This site, The Multicultural American West: A Resource Site, is intended as a space for the interactive exchange of ideas, information, and educational tools related to the American West in multicultural and intercultural perspective. We hope to serve high school and college students, teachers, professors and independent scholars with an interest in the multicultural West. By "multicultural" we mean to stress culture as defined by race, ethnicity, language, and nationhood, but also to include gender, sexuality, class, religion, and other factors as distinct cultural forces. By intercultural we mean to stress the making of culture(s) through contact and conflict.

 "Clifton, Arizona, jail. Built about 1881 by Lezinsky Bros., original owners of the copper mines at Clifton. Contract for blasting cells in face of cliff secured by a Mexican, Margarito Barela, who was its first prisoner imprisoned for a`shooting up' celebration."

"Clifton, Arizona, jail. Built about 1881 by Lezinsky Bros., original owners of the copper mines at Clifton. Contract for blasting cells in face of cliff secured by a Mexican, Margarito Barela, who was its first prisoner imprisoned for a`shooting up' celebration."

"Judge Roy Bean, the `Law West of the Pecos,' holding court at the old town of Langtry, Texas in 1900, trying a horse thief. This building was courthouse and saloon. No other peace officers in the locality at that time."

The Gold Rushes of North America (1847-1900)

The Comstock Lode: Finance and Technology

In 1851, a gold strike in Australia fueled a migration to the other side of the globe by thousands of Californians; the Australian who discovered the gold had prospected in California. In 1858, prospectors surged to the Canadian northwest and to Colorado ("Pike's Peak or Bust"). And then, only miles from the Carson Valley trail used by so many Forty-niners a decade earlier, came the fabled Comstock Lode. The rush to the Comstock in 1859 virtually shut down the mines of California. A new era dawned, scientifically, economically, and socially.

By the late 1850s, thousands of gold seekers were doubling back from California, through the Western territories. Many were professional prospectors by now, roving from one small strike to the next. Others belonged to a new wave of novices, fleeing a severe financial depression back East.

 

The Greatest Strike in History

 

All were scratching the mountain dirt for "color" when some electrifying news came drifting over from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada - some "blasted blue stuff" that had been found was actually a fabulous silver strike, the legendary Comstock Lode, probably the greatest single mineral strike in history.

During the next year, 17,000 swarmed into the Washoe region of what is now the state of Nevada.

"Frame shanties pitched together as if by accident - tents of canvas, of blankets of brush, of potato-sacks, and old shirts, with empty whisky barrels for chimneys - coyote holes in the mountain-side forcibly seized and held by men - pits and shafts with smoke issuing from every crevice - piles of goods and rubbish in the hollows, on the rocks, in the mud, in the snow everywhere, scattered broadcast in pell-mell confusion."

Seemingly overnight, the mud metamorphosed into pop-up villages -- Gold Hill, Silver City, Virginia City. "Houses are built anywhere and everywhere, and the streets are then made to reach them... The people were camped all around in wagons, tents and temporary brush houses or wickiups. The principal business houses were saloons, gambling houses, and dance halls, two or three so-called stores with very small stocks of general merchandise and little provisions."

Mark Twain, after an unsuccessful stint as a prospector, found himself working

 

Boomtowns

Despite the odds against striking it rich, hordes of hopeful prospectors rushed to each new site. Within days, mining camps would spring up in areas that had been mostly barren and desolate land. The camps were little more than tents and shacks built in a matter of days. They were known as "boom and bust" towns, because when the gold or silver was gone they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.

The cycle of boom and bust repeated itself over and over. In 1857 newspaperman J. Ross Browne described the creation of Gila City in present-day Arizona:

"Enterprising men hurried to the spot with barrels of whiskey and billiards tables, . . . ready-made clothing, and fancy wares. Traders crowded in with wagons of pork and beans. Gamblers came with cards and Monte [gambling] tables. There was everything in Gila City within a few months but a church and a jail."

 
Selected Excerpts
from
The Big Bonanza
by Dan DeQuille
of the Territorial Enterprise

Comstock Lode

Comstock Lode, richest known U.S. silver deposit, W Nevada, on Mt. Davidson in the Virginia Range. It is said to have been discovered in 1857 by Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh, sons of a Pennsylvania minister and veterans of the California gold fields who died under tragic circumstances before their claims were recorded. Henry T. P. Comstock, known as Old Pancake, was a sheepherder and prospector who took possession of the brothers' cabin and tried to find their old sites. He and others searching for gold laid claim to sections of the Comstock (1859) but soon sold them for insignificant sums. The lode did not become really profitable until its bluish sand was assayed as silver. News of the discovery then spread rapidly, attracting promoters and traders as well as miners, and the lode was the scene of feverish activity. Among early arrivals was William Morris Stewart, who later became one of Nevada's first senators. Camps and trading posts in the area became important supply centers, and Virginia City, a mining camp on the mountain, was for several decades the “capital” of the lode and a center of fabulous luxury. Great fortunes were made by the “silver kings,” John W. Mackay, James Graham Fair, James C. Flood, and William S. O'Brien, and by Adolph Sutro, George Hearst, and Eilley Orrum Bowers. Silver determined the economy and development of Nevada until exhaustion of the mines by wasteful methods of mining and the demonetization of silver started a decline in the 1870s. By 1898 the Comstock was virtually abandoned.

Driving the Last Spike

The greatest Historical event in transportation of the continent occurred at Promontory, Utah, on May 10th, 1869, as the Union Pacific tracks joined those of the Central Pacific Railroad.

As early as 1832 the nation had realized a need to tie California to the rest of the states through the means of a transcontinental railroad system.    In 1849 and 1850, Howard Stansbury surveyed a route for a transcontinental railroad through the Black Hills and south of Salt Lake City

The Southern Trans-Continental Railway Company was chartered on July 27, 1870, with authority to construct a railroad from the eastern boundary of Texas to El Paso. The company was also given the right to acquire the rights and property of the Memphis, El Paso and Pacific Railroad Company. On October 31, 1870, the company was organized in New York; its directors included Texans George H. Giddings and James W. Throckmorton. The directors also included John C. Fremont and Marshall O. Roberts. The business office was in Marshall. The Southern Trans-Continental did some surveying and was in the process of building a bridge over the Sulphur River when it was acquired by the Texas Pacific Railroad (later the Texas and Pacific Railway) on March 30, 1872.

Chinese-American contribution to the Transcontinental Railroad

Millions of buffalo once roamed North America, grazing the plains and prairies and populating the mountains. Historical documents around the time of Columbus's arrival describe the animals' importance to the indigenous people. According to early explorers, "the plains were black and appeared as if in motion" with buffalo herds. Woven into the fabric of Native American life for millennia, the buffalo was revered and honored.

Some scholars argue that extermination of the buffalo was an official policy of the US government in order to achieve extermination of the Native Americans, particularly those living in the Western Plains. We will examine this theory, as well as the history of the settlement of the "American West".

The American Buffalo - The Spirit of the Nation

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