The American Far West in the Twentieth Century

596 Pages·2008·15.212 MB·English

by  Earl Pomeroy, Richard W. Etulain (editor)

The American Far West in the
Twentieth Century
THE LAMAR SERIES IN WESTERN HISTORY
The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest
that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute
to a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural
life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the
range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people,
Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and
illustrated history of the American West.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus,
Past President of Yale University
William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan
John Mack Faragher, Yale University
Jay Gitlin, Yale University
George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Martha A. Sandweiss, Amherst College
Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico
David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University
Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian National Park Service
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John Mack Faragher
Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place, by Benjamin Heber Johnson and
Jeffrey Gusky
Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, by Matthew Klingle
Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory,
by Christian W. McMillen
The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, by Earl Pomeroy
Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands,
by Samuel Truett
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The American
Far West in the
Twentieth Century
Earl Pomeroy
Edited by Richard W. Etulain
Foreword by Howard R. Lamar
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Electra and Trajan types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pomeroy, Earl S. (Earl Spencer), 1915–2005
The American Far West in the twentieth century / Earl Pomeroy ;
edited by Richard W. Etulain ; foreword by Howard R. Lamar.
p. cm. — (The Lamar series in Western history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-12073-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Pacific and Mountain States—History—20th century.
I. Etulain, Richard W. II. Title.
F718.P66 2008
978'.033—dc22
2008021379
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISOZ39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest
Stewardship Council (FSC).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword by Howard R. Lamar vii
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments by Richard W. Etulain xxv
ONE The West in 1901 1
TWO Agricultural Frontiers: New Farms and Family Farmers 20
THREE Agricultural Frontiers: Farming on New Scales 53
FOUR New Forms of Economic Growth 89
FIVE Economic Growth from the 1940s 116
SIX The Urban Occupation of the West: Rails, Roads, and Cities 149
SEVEN Rails, Roads, and Cities from the Second World War 185
EIGHT Social Relations and Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases 225
NINE Social Relations and Social Attitudes:
Putting Down Roots—Agencies of Acculturation 264
TEN Western Politics 300
ELEVEN Expanding Electorates 338
TWELVE Frontiers of Land and Opportunity:
The Variously Far West 376
vi Contents
Notes 405
Supplemental Bibliography by David M. Wrobel 535
Index 549
Foreword
It was my good fortune as a historian of the American West to have known
Earl Pomeroy both professionally and personally for nearly sixty years. When
I was working on my doctoral dissertation, “Dakota Territory: A Study of Fron-
tier Politics, 1861–1889,” Earl’s brilliant first book, The Territories of the United
States, 1861–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration, which appeared in 1947
and won the Beveridge Prize, proved to be both a key resource and a model for
me, as it was for all who wished to study American territorial history.
After having used the vast resources of the then-unpublished papers of the ter-
ritories of the United States, one of the most neglected key collections of Ameri-
can national history, Pomeroy joined Clarence E. Carter, Paul Wallace Gates,
and the Organization of American Historians to persuade Congress to edit and
publish the scholarly record of each territory. Congress approved this vast project
in 1961, and the impressive volumes, now known as Territorial Papers of the
United States, continue to appear down to the present. During those years, Earl
enlisted my support; later we met and became regular correspondents.
I soon learned that Earl felt that it was inexcusable that western historians had
focused their attention almost solely on the frontier period and the nineteenth
century, portraying the West as a rural and agrarian region peopled by individu-
alistic American pioneers, but had neglected the twentieth-century American
West. Clearly, Earl’s lifelong ambition, as reflected in his subsequent books and
essays, was to fill this gap and even to change our perspectives on what were the
central themes of nineteenth-century western history.
Equally important was the fact that not only was Pomeroy a fifth-generation
Californian, born in Capitola in 1915, but he received his A.M. at Berkeley and
later completed his Ph.D. there under the guidance of two outstanding scholar-
vii
viii Foreword
teachers. One was Frederic L. Paxson, a brilliant teacher and an accomplished
historian of both the American frontier (who had been Frederick Jackson
Turner’s successor at the University of Wisconsin) and recent United States his-
tory; the other was Herbert E. Bolton, a powerful teacher and scholar who intro-
duced the profession to the neglected history of the Spanish Borderlands.
Pomeroy emerged from his graduate training believing that California was
one of the keys to modern western history—both because the state was the
largest and most powerful in the Far West and also because it had dominated
the economies of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska in their formative stages.
In addition, California had an intimate relation to the Hawaiian Islands, China,
and Japan (the sources of Asian immigrants to California) and to the Southern
Pacific, where the United States Navy sought to secure coaling stations for their
vessels to counter Japan’s expansionist policies in the same area.
Pomeroy’s second book, Pacific Outpost: American Strategy in Guam and
Micronesia published in 1951, turned out to be an insightful analysis of the
causes of the war with Japan. Six years later, Pomeroy again startled his fellow
historians by writing about a completely different subject in his next book—In
Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (1957), a pioneering
work in social and cultural history praised by one reviewer as “the kind of social
history that the best historians would like to produce.” Pomeroy’s fourth major
work, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho,
Utah, and Nevada (1965), was the most complex social, political, and economic
history of the American Far West states yet written.
Meanwhile, Pomeroy, by then a professor at the University of Oregon, was
busy training a new generation of excellent western historians, among them
Gene M. Gressley, Eckard V. Toy, Jr., Tom Cox, James Hendrickson, Richard
Wayne Etulain, and others. It would be difficult to exaggerate the respect and
affection these former students have had for Pomeroy. He advised them on every
book they wrote and was in constant contact with them throughout his life.
So much did Richard Etulain, himself a distinguished professor of western
history at the University of New Mexico and author of more than forty books on
the West, admire and respect Pomeroy that after he retired from the University
of New Mexico, he and his wife moved to Oregon. Pomeroy, by then in failing
health, asked Etulain to assist him in the completion of his final and most ambi-
tious work, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, on which Pomeroy
had been working for forty years. Etulain became Pomeroy’s literary executor;
after the latter’s death in 2005, Etulain mailed the huge and sometimes rough
manuscript to Yale University Press with the message that Pomeroy had wanted
Yale to publish it with a foreword by Howard Lamar.
Foreword ix
Once the manuscript was accepted for publication, based on the enthusiastic
recommendations of reviewers, the Press asked Etulain to fill in gaps in the manu-
script and clarify passages. Such was Etulain’s commitment to Pomeroy that he
spent two years fulfilling this daunting task while making excellent comments
on his own about Pomeroy’s work. He reminded the Press, for example, that
Pomeroy’s notes were most unusual because he preferred to cite primary rather
than secondary sources, which was “true of all his books and essays throughout
his career.” Etulain also recommended that editors not amend Pomeroy’s style,
for “his was a unique voice, unlike that of any other major scholar in the history
of the American West.” Without Etulain’s crucial assistance, The American Far
West in the Twentieth Century would have been a lesser book.
In this book Pomeroy has covered every state of the West from the Missis-
sippi and Missouri rivers to the West Coast, as well as Alaska and Hawaii, with
the exception of Texas. Naturally, this omission troubled some readers of the
manuscript. It appears that Pomeroy felt strongly that Texas was seen as southern
rather than western in the nineteenth century, and also it had achieved its own
nationhood in the traumatic years from 1836 to 1848. Moreover, during the Civil
War, Texas actually attempted to seize the American territories of New Mexico,
Arizona, and even Colorado for the Confederacy. Texas’s reputation as a western
state did not really arise until the early twentieth century.
In contrast, the United States had defeated Mexican forces in California, as it
did in the lands that later became New Mexico and Arizona. But before Califor-
nia could be organized as a territory, the gold rush of 1848–49 brought a flood
of American migrants and led to the instant rise of San Francisco as a major port
city and the establishment of other gold rush towns, with the result that almost
at once California qualified for statehood and became a mainstream American
state. As Pomeroy has noted, the former underpopulated Mexican province had
overnight “become American, only more so.”
Pomeroy begins his narrative with some arresting factual corrections in a
chapter titled “The West in 1901.” He reminds us that in 1850, there were only
178,000 recorded inhabitants of European descent in the Far West, whereas
Iowa’s population was 192,000. Ten years later, the Far West had fewer inhabi-
tants than the state of Wisconsin, and as late as 1870, fewer inhabitants than the
state of Missouri. In short, the Middle West continued to be more significant in
terms of settlement and maturity than the Far West and deserved the attention
Turner had given it. Only in the 1880s and 1890s did Oklahoma, Washington,
Oregon, and California boom along with the mining states of Idaho, Montana,
and South Dakota, but at that time the railroad, eastern industry, and eastern
capital continued to dominate the western economy.
x Foreword
Using the U.S. Census records, Pomeroy traces the ups and downs of each
state’s economy along with the warning that each state’s history was slightly or
dramatically different. He provides a further unique perspective by noting that
more immigrants from Europe chose to stay in the Middle West and the North-
east than in the Far West. The only significant immigrant increase in the West
in the 1890s were among the Japanese, while in that period San Francisco lost
two-fifths of its Chinese population. For Pomeroy, the significant changes were
in the rise of big ranches, the doubling of irrigation lands, and the founding of
chambers of commerce and state and county historical societies during the 1890s
as evidence of an emerging sense of place. Pomeroy concludes, “If westerners
lowered their expectations for development to more nearly national levels, they
also regarded themselves more as residents, investing both their money and their
loyalties in community and region as most of them had not done as pioneers.”
In chapters 2 and 3, Pomeroy turns his attention to “Agricultural Frontiers,”
noting that between 1890 and 1920 farmland increased nearly two and one half
times as much over the Pacific, mountain, and plains states than in the thirty
years preceding. This dramatic impetus came partly from J. J. Hill’s huge pro-
motion of farming in the Pacific Northwest; a boom in Indian land cessions in
Oklahoma, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Washington; and through the
promotion of dry farming.
Homesteading accounted for the principal movement into western lands. But
with his passion for accurate detail, Pomeroy tells the reader when and where
the homesteading boomed while noting that many who came were commuters
or speculators who never planned to take up residence on the land. In contrast,
two thousand women who registered for homesteads in Colorado and Wyoming
“proved up” more often than men. Pomeroy writes, “If there is a governing
theme or point of focus in the book, it concerns the ways in which people in
the West have become—and have not become—westerners and members of
their western communities, not merely establishing their economic opportuni-
ties, but also redefining their relations with each other and the nation.” Far from
stopping there, however, he goes on to trace the transformation of various im-
migrant groups—the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs, and the Japanese—on
the West Coast and in Hawaii.
In these chapters, Pomeroy devotes careful attention to changes in farm-
ing, the rise of truck farming, the continued expansion of irrigation, and the
mechanization of farming between the two world wars. With the introduction
of the tractor and combines, farming became larger and soon metamorphosed
into corporation farming of which he provides us with incredible case study ex-
amples, ranging from the large-scale fruit farmers in California to changes in the