of its urban life, the North was now ready to become its own center, and the center for the entire continent. More than this, the North was ready to become the center of the continent as a continent, the entirety of its land being developed for the support of Northern cities. This was why Southerners felt threatened, and why they lost. When Lincoln came to office in 1861—a president whom Southerners perceived, somewhat falsely, to be a Free-Soiler—and when the South finally seceded, the war was fought not merely to resume an American system. The war, instead, created such a system. Now it was to be, for the first time, a single structure, with a single center based in America itself, on the northern Atlantic seaboard—all intensively developed. The war started because there was a West to incorporate, and it ended with the West—as well as the South—both incorporated into capitalist America.
In Lincoln’s Congress—the Southern filibusterers now having seceded—all the gridlocked issues of the 1850s were pushed into motion. The main goal was to develop land in the West; the main tool the government had at its disposal was land in the West. Thus the curious nature of the legislation, offering uncharted lands to those who would chart them. The Pacific Railroad Act established a northern route for the railroad, offering its developers, as incentive, 6,400 acres of western land (more would be decreed in the future) for each mile constructed. Meanwhile, toward the foundation of state colleges, the Morrill Act gave western land at the rate of 30,000 acres for every senator and congressman each state had. These colleges, let us remember, were primarily supposed to produce agricultural experts—which, in the early years, is what they largely did. Funded by the intensive cultivation of land, their intellectual production served to intensify agriculture further. Finally, the Homestead Act was the crucial legislation that set out the basic form of settlement for the West. The act promised each individual settler, following five years of residence and improvement, 160 acres of land. This envisaged small-scale, intensive family farming. The railroad, agricultural science, Northern farming families—all were expected to replicate soon, on the Great Plains, the economic achievement of the North.
This was all enacted in 1862 in Washington, D.C., while not far off, Americans were dying in numbers—and ways—unimagined. The Civil War was the fourth cycle of violence unleashed by Louisiana, following Texas, Mexico, and Kansas, but nothing had prepared for what happened now. It was as shattering to contemporary Americans as World War I would later be to Europe. It was strange and frightening; while warring, war itself was changing. No one knew iron could wreak such havoc. Ironclads, introduced in 1861 by the South and soon mass-produced by the North, made wooden military ships obsolete overnight. Railroads allowed the concentration, never seen before, of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Rifles—an invention assembled together during the 1850s—changed the space of battle itself. If you impart spin to a bullet by shooting it through a rifled, or spiral-grooved, barrel, it gains in precision and thus in effective range. The smoothbore musket had a range of not much more than a hundred yards; the rifle had one of about six hundred, covering a space thirty-six times greater. From 1862 onward, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers amassed by the railroad carried with them rifles instead of muskets. Iron made battles larger: the rifle made the field of killing greater, and the railroad enlarged its reach in terms of human population. A soldier could be drafted in Boston, within a few weeks arrive in Pennsylvania, and there become tangled in an area of tens of square miles of unremitting violence—the worst of them all, the field of Gettysburg, where more than 50,000 were killed over three days’ fighting in July 1863. Death was agonizing; rifles were at an interim stage of technology, forceful enough to get the bullet inside the body even at long range, but not quite forceful enough (as twentieth-century guns would be) for the bullet to exit the body following impact. Civil War bullets typically rested inside the flesh, ensuring inflammation and, in most cases, painful death.5 All in all, more than 600,000 Americans died in the four years of the war. The brutality of the frontier skirmish—the Indian wars, Texas, Mexico City, Kansas—returned, magnified many times over, to the centers of American civilization. I will return to this dialectic of frontier and center—the brutality of the first returning to haunt the latter—in the next chapter.
Not that the American frontier skirmishes ever stopped. The Civil War had its Indian War built into it. Indeed, some tribes made the wrong tactical decision, siding with the South—particularly in the Indian Territory. This was very convenient for the North, as ultimately it would allow the federal government to discontinue the grant of any territory to the Native Americans. But the same was true everywhere. The skills, the brutal attitudes, and the technologies developed in the Civil War were seen in the West as well. Even as the Civil War was still raging, rifles shot more bison than humans.
These were the cycles of violence: from the Texans’ war against Mexicans, through the Mexican-American War, and then through the North-South skirmish, particularly at Kansas, came the Civil War itself; and this led immediately to further cycles of violence, aimed now at the Indian and the bison. In November 1864, General Sherman was marching from Atlanta to the sea, everywhere proclaiming the cause of liberty. Just then, far to the West, the Cheyenne Indians were invited by the American settlers to come to Sand Creek, Colorado. The Cheyenne were promised that they could hunt there, but on November 29 they were hunted themselves. Local Colorado militia forces surprised the Cheyenne in their tents, and all were killed—hundreds of men, women, and children. Skin cut off a dead body had an enormous fascination for the killers of the West, and the scalps of Cheyennes were now displayed, to applause, in Denver’s public theater.6
Such excesses were indeed less common, and an outcry took place when news reached further east. But America did not really have an alternative Indian policy. To start with, the main piece of official policy were forts garrisoned across the West to protect the growing railroad and the concomitant agricultural settlements. In topological terms, then, the Great Plains were a plane surface, across which points (garrisons and settlements) were connected by lines (railways and trails), the surface as such still belonging, in a sense, to the Indian and the bison. Precisely this topology was to be changed. The bison—the basis for the Indians’ way of life—were being finished, and the Indians were urged to settle down, to get out of the way. Instead of Euro-Americans being confined to points on the surface, the Indians were to be reduced to their points—the reservations—the entire surface now becoming European. This was the enlightened alternative to Sand Creek. Indians, on the whole, realized they had no other option, but many resisted. They had moved to the plains from the East, generations ago, because their agriculture was failing under European pressure; they had taken to hunting because, with their resources, successful agriculture on the plains was impossible. They suspected they were being condemned to a life of destitution, and they were right. But all their courage and equestrian skills notwithstanding, the Indians had no chance. With the typical advantages of guerrilla fighters—better mobility, knowledge of the land—surprise and individual successes were always possible, most spectacularly at Little Bighorn, when on June 25, 1876, Colonel Custer was caught and killed with his force of 220 soldiers. But in fact, these were already the last moments of Indian resistance. They had nothing to roam the plains for. The bison were now dead, replaced by railroads and farmers. As the Indians retreated to their pitiful reservations, the cow began its trek north of Texas, eventually to introduce there an economy based in Chicago. And this, finally, was the culmination of American history in the nineteenth century. Texas led to Mexico, which led to Kansas, which led to the Civil War, upon whose conclusion America could move on to destroy the Indian and the bison. The final act in the subjugation of the West was under way: the transition from bison to cow.7 This was the immediate consequence of the Civil War: the West was opened for America—and America had filled it with cows.
We are getting near the invention of barbed wire, then. So let us focus our attention on western cows, at the moment when they replace the bison. Was this, in reality, a deep transformation at all? The answer is complicated. At first glance, the new order could be said to be no more than a shift of species and of race: bison replaced by cows, Indians replaced by Euro-Americans. Neither shift, in itself, involved, at first glance, a dramatic change.
Take first the animals. The Texas longhorn cow, instead of the herds of wild bison, now roamed the plains. We should not be misled. When one thinks of a cow, what comes to mind are, perhaps, dairy cows seen in European fields—heavily bred and disciplined so as to produce a breed