American frontier

• 1. Introduction

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  The American frontier, also called the Old West and popularly the Wild West, was declared finished by a government statistician in 1890. William Rush Merriam, the Superintendent of the Census, told the country that its unsettled land had been chopped into scattered pockets of settlement. His verdict was blunt. In his words, "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."

  The Wild West did not end with that sentence. Its legends and folklore, known together as the frontier myth, grew into the Western genre, which now ranks among the defining features of American national identity. Film, television, novels, comic books, video games, children's toys and costumes all drew on it. Popular media typically exaggerated the romance, anarchy and chaotic violence of the period to heighten the drama.

  So what was the frontier in fact? Where did its line run, and who had the power to draw it? Who crossed that line, who already stood on the far side, and what did each of them pay? And how did a record of farms, mail routes and land offices turn into a world of gunfighters in the popular imagination?

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• 2. Where the Line Fell

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  The Census Bureau used a plain yardstick for frontier territory: fewer than 2 people per square mile, or 0.77 people per square kilometer. The frontier line marked the outer edge of European-American settlement into that thinly peopled country. Starting from the first permanent settlements on the East Coast, the line moved steadily westward between the 1600s and the 1900s. It also jogged north into Maine and New Hampshire, south into Florida, and east from California into Nevada.

  Los Angeles and Salt Lake City show how untidy the line could be. Settlements appeared far beyond it, on the West Coast and in the deep interior. The "West" meant the recently settled area near the boundary. For that reason, parts of the Midwest and the American South, though no longer called western, share a frontier heritage with the modern western states.

  Historian Richard W. Slatta points out that definitions of the region vary. Some historians place the American West beyond the 98th meridian, at 98 degrees west longitude. Others count every land west of the Mississippi or Missouri rivers. The popular folk frontier focuses on the country west of the Mississippi, meaning the Midwest, Texas, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest and the West Coast. Public attention fixed on this region, especially the Southwest, from the 1850s to the 1910s.

  Historians have debated at length when the era began, when it ended, and what its key sub-periods were. The label "Old West" is sometimes applied to the years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until the Census Bureau stopped recording western frontier settlement as its own category after the 1890 census. The Bureau's habits outlived that decision. The 1900 census still showed a westward frontier line, and Merriam's successors continued the practice until the 1920 census.

  Other authorities pick later endings. The Library of Congress and the University of Oxford often cite dates in the early 1900s, typically within the first two decades and before American entry into World War I. One school of thought prefers a wider frame called "The Western Civil War of Incorporation," which runs from the 1850s to 1919. It gathers the events people link with the Wild West: violent clashes over encroaching settlement, the removal and assimilation of Native peoples, the consolidation of property in large corporations and government, vigilantism, and attempts to enforce law on outlaws.

  By the 1910 census, the frontier had shrunk into divided areas with no single westward line of settlement. The cause was a rush of agricultural homesteaders in the first two decades of the 20th century. They took up more acreage than all the homestead grants of the entire 19th century combined.

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• 3. Turner and His Critics

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  In 1893, the theorist Frederick Jackson Turner presented his Frontier Thesis. He argued that the frontier was a process that transformed Europeans into a new people, the Americans. In his telling, their values centered on equality, democracy and optimism, along with individualism, self-reliance and even violence. Turner asserted that the frontier "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people."

  Free land was the engine of his argument. Turner returned again and again to the pull of cheap farmland on pioneering Americans. "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development," he wrote. His ideas have inspired generations of historians, and critics, to examine many separate American frontiers.

  Turner grew up in Wisconsin during its last frontier stage, and he saw its layers on his travels around the state. Historian Mark Wyman calls Wisconsin a "palimpsest," a surface written over again and again by different forces. Wyman names a Native American frontier, a French frontier, an English frontier, a fur-trade frontier, a mining frontier and a logging frontier. The coming of the railroad ended the last of them.

  Merle Curti, one of Turner's last students, tested the thesis against local records from Wisconsin. He found that between 1840 and 1860 the poorest groups gained rapidly in land ownership. Many rose to political leadership at the local level. Even landless young farmworkers soon obtained farms of their own. Curti concluded that free land created opportunity and democracy for European immigrants and old-stock Yankees alike.

  The historians Hine and Faragher describe frontier history as the creation and defense of communities, the use of land, and the formation of states. They call it "a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples and cultures." That double edge matters, because not every historian shared Turner's glow.

  Louis Hacker painted a harsher picture of Kentucky farms around 1812. Farms for sale had ten to fifty acres cleared, log houses, fences, and peach or apple orchards, with wheat, corn and hemp in the fields. Yet Hacker judged the farming wasteful. Grass seed went unsown, one crop was planted until the soil gave out, and manure never returned to the fields. In his view, "Hunger was the goad" that kept pioneers moving west. Hacker added that a second wave of settlers repaired the damage and farmed more sustainably.

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• 4. Before the Republic

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  Jamestown, Virginia, settled by the English in 1607, marks the traditional start of the frontier. Until about 1680, the frontier meant any part of the continent's interior beyond the fringe of towns along the Atlantic coast. English, French, Spanish and Dutch settlers each expanded in different ways.

  Only a few thousand French migrated to Canada. These habitants settled in villages along the St. Lawrence River and built stable communities. French fur traders ranged widely through the Great Lakes and the midwest but seldom settled down. French settlement stayed limited to tiny villages such as Kaskaskia, Illinois, and a larger settlement around New Orleans.

  In what is now New York state, the Dutch set up fur trading posts in the Hudson River valley. Rich landowners called patroons received large grants and brought in tenant farmers, who built compact, permanent villages. The result was dense rural settlement in upstate New York, but the Dutch did not push westward.

  On the English seaboard, land ownership came first. The typical New England settlement was compact and small, covering under a square mile. Unlike Britain, where a few landlords held most of the land, ownership in America was cheap, easy and widespread. It brought independence and a vote in local and provincial elections. Conflict with Native Americans in New England arose over a political question, namely who would rule.

  Northern areas that reached the frontier stage by 1700 generally had poor transportation. Commercial farming was hard, so these areas stayed with subsistence agriculture. By the 1760s they were highly egalitarian, according to historian Jackson Turner Main. Wealthy speculators stayed at home, so no rich resident lived there. The landless poor were few, and most families owned land while still being poor. A typical community had a storekeeper, a minister, perhaps a doctor, several landless laborers, and farmers for everyone else.

  North Carolina was representative of the South. Frontier districts there, such as the Appalachian Mountains region, lacked transport and stayed with subsistence farming, resembling the egalitarian North except for a larger upper class of slaveowners. Frontier districts of 1700 with good river connections went another way. Rich men bought the best land and worked it with slaves. The area stopped being frontier and became a stratified society of white landowning gentry, a small middle class, many landless or tenant white farmers, and a growing enslaved population at the bottom. Unlike the North, with its small towns and cities, the South stayed overwhelmingly rural.

  War in Europe repeatedly spilled across the Atlantic. In the French and Indian War, France made up for its small colonial population by enlisting Native war parties as allies. The conflict belonged to the worldwide Seven Years' War, which ended in complete victory for Britain. Under the peace treaty of 1763, France gave up practically everything. Spain received the lands west of the Mississippi River, plus Florida and New Orleans. Britain took the lands east of the Mississippi and what is now Canada.

  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 briefly forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 reopened most of those western lands to frontiersmen. Americans were already crossing into western Pennsylvania, what is now West Virginia, the Ohio Country, Kentucky and Tennessee. Young George Washington promoted settlement in western Virginia on land the Royal government had awarded to him and his soldiers for service in Virginia's militia.

  In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail for the Transylvania Company from Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky. It was later extended to the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. The Wilderness Road was steep and rough, passable only on foot or horseback, yet it was the best route for thousands of settlers. The danger was real. In 1784 alone, Native attackers killed over 100 travelers on the road. One victim of a raiding party that year was Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, who was scalped near Louisville.

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• 5. Jefferson's Purchase

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  Thomas Jefferson thought of himself as a man of the frontier, and his Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the nation. It cost $15 million, about $0.04 per acre. Federalists opposed the expansion. Jeffersonians hailed the chance to create millions of new farms for land-owning yeomen. They imagined a republic built on agriculture instead of commerce, lightly governed, and resting on self-reliance and virtue.

  The $15 million paid France for its sovereignty under international law. Native tribes still held the land itself. Between 1803 and the 1870s, the federal government bought it from the tribes then in possession. Accountants and courts in the 20th century added up the payments, which included future cash, food, horses, cattle, supplies, buildings, schooling and medical care. In cash terms, the tribes in the Louisiana Purchase area received about $2.6 billion, or nearly $9 billion in 2016 dollars. Further sums went to Natives east of the Mississippi and to those in parts of the west outside the purchase.

  Jefferson planned to explore the land even before the purchase. He charged Lewis and Clark to "explore the Missouri River" and judge whether it, or another river such as the Columbia, Oregon or Colorado, offered the most direct commercial route to the Pacific. He also told the expedition to study the region's tribes, including their morals, language and culture. The list continued with weather, soil, rivers, commercial trading, and animal and plant life.

  Other explorers followed. In 1805-1806, Army lieutenant Zebulon Pike led 20 soldiers in search of the headwaters of the Mississippi. On his return, he sighted the Colorado peak that now bears his name. Major Stephen Harriman Long led the Yellowstone and Missouri expeditions of 1819-1820. In 1823, he labeled the Great Plains arid and useless, and the "Great American Desert" reputation that resulted discouraged settlement there for decades.

  Naturalists Thomas Nuttall and John Bradbury traveled up the Missouri River in 1811, documenting and drawing plants and animals. George Catlin painted accurate pictures of Native American culture, and the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer made compelling landscapes and portraits. John James Audubon classified and painted 500 species of birds in minute detail, published as Birds of America.

  John Jacob Astor moved fastest on the commercial side. His Fort Astoria, later called Fort George, stood at the mouth of the Columbia River and became the first permanent white settlement in that area, though it never made him money. He founded the American Fur Company to break the hold of the Hudson's Bay Company. By 1820, Astor had absorbed independent traders into a profitable monopoly, and he left the business in 1834 as a multi-millionaire.

  Trappers and hunters ranged ahead of the settlers, hunting beaver and other skins for shipment to Europe. They were the first Europeans in much of the Old West and the first to form working relationships with Native Americans there. They also learned the terrain, including South Pass through the central Rocky Mountains, discovered about 1812 and later a major route for settlers to Oregon and Washington.

  By 1820, a "brigade-rendezvous" system sent company men on long cross-country expeditions in brigades, bypassing many tribes. It also encouraged "free trappers" to explore on their own. At the end of the season, trappers met at river ports along the Green River, the Upper Missouri and the Upper Mississippi to turn in their goods for pay. St. Louis was the largest of these rendezvous towns.

  Fashion ended the business. By 1830, silk hats had replaced beaver hats, and demand for expensive American furs collapsed. The trade in beaver fur virtually ceased by 1845. That closed the era of mountain men and scouts such as Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass, Davy Crockett and Jack Omohundro.

  The most famous explorer was John Charles Frémont, an Army officer in the Corps of Topographical Engineers. His talent for self-promotion earned him the sobriquet "Pathmarker of the West" and the presidential nomination of the new Republican Party in 1856. In the 1840s he crossed the Rocky Mountains by five different routes and mapped parts of Oregon and California. In 1848-1849 he was sent to find a central mountain route for the proposed transcontinental railroad, but his party got lost and was trapped by heavy snow. His reports mixed adventure with scientific data and practical advice for travelers, and they inspired many to head west. Goetzman called them "monumental in its breadth, a classic of exploring literature."

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• 6. Land for Sale

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  In 1788, American pioneers founded Marietta, Ohio, the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had abolished slavery in the area north of the Ohio River and promised statehood once a territory reached a threshold population. Ohio met it in 1803. A frontier district first became a territory, with an elected legislature and a governor appointed by the president. When the population reached 100,000, it could apply for statehood. Frontiersmen often dropped the legal formalities and restricted voting favored by eastern upper classes, and they adopted more democracy and equality.

  Transylvania University, founded in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1780, had little competition on the western frontier. It offered a law school as well as undergraduate and medical programs. It drew politically ambitious young men from across the Southwest. Among them were 50 future United States senators, 101 representatives, 36 governors and 34 ambassadors, along with Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederacy.

  The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the pattern for turning public land into private farms. Exploration teams first scouted the land and noted Native habitation, and treaties then transferred title from the resident tribes. Surveyors marked the ground into squares six miles (10 km) on each side. These were divided into one-square-mile blocks and then into 160-acre lots. Townships were formed and sold at public auction, and unsold land could be bought from a land office for a minimum of $1.25 per acre.

  The government also paid veterans and others with "land script." The script traded on a financial market, often below the legal minimum price per acre. That gave speculators, investors and developers another cheap way to assemble large tracts. Farmers formed "claims clubs" to counter the speculators and buy larger holdings themselves.

  From 1790 to 1820, both parties wanted to grow the economy, keep skilled workers in the East, pay off the national debt, and tie the West closely to the settled states with little risk of a breakaway movement. By the 1830s, the West was filling with squatters who held no legal deed. The Jacksonian Democrats favored them with promises of rapid access to cheap land. Henry Clay was alarmed by the "lawless rabble" heading west, which he feared would undermine a stable, law-abiding middle-class republic. Rich southerners looked for good land on which to set up slave plantations.

  The Free Soil movement of the 1840s called for low-cost land for free white farmers. The new Republican Party turned that demand into law in 1862 with the Homestead Law. It offered a free 160-acre homestead to any adult, male or female, black or white, native-born or immigrant, who worked the land for five years. John Quincy Adams and the Whigs had wanted a moderated pace with prices high enough to cover government costs, while the Democrats tolerated a wild scramble at very low prices. The Pacific Railroad Act passed in the same year. By 1890 the result was millions of new farms in the Plains states, many run by new immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia.

  The federal government played a supporting part in a movement driven mainly by private profit. By the 20th century, the General Land Office in the Interior Department managed federal lands, and after 1891 the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture did the same. After 1900, dam building and flood control became major concerns. The steamboat, first used on the Ohio River in 1811, made cheap travel possible on the Mississippi and Missouri systems. In 1819, the Army's steamboat Western Engineer combined a very shallow draft with one of the earliest stern wheels. Colonel Henry Atkinson developed keelboats with hand-powered paddle wheels between 1819 and 1825.

  The postal system quietly bound the frontier to the East. Letters from early settlers carried information and boosterism that encouraged more migration. They also helped scattered families stay in touch and let merchants in the West deal with wholesalers and factories back east. Newspapers such as the New York Weekly Tribune traveled by mail and helped politicians in different states coordinate.

  After the Civil War, the government subdivided several territories to prepare them for statehood, and it standardized how territorial governments were supervised. This brought much red tape and a larger federal bureaucracy. A territorial governor was a political appointee beholden to Washington, and he doubled as militia commander and local superintendent of Native affairs. Mark Twain, who worked for his brother, the secretary of Nevada, wrote that his government "snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy." Corrupt "territorial rings" of local politicians and business owners, backed by federal patronage, embezzled from Native tribes and local citizens, especially in the Dakota and New Mexico territories.

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• 7. War, Gold and Wagons

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  Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and took over Spain's northern possessions, stretching from Texas to California. American caravans soon carried goods to Santa Fe along the Santa Fe Trail, a journey of 870 miles that took 48 days from Kansas City, then known as Westport. From Santa Fe, the trade route called El Camino Real carried American manufactured goods south into Mexico and brought back silver, furs and mules. The Old Spanish Trail connected Santa Fe to California.

  Spanish and Mexican officials attracted American settlers to Texas on generous terms. Stephen F. Austin became an "empresario," holding contracts to bring in immigrants, which made him the de facto political and military commander of the area. Tension rose after a failed attempt in 1826 to found the independent nation of Fredonia. William Travis led a "war party" demanding independence, while Austin led a "peace party" seeking more autonomy. When Santa Anna turned dictator and sent soldiers to curb immigration, newcomers kept arriving anyway. By 1835-30,000 Anglos with 3,000 slaves lived in Texas.

  The Texas Revolution erupted in 1836. After losses at the Alamo and Goliad, the Texians won the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Sam Houston, their commander-in-chief and a future president of the Republic of Texas, famously shouted a call to remember the Alamo and Goliad. Congress declined to annex Texas at first, stalemated over slavery and regional power. The republic stood independent for nearly a decade before joining the Union in 1845 as the 28th state. Mexico, which still called Texas a runaway province, threatened war if annexation went ahead.

  War came after the Mexican army killed 16 American soldiers in disputed territory. Congressman Abraham Lincoln and other Whigs denounced the conflict, though it was popular outside New England. American forces seized New Mexico with little resistance and quickly took California. General Zachary Taylor won a series of battles in northern Mexico. General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz and marched a 12,000-man force to Mexico City, winning the final battle at Chapultepec.

  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded California and New Mexico to the United States for $18.5 million. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added southern Arizona, needed for a railroad route to California. In all, Mexico gave up half a million square miles (1.3 million km2). The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in the new lands, never passed Congress. The Compromise of 1850 settled the matter temporarily, and California entered the Union that year as a free state.

  In 1846, about 10,000 Californios lived in California, mostly on cattle ranches around what is now Los Angeles. Gold turned up in the north as the war with Mexico ended, and the news spread worldwide. Thousands of "forty-niners" arrived by sailing around South America, taking a shortcut through disease-ridden Panama, or walking the California trail. The population passed 200,000 in 1852, mostly in the gold districts east of San Francisco.

  San Francisco housing was so scarce that abandoned ships, left by crews who headed for the mines, became temporary lodging. In the goldfields, typical meals were pork, beans and whiskey. With no courts or law officers, miners improvised a legal system modeled on "mining codes" from other mining communities abroad. Each camp set its own rules and often decided cases by popular vote. Native Americans, Mexicans and Chinese generally received the harshest sentences.

  Over 250,000 miners found more than $200 million in gold in five years, but fewer and fewer struck it rich, and most ended exhausted and broke. Mining companies soon bought up the claims and hired low-paid salaried miners. From 1852 through 1883, hydraulic mining washed vast amounts of waste into river systems and did heavy ecological damage. Public outcry over ruined farmland finally led to its prohibition.

  The Comstock Lode in Nevada, rich in silver, produced the boomtowns of Virginia City, Carson City and Silver City. Silver wealth, more than gold, fueled the growth of San Francisco in the 1860s and the rise of wealthy families such as that of George Hearst. Across the mountains from New Mexico to California to South Dakota, hundreds of hard-rock mining sites appeared. Temporary camps sprang up overnight, and most became ghost towns once the ore ran out.

  To reach the West Coast, some travelers sailed around South America on a six-month voyage, and others crossed the treacherous Panama isthmus. About 400,000 walked an overland route of more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km), usually in wagon trains that left from Missouri under an experienced wagonmaster. By 1836, when the first migrant wagon train formed in Independence, Missouri, a trail had been cleared as far as Fort Hall, Idaho. Trails pushed on until they reached the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and this network became the Oregon Trail.

  The eastern half of the route also served the California Trail from 1843, the Mormon Trail from 1847 and the Bozeman Trail from 1863. In the "Wagon Train of 1843," some 700 to 1,000 emigrants headed for Oregon, and missionary Marcus Whitman led the wagons on the last stretch. In 1846, the Barlow Road opened around Mount Hood, giving wagons a rough but passable route from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley of about 2,000 miles. Some travelers moved eastward on the trail. A few were defeated and discouraged, some carried gold and silver, and most were "gobacks" returning for their families. Their stories fed both excitement and warnings about the far West.

  Not everyone arrived. Snakebites, wagon accidents, stampedes, malnutrition, exposure, avalanches, violence and disease killed emigrants, and dysentery, typhoid and cholera were among the most common illnesses. The Donner Party was trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847, and half of the 90 people traveling with it died of starvation and exposure. Some survivors resorted to cannibalism. Another case of cannibalism involved Alferd Packer on his trek to Colorado in 1874.

  Communication improved faster than the roads. In 1858, John Butterfield launched a stage service that covered the route from Saint Louis to San Francisco in 24 days. William Russell started the Pony Express in 1860, hoping to win a government mail contract, and cut delivery time to ten days. He set up over 150 stations about 15 miles apart. The Pony Express lasted only 18 months. On the 24th of October 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph linked Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco, eight years before the transcontinental railroad opened.

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• 8. Contested Ground

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  In 1813, militia under Governor William Henry Harrison beat a Native-British alliance at the Battle of the Thames in Canada. The death in battle of the Native leader Tecumseh dissolved the coalition of hostile tribes. Andrew Jackson had already defeated the Creeks, and in 1814 he ended the Native military threat in the Southeast at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. Frontiersmen did most of the fighting with little help from the Army or the federal government.

  The Treaty of Ghent, signed toward the end of 1814, closed the War of 1812. American diplomats rejected a British plan for a Native state south of the Great Lakes. They stated that the United States intended to acquire Native lands only "peaceably, and with their free consent." They also refused to accept a policy of halting national growth just to preserve "a perpetual desert."

  In Minnesota in 1862, attacks by Dakota tribes at the Lower Sioux Agency, New Ulm and Hutchinson killed between 300 and 400 white settlers. State militia fought back, and Lincoln sent in federal troops. Battles at Fort Ridgely, Birch Coulee, Fort Abercrombie and Wood Lake marked a six-week war that ended in an American victory. The government tried 425 Natives for murder, and 303 were sentenced to death. Lincoln pardoned the majority, but 38 leaders were hanged.

  With fewer Union troops in the West during the Civil War, untrained militias faced hostile tribes. In late 1864, militia struck the winter quarters of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, full of women and children, at the Sand Creek massacre in eastern Colorado. That same year, Kit Carson and the Army trapped the entire Navajo tribe in New Mexico and moved it onto a reservation.

  The Army established a chain of military posts across the frontier after 1850 to stop fighting among tribes and between tribes and settlers. U.S. Secretary of War John B. Floyd described the policy in 1857 as a line of infantry posts near Native homelands. His reasoning was that any raid on white settlements would meet prompt retaliation at the raiders' own homes. Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott and Thomas Jesup preferred fewer, larger forts. Floyd's plan cost more, but settlers and the public wanted soldiers close by. Even Davis conceded that concentration would leave parts of the frontier unprotected. Army officers typically moved from fort to fort for whole careers, and combat was rare.

  Kansas became the nation's argument over slavery in miniature. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the decision to the voters on the ground. Anti-slavery "Jayhawkers" financed the migration of settlers committed to their cause, and pro-slavery advocates answered with settlers from Missouri. In all, 56 men were killed before the violence abated in 1859. Pro-slavery forces held control by 1860, though Kansas had only two slaves. The anti-slavery side took over, and Kansas became a free state in 1861.

  The trans-Mississippi West saw its own Civil War campaigns, often overlooked by historians. Kansas had only one battle, at Mine Creek, but pro-Confederate guerrillas such as Quantrill's Raiders attacked Union strongholds and massacred residents. Texans voted to join the Confederacy, and anti-war Germans were hanged. General Henry Hopkins Sibley marched his New Mexico Army up the Rio Grande hoping to reach the mineral wealth of Colorado and California. The Union ended his campaign at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, and the area west of Texas stayed in Union hands.

  On the 24th of October 1838, in Missouri, militias from Mormon and non-Mormon communities clashed. Six days later came a mass killing of Mormons in Livingston County. A Mormon Extermination Order followed, and the Mormons were forced to scatter. Brigham Young then led them to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, land that Mexico owned but did not control. He called the territory "Deseret," ruled it as a theocracy, and watched about a hundred rural Mormon settlements spring up around Salt Lake City. Mormon communalism and advanced farming practices helped them succeed, and they often sold goods to passing wagon trains.

  After the Battle at Fort Utah in 1850, Brigham Young articulated a policy often paraphrased as "It is cheaper to feed them than to fight them." Hostilities continued anyway, through Wakara's War and Utah's Black Hawk War. Federal and territorial leaders finally agreed that the nearby Indigenous people should be displaced to the Uinta Reservation.

  The federal government and Protestant churches objected to theocracy and polygamy. The Republican Party, founded in 1852, was openly hostile to the LDS Church over polygamy. In the late 1850s, President Buchanan sent in troops, and confrontation verged on open warfare. No military battles were fought, and negotiations ended the standoff, but violence still escalated and there were several casualties. After the Civil War, the federal government took firm control of Utah and legally disincorporated the church in the territory. Church leaders, Young among them, were barred from nearly every public office. Congress refused statehood because it feared church-chosen politicians would fill the offices. In 1890, church leadership announced that polygamy was no longer a central tenet. Utah entered the Union in 1896 as the 45th state, and its Mormon voters divided between the Republican and Democratic parties.

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