Chapter 16 The Conquest of the Far West Learning Objectives • Detail the effects of ethnic, racial, and cultural prejudice on western society. • Describe the three major industries important to western development and discuss their importance for the region’s economic transformation. • Describe the romantic image of the West as it was expressed in art, literature, and popular culture. • Explain how the actions and policies of the federal government affected the fate of western Indians. • Describe the significance of the idea of the “frontier” in American history. Chapter Overview Far from being empty and unknown, significant parts of what would become the western United States were populated by Indians and Mexicans long before the post–Civil War boom in AngloEuropean settlement. Even after the waves of white occupation, and faced with significant prejudice from those whites, large numbers of Mexicans and Asian Americans continued to live in the West. White settlement developed in initial boom and decline patterns in three industries that would do much to shape the region in the long run: mining, ranching, and commercial agriculture. Asians, Mexicans, and African Americans provided much of the labor force for these industries. In the late nineteenth century, the South and West were underdeveloped regions with an almost colonial relationship to the industrial, heavily populated Northeast and Midwest. Except for a few pockets in the Far West, the frontier line of agricultural settlement in 1860 stopped at the eastern edge of the Great Plains. Hostile Plains Indians and an unfamiliar environment combined to discourage advance. By the end of the century, the Indian barrier to white settlement had been removed, cattlemen and miners had spearheaded development, and railroads had brought farmers, who, despite nagging difficulties, had made significant adaptations to the Great Plains.