tribal lands
for white settlers. When the allotment system finally ends, Indian
landholdings are reduced from 138 million acres in 1887 to only 48
million acres in 1934. And with their land many Native Americans lose
a fundamental structuring principle of tribal life as well. |
|
| 1887 |
Increasing pressure on the Mormons,
Congress passes the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporates the
Mormon church, confiscates its real estate and other properties, and
abolishes women's suffrage in Utah. The law effectively destroys the
political, economic and social system by which the leaders of the
Mormon church have guided and governed their society, imposing federal
authority in its place. |
|
| 1887 |
A fare war between competing rail
lines and the inducements of eager land speculators bring newcomers
to Los Angeles by the trainload; 120,000 arrive in 1887, drawn by
the promise of pure air, warm sunshine and prosperity. Within a few
years, the city is transformed and the Californios who have lived
there for more than a century are suddenly regarded as strangers in
their own land. |
|
| 1888 |
 Deep
snows and raging blizzards, following a dry summer, devastate the
cattle herds of the northern Plains. When the snows finally melt,
hundreds of thousands of carcasses litter the range, leading the ranchers
who must gather them up to call the winter of '88 "The Great
Die-Up." |
|
| 1889 |
Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, awakes
from a three-day trance to teach his tribe the Ghost Dance, with which
they can restore the earth to the way it was before the whites arrived
in the West. His teachings will soon touch many tribes across the
West, stirring a spiritual revival that whites nervously misinterpret
as a return to hostilities. |
|
| 1889 |
 President
Benjamin Harrison authorizes opening unoccupied lands in the Indian
Territory to white settlement, an order put into effect on April 22
at noon, when a gunshot gives settlers the signal to cross the border
and stake their claims. Within nine hours, the Oklahoma Land Rush
transforms almost two million acres of tribal land into thousands
of individual land claims. Many of the most desirable plots are taken
by "Sooners," so called because they crossed into the territory
sooner than was permitted. |
|
| 1889 |
At the urging of the National Farmers'
Alliance, Kansas adopts first-of-its-kind legislation regulating trusts,
providing an early portent of the agrarian-based progressive movement
preparing to sweep through the West. |
|
| 1889 |
Farm and labor representatives
meet with prohibitionists in Salem, Oregon, to form a progressive
Union Party. |
|
| 1889 |
Washington, Montana and the Dakotas
join the Union. |
