A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (82 page)

The Natural Resources Frontier

Trends seen in the evolution of natural resource extraction industries—fur, fish, ore, timber, ranching, and agriculture—actually parallel several of the patterns of the stagecoach, steamboat, and transcontinental railroad industries. Entrepreneurs tended to start out small, but larger concerns soon came to dominate, largely because technology and capital were necessary to efficiently harvest natural resources. An important result of this efficiency, however, was a tendency to overharvest in the short term—a failure to conserve natural resources—which quickly produced higher prices and efforts to moderate extraction in the longer term.

Although historians have been quick to blame this environmental waste and destruction on the forces of free-market capitalism, once again the picture is not so clear.
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In opposition to laissez-faire principles, the federal government often played a major role in leasing or giving federal land to miners, loggers, farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, distorting incentives by making resources cheap that, had the market had its way, would have come at a much higher cost.
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Then, as today, federal and state governments, not market forces, regulated many natural resource extraction industries and often did so poorly, actually undercutting market forces that would have adjusted prices and, therefore, supply. Contrary to the “capitalist menace” view of the environment and extraction-related industries, it was the existence of so much
public
land—the absence of
private
property—that was the main detriment to responsible stewardship of western natural resources.
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As we have seen, fur trappers were the first to overharvest public lands. The American Fur Company, which flourished under the often heavy-handed direction of John Jacob Astor, began diversifying into emerging industries.
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Before the British retreated to the forty-ninth parallel in 1846, the Hudson’s Bay Company was harvesting, drying, and pickling western salmon for export to Europe. Following the Civil War, American entrepreneurs cashed in on the revolutionary changes brought by the invention of the canning process. Canned fish, especially salmon, reaped spectacular profits for large concerns like Hapgood, Hume and Company, which employed thousands of Scandinavian immigrant fishermen and Chinese cannery workers. Like the fur trappers, fishermen overharvested the public waterways; as early as 1877, trap and net fishing had interrupted and stifled salmon spawning. At the mouth of some western rivers, the armada of fishing boats was so thick during the salmon spawning season that fishermen could literally walk from deck to deck over the hundreds of fishing boats; industry technology was so efficient that it threatened its own long-term survival.

In the case of fur and fish, the early American legal system had not yet developed appropriate ways to privatize property rights so that those responsible for using the resources bore the full cost.
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Often, industrial polluters would dump waste in streams and rivers without owning any more than a small section of waterfront land. Other industrialists, however, displayed much better stewardship: Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Gustavus Swift, for example, voluntarily monitored replacement of resources and pollution as commonsense responses to wise land management. It was simply good business to ensure a constant supply of one’s raw materials, whether trees or cattle.

The rush to mine the West’s rich veins of gold, silver, and copper ore also brought technology, capitalization, and environmental waste. While the Civil War raged back east, miners fanned out to seek gold in the present-day states of California, Nevada (site of the famed Comstock Lode), Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Afterward they tried their luck in Colorado, in the Black Hills of the Dakotas, and near the turn of the century, in the newly acquired Alaska. Canadian gold rushes in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, saw similar patterns and usually drew the same multinational work force.

In the early stages, mining rushes were peopled by individualistic entrepreneurs—the fabled sourdoughs equipped with only a pick and shovel, a gold pan, a few months’ grubstake, and a mule to carry it all to El Dorado. Very few struck it rich, and most prospectors soon gave up and moved on to better pickings. Some took advantage of collaborative efforts to strike it rich. Groups of miners replaced single panning with rockers, sluice boxes, and Long Toms, with which they channeled fast-moving river water to strain dirt and more efficiently search for gold. The crude sluices, however, soon gave way to hydraulic mining—the use of powerful pumps and water hoses to wash down and cull entire hillsides in search of ore. Hydraulics of this magnitude required capital and expertise, which brought large companies and professional management and mining engineers. This evolution was completed with lode mining—the use of dynamite and rock crushers to separate veins of gold, silver, and copper ore from hard rock buried deep within mountainsides. By the time lode mining had begun, the sourdoughs and their sluices had long departed, and many of those who had come west to strike it rich found themselves working for a paycheck in company towns like Butte, Montana, or Globe, Arizona.

While gold fever was claiming one sort of western immigrant, the thick forests, rich with spruce, cedar, pine, and Douglas fir trees, were beckoning another type, the logger. Although the Hudson’s Bay Company had built a major logging and saw-milling operation in and around Fort Vancouver in 1827, smaller entrepreneurs also soon flocked to the West, drawn by the sheer abundance of natural resources. Western loggers followed water routes, floating timber down navigable rivers leading to sawmills like those at the mouth of the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers, and on Puget Sound (Port Blakely and Port Ludlow), Grays Harbor, Washington, and Coos Bay, Oregon. The railroads’ need for hundreds of thousands of railroad ties provided an important early market.

This small-scale decentralized logging business was revolutionized in the 1880s with the introduction of the narrow-gauge railroad, which made it possible to cut forests far away from navigable rivers. Innovations such as crosscut saws, donkey engines, steam loaders, and steam-powered band saws, which could increase mill output tenfold, dramatically changed and improved the ways loggers felled, loaded, and processed timber.

This was all capital-intensive technology, which meant that small entrepreneurs soon gave way to larger better-financed firms like the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company and the Weyerhaeuser Company, which themselves had started small. Weyerhaeuser himself went broke in 1857 but soon tried again.
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His genius lay in his ability to see the final product and to understand the business concept of vertical integration, whereby the company owned all the various parts of the production process, from raw material to transportation to sales. By 1885 his Beef Sough Company processed some 500 million board feet of lumber. At that point he still tended to use the forests as if they were infinite, but in 1900, having purchased nearly a million acres from the Great Northern Railroad, Weyerhaeuser’s inspectors found that the lands were not nearly as rich in timber as he had thought. That discovery forced him—as market forces do—to focus on reforestation, preventing soil erosion, and on fire prevention. Then, as today, more forest lands are destroyed by fires (most caused by lightning) than are lost by harvesting. (The historian of fire in America, Stephen Pyne, found that from 1940 to 1965, when fire prevention techniques were far more advanced than in Weyerhaeuser’s time, lightning started some 228,000 fires in the United States, burning up to a million acres in a single forest!)
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Weyerhaeuser and, soon, other paper giants like International Paper and Kimberly-Clark began massive reforestation programs in which the companies planted, on average, about five times more than they consumed.
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Kimberly-Clark, in 1902, became the first producer of paper products to embark on a long-term woodlands management program, employing hundreds of professional foresters before the U.S. government entered the arena of forest conservation.
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Whenever possible, of course, companies sought to use federal funds and federal lands while leasing and harvesting as many state and federal tracts as could be acquired. Interestingly, the Weyerhaeuser Company’s ultimate dominance of northwestern logging (the company owned 26 percent and 20 percent, respectively, of all Washington and Oregon timber stands) was an indirect result of federal largesse. Frederick Weyerhaeuser bought his Northwest empire at six dollars per acre from his St. Paul, Minnesota, neighbor James J. Hill; Hill had obtained it when he bought the extensive federal land grants of Henry Villard’s bankrupt Northern Pacific. Weyerhaeuser proceeded to build the world’s largest sawmill in Everett, Washington, in 1914.
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A much different industry developed on the plains where, from 1865 to 1885, the West witnessed the rise and fall of the Cattle Kingdom. Prior to the Civil War, when thousands of cattle populated the Texas plains, with ranches stretching into Oregon and California, ranchers had shipped cattle to New Orleans. A special breed of cow, the Texas longhorn—derisively referred to in the East as “eight pounds of hamburger on eight hundred pounds of bone and horn”—could thrive on range grasses without additional feeding, and those cattle proved especially resistant to the ticks that carried Texas fever.
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Ironically, however, the resistance to the fever made the Longhorn a dangerous presence in the East where the ticks fell off and soon infected other nonresistant breeds, leading to an almost-uniform quarantining of Texas Longhorns prior to the mid-1860s. Then, by accident, drovers found that freezing temperatures killed the ticks: if a herd was held over on a northern range during a frost, it could be tick free. Joseph G. McCoy, the founder of the town of Abilene, Kansas, was among the first to appreciate the benefits of both Abilene’s cold weather and its location. He encouraged ranchers to send their herds to the Kansas Pacific Railroad’s railhead in his town, which offered transportation to eastern markets.
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Jesse Chisholm (not to be confused with another cattle trailblazer, John Chisum) cut a trail from Texas to Abilene in 1867 (the Chisholm Trail), with his cowboys driving some 35,000 head north in the first year alone. More than 2 million cattle came up the Chisholm Trail during the next twenty years.
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Cattle barons like Charles Good-night and Oliver Loving established their own well-worn trails for getting herds to the railheads. Boom towns sprang up to accommodate the cattle drovers as the railroad lines extended westward.
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From 1865 to the 1880s, the cattle frontier was in its prime.
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Ranches such as the King Ranch and the XIT Ranch covered thousands of acres, and tens of thousands of cattle arrived in Dodge City every year during its heyday, in the process creating one of the most thoroughly American figures in history—the cowboy.

There was something special about the American cowboy. Everything from his clothing to his entertainments to the dangers he faced seemed to represent both the best and worst of young America. Typical drives lasted weeks. During that time, upward of a dozen or more cowboys spent every day on horseback and every night on hard sod with only a saddle for a pillow. Meals came from the ever-present chuck wagon that accompanied the drives, and they usually consisted of beans, bacon, hardtack, potatoes, onions, and whatever game might be killed along the way without spooking the herd. The wagon master drove the chuck wagon, cooked, handled all sewing and repair chores for the cowboys, set up and broke down camp, and when necessary was doctor or vet. Any cattle spotted along the way that had no visible brand were immediately roped, branded, and inventoried into the herd. Cattle required water at regular intervals, and the trail boss had to make sure he did not misread a map and cause an entire herd to die of thirst. Indians or white squatters frequently had control of strategic watering holes, for whose use which they extracted a hefty tribute from the desperate cowboys.
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Once the herd reached the railhead, the cattle went into stockyards to await trains to the Chicago slaughterhouses while the dusty and thirsty cowboys took their pay and visited the bars and bordellos. That was what made the cattle towns so violent—a combination of liquor, guns, and men nearly crazy from the boredom of the drive. Yet outside these railhead towns, and excluding a few of the episodes of gang-type violence, the numbers of capital crimes in the West appear to be well below current violent crime rates, so the Wild West was only moderately more violent than the rest of society.
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Historian Roger McGrath studied the Sierra Nevada mining towns of Aurora and Bodie, which had more potential for violence than other western towns. There he found that homicide rates were high, especially among the “bad men” who hung out at the saloons, although the homicide rate was about the same as in modern-day Washington, D.C. Yet he also discovered that virtually all other crime was nonexistent, certainly due in part to the presence of an armed populace. Robberies in Aurora and Bodie were 7 percent of modern-day New York City’s levels; burglary was 1 percent; and rape was unheard of.
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Another study, by Robert Dykstra, of five cattle towns with a reputation for violence—Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell—discovered that the total cumulative number of homicides was less than two per year. Again, rape and robbery—except for trains and stagecoaches—was largely unknown. Still another researcher, examining Texas frontier towns from 1875 to 1900, found murder to be rare—not counting “fair fights” staged by gunslingers. Burglary and theft were so absent that people routinely did not lock their doors. Even in the California gold fields, with all its greed, researchers found little record of violence.
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