Headnote: Between 1889 and 1891, Mexican night riders known as the Las Gorras Blancas (the White Caps) cut fences and destroyed railroad tracks in an attempt to maintain common use of the Las Vega Land Grant Commons around Las Vega, New Mexico, against encroachments be white ranchers and the railroad. Las Gomas Blancas explained their motivations in this manifesto to white ranchers and railroad executives.
Our purpose is to protect the rights and interests of the people in general; especially those of the helpless classes. We want the Las Vegas Grant settled to the benefit of all concerned, and this we hold is the entire community within the grant. We want no "land grabbers" or obstructionists of any sort to interfere. We will watch them. We are not down on lawyers as a class, but the usual knavery and unfair treatment of the people must be stopped. Our judiciary hereafter must understand that we will sustain it only when "Justice" is its watchword. The practice of "double-dealing" must cease. There is a wide difference between New Mexico's "law" and "justice." And justice is God's law, and that we must have at all hazards. We are down on race issues, and will watch race agitators. We are all human brethren, under the same glorious flag. We favor irrigation enterprises, but will fight any scheme that tends to monopolize the supply of water courses to the detriment of residents living on lands watered by the same streams. We favor all enterprises, but object to corrupt methods to further the same. We do not care how much you get so long as you do it fairly and honestly. The People are suffering from the effects of partisan "bossism" and these bosses had better quietly hold their peace. The people have been persecuted and hacked about in every which way to satisfy their caprice. If they persist in their usual methods retribution will be their reward. We are watching "political informers." We have no grudge against any person in particular, but we are the enemies of bulldozers and tyrants. We must have a free ballot and a fair count. and the will of the majority shall be respected. Intimidation and the "indictment" plan have no further fears for us. If the old system should continue, death would be a relief to our sufferings. And for our rights our lives are the least we can pledge. If the fact that we are law abiding citizens is questioned, come out to our homes and see the hunger and desolation we are suffering; and "this" is the result of the deceitful and corrupt methods of "bossism." Be fair and just and we are with you, do otherwise and take the consequences. The White Caps, 1,500 Strong and Growing Daily Source:Las Vegas Daily Optic,March 12, 1890.
Was the West Really “Won”?
For more than half a century, the Turner thesis dominated historical writing about the West. In his famous essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier experience molded both region and nation. Not only the West, Turner insisted, but the national character had been uniquely shaped by the westward movement. Pioneers had brought the raw West into the embrace of civilization. And the struggle to overcome the hazards of the western wilderness—including distance, deserts, drought, and Indians—had transformed Europeans into tough, inventive, and self-reliant Americans.
Turner’s thesis raised a question that Americans found especially intriguing in 1893. Just three years earlier, the superintendent of the census declared that the frontier, defined as the boundary of a zone with little or no settled population, had closed forever. What new forces, Turner asked, would shape a distinctive American national character, now that the testing ground of the frontier had been plowed and tamed?
Turner’s hypothesis that the American character was forged in the western wilderness is surely among the most provocative statements ever made about the formative influences on the nation’s development. But as the frontier era recedes ever further into the past, scholars are less persuaded that Turner’s thesis adequately explains the national character. American society is still conspicuously different from European and other cultures, even though Turner’s frontier disappeared more than a century ago. Modern scholars charge that Turner based his thesis on several questionable assumptions. Historian David J. Weber, for example, suggests that the line of the frontier did not define the quavering edge of “civilization,” but marked the boundary between diverse cultures, each with its own claims to legitimacy and, indeed, to legitimate possession of the land. The frontier should therefore be understood not as the place where “civilization” triumphed over “savagery,” but as the principal site of interaction between those cultures.
Several so-called New Western historians take this argument still further. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster suggest that the cultural and ecological damage inflicted by advancing “civilization” must be reckoned with in any final accounting of what the pioneers accomplished. These same scholars insist that the West did not lose its regional identity after the frontier line was no longer recognizable in 1890. The West, they argue, is still a unique part of the national mosaic, a region whose history, culture, and identity remain every bit as distinctive as those of New England or the Old South.
But where Turner saw the frontier as the principal shaper of the region’s character, the New Western historians emphasize the effects of ethnic and racial confrontation, topography, climate, and the roles of government and big business as the factors that have made the modern West. The New Western historians thus reject Turner’s emphasis on the triumphal civilizing of the wilderness. As they see the matter, European and American settlers did not tame the West, but rather conquered it, by suppressing the Native American and Hispanic peoples who had preceded them into the region. But those conquests were less than complete, so the argument goes, and the West therefore remains, uniquely among American regions, an unsettled arena of commingling and competition among those groups. Moreover, in these accounts the West’s distinctively challenging climate and geography yielded to human habitation not through the efforts of heroic individual pioneers, but only through massive corporate—and especially federal government—investments in transportation systems (like the transcontinental railroad) and irrigation projects (like the watering of California’s Central Valley). Such developments still give western life its special character today.
The Significance of the Frontier: SAQ Practice
Read the two short excerpts from two different secondary sources. Answer the questions and practice the SAQ format.
Secondary Source 1: Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 1893.
“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.… This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.… In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.…”
Secondary Source 2: Richard White, The Middle Ground, 1991 “[The West] is not a traditional world either seeking to maintain itself unchanged or eroding under the pressure of whites. It is a joint Indian-white creation.… The real crisis came…when Indians ceased to have power to force whites onto the middle ground. Then the desire of whites to dictate the terms of the accommodation could be given its head.… Americans invented Indians and forced Indians to live with the consequences.”