Source: Narrated by Zach Lamb
It's no surprise that St. Louis, Missouri, known for its famous Gateway Arch and nicknamed the Gateway to the West, would commission [INAUDIBLE] to paint a mural of the American West. Founded near where Lewis and Clark began their great expedition to the Pacific Coast, the city was a notable starting point for many people with dreams of moving west.
If you're a fan of Western history or fiction, you know that the West is a place of stories, legends, and stunning landscapes. But this subunit challenged some of the myths associated with Western settlement by examining the West and the South during the late 19th century, and uncovered some similarities between both regions. Both regions featured colonial economies.
Despite the dreams of Western individualism, fostered by the Homestead Act, or Henry Grady's proclamation of a New South, inhabitants in both regions extracted raw materials and shipped them to manufacturing centers in the northern United States or overseas.
In the South, the economy continued to revolve around the production of cotton, which was shipped to textile factories in the North. In the West, farmers grew wheat and ranchers produce cattle, transporting both to railroad depots that in turn, shipped them to processing plants in Chicago and other cities. Economic success in either region often depended on gaining access to outside capital and markets. This economic situation made both regions dependent upon outside interests, such as railroad companies and banks, which were primarily located in the northeastern United States.
When you apply the lens of race, you can see that all of this economic activity provided opportunities for immigrants and African-Americans, and both regions were racially diverse. You might have been surprised to learn that so many European immigrants settled in the West. By 1900, immigrants comprised 45% of North Dakota's population.
Meanwhile, African-Americans in the South had limited economic prospects. Many became sharecroppers and were ultimately trapped in a cycle of debt.
At the same time, white Southerners actively worked to deprive African-Americans of their political rights. As American Indians were relegated to reservations and boarding schools, African-Americans endured a system of Jim Crow segregation that deprived many of them of educational opportunities and the right to vote. Native Americans were further marginalized by the federal government's assimilation campaign.
At institutions, such as Carlisle, native children bore the brunt of this assimilation campaign as teachers gave them Christian names, required them to speak English, and forced them to abandon their parent's traditions. And the Dawes Act forced numerous tribes to abandon traditions of communal ownership, and dispossessed them of their lands and resources. Unfortunately, both regions were settings for violence and racism.
By 1890, while US soldiers killed approximately 150 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, and the US Census Bureau announced the closing of the American frontier, African-Americans in the South endured lynchings or other forms of racial violence and intimidation. What other lenses besides race can you apply when examining the West and the South to discover new similarities or differences between the regions?
As rediscovered during the research for her mural, the West was a much more diverse and different place than historian Frederick Jackson Turner envisioned in his 1893 Frontier Thesis. Unlike Turner's argument, the West was not all that different from other regions in the United States, especially the South. Thus, one way that historians have challenged Turner's Thesis is by asking new questions and applying different lenses.
