Promoting the West

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“Are the Indians troublesome to settlers?” rhetorically asked a Northern Pacific guide issued in 1873 to promote settlement of Washington and Oregon. “No. There are but few Indians in Washington Territory, and these have been for many years on reservations, living by fishing and agriculture.” They have “long since abandoned all thought of hostility to the whites, and have mostly adopted civilized customs and habits of industry.” Transcontinental railroads increased Uncle Sam’s ability to control American Indian populations in the West and prevent conflict, or so claimed another of the Northern Pacific’s 1873 brochures: “The Indian question in the Northwest cannot in any other way be so promptly, so thoroughly, so economically and so humanely settled as by the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad.”

When in 1913 the Northern Pacific issued a brochure to promote summer vacations on the Pacific Coast, enough time had elapsed for Indians to be thoroughly transformed from Wild West natives inspiring fear and antipathy into stalwart agrarian capitalists—if not also into tourist attractions. One brochure wordsmith jauntily observed that the railroad’s main line “runs through the heart of the old Indian and buffalo country made historic by the many encounters between the various Indian tribes and the old fur traders and early miners, and later by the campaigns against the Indians by Generals Hancock, Terry, Howard, Custer, Miles and Gibbon. Now the buffalo and other game are replaced by cattle, sheep and horses; the Indians and their tepees by white settlers and their comfortable homes. In a word, the country has been transformed by Immigration and Irrigation. Even the Indians now have their farms and irrigation works.”

Along the numerous rail lines that by the 1880s bisected the Great Plans, new settlements sprang up like Kansas wildflowers—and many died just as quickly. At that time, what perhaps most impressed and sobered transcontinental train travelers was what was missing among the Great Plains wildflowers. Keen observers of the transformation of the American West fretted aloud over the rapid disappearance of wild animals. Where were the immense herds of bison that had so recently roamed freely across the prairies? Only a generation or two earlier, travelers by stagecoach had marveled at a spectacle of nature as they paused for minutes and even hours as innumerable bison crossed the overland trail ahead of them.

It had been easy for early travelers to imagine that western wildlife was abundant beyond belief, and that the trigger-happy man who relieved the boredom of an overland stage journey by using bison, antelope, prairie dogs, grouse and other wild creatures for target practice could never diminish their numbers. The sight of a great moving mass of dark and shaggy bison, recalled Frank Root, a veteran stage driver on the Overland Route across the Great Plains, “was one greatly admired by all the passengers” aboard a coach. Root added that it was “genuine sport for some of the stage passengers, even while moving along at a lively gait, to pull their revolvers and shoot out of the windows of the coach at a herd of antelope per­haps a few hundred yards distant.” The same “sport” helped to occupy the time of bored passengers aboard steamboats on the two-month long journey up the Muddy Missouri from Saint Louis to Fort Benton, Montana Territory, in the 1860s. Missouri River steamboatman Charles Bailey recalled the “frenzy of excitement” that erupted when passengers saw a herd of about fifty antelope plunge into the water and swim rapidly toward the opposite shore. Bailey estimated that nearly 500 shots were fired into the herd.

Hunting for sport—if that is what one called randomly targeting wildlife from a slow-moving stagecoach or the deck of a Missouri River steamboat—was common on the long journeys that required weeks of hard traveling. The popular sport continued into the early railroad era in the West. Elizabeth Cuter, wife of Lt. Col. George Custer, recalled, “When the sharp shrieks of the train whistle announced a herd of buffaloes the rifles were snatched, and in the struggle to twist around for a good aim out of the narrow window the barrel of the muzzle of the firearm passed dangerously near the ear of any scared woman who had the temerity to travel in those tempestuous days.….” White men not only hunted buffalo for sport but also to provide meat for the railroad workers. William “Buffalo Bill’ Cody, for example, might have killed more than 4,000 buffalo as a meat hunter for the Union Pacific. What’s more, the railroads meant that buffalo meat and robes could be shipped in greater numbers and at lower costs to mark ets in the East. By the early 1880s, train passengers were crossing the Great Plains without seeing a single buffalo.

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