They would seem to be a combination of fur trappers and mining prospectors (the one in the rear carries digging tools).
(Where are the poles being carried?)
Yeah, kind of funny in retrospect, the progress godess being shown stringing wires. Lots of such “modernized mythology” allegorical representations in art of the period, this one slightly more appropriate for the theme than the more common industrial cog wheels.
They’re referring to the French painting, not the American.
Yes, I see now he also made it to Missouri which I guess was considered part of the West?
Ah. Thanks.
All sorts of places were considered the West for a while which we now don’t think of that way at all. Western NY State, for instance. (Those false upper story fronts that you see in depictions of the “West”? Pretty common in surviving downtown buildings in the Finger Lakes.)
Missouri was part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, and while the area of the Bootheel and areas along the Mississippi had settlements of some size, there was little penetration westward prior to US control. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is known as “The Gateway To The West”, and the most popular migration path in Westward expansion was through Independence and St. Joseph, cities on the western border of state and in the Missouri River. At that time it certainly would have been considered part of the ‘West’, although today it is the anchor state of the region now known as the Midwest.
Stranger
The famed “western outlaw” Jesse James and his gang? Missouri-based, 1870s. So yeah still considered “West” then.
The West was originally everything west of the Appalachians. Then it became everything west of the Mississippi, and finally, everything west of the Great Plains. Former iterations of West were demoted to Midwest.
Remember that Davy Crocket, famed as a pioneer of the West, was a pioneer back when Missouri/ Arkansas was still a semi-wilderness area.
About the whole “Manifest Destiny” thing: our forebears were certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that civilization was good. Therefore the expansion of civilization was ipso facto a good thing. The native Americans were either “savages” who were actively resisting this or else they were just sorta’ in the way. It’s only now that we have a surfeit of civilization that we nostalgically look back to when it wasn’t so.
Specifically, theirs. ‘cause it was the only one that really was civilized. /s
And some descendants to this day stick by that, unironically.
I’ve lived in St. Louis. To me, it’s the neutral gear on the continental stick shift. It isn’t North, it isn’t South, it isn’t East, it isn’t West, it’s just in between all those.
Yeah, I had a minor argument with someone, once, over whether the American expansion West should be considered evidence of American “colonialism”. I held that it wasn’t - which the other person objected to as a form of denialism. My argument was that, in essence, it was worse. Under colonialism, you’re conquering a group and forcing them to supply you with goods (tribute), but you do still want to keep them alive and healthy since, otherwise, no tribute. With Manifest Destiny, while there was some nominal attempt to convert the natives to Christianity and modern life, mostly they were either outright killed or simply pushed out of the way and onto land that, so far as the expansionists were concerned, wasn’t fit for habitation. That many survived would just seem to say that the European settlers misjudged the habitability of the land.
Scholars of colonialism often distinguish between two types of colonialism: basically, “we’re here now, you’re going to work for us” and “we’re here, you go away.” The latter is what is often called settler colonialism: the displacement rather than the exploitation of the Indigenous peoples. Canada and the US are mostly examples of the latter. In 1967, the Jewish historian Maxime Rodinson published the book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (I believe the English edition came out a few years later, which I note here only to give some sense of the issues and debates around the definitions.
It’s noteworthy that both the American and ancient Roman Republics demonstrated that empires didn’t have a monopoly on expansionism.
Yes, very much so.
Interpreting the picture requires an understanding of how white Americans thought in 1872 and what symbols and metaphors resonated with them. At that time, the Mississippi River became a boundary line between the “civilized” East and the “wild” or “savage” West. Cowboy culture as we know it today barely existed - Dodge City in southwest Kansas, the end of the trail for cattle drives, didn’t become a town until 1871. Previously, mining strikes like the 1849 Gold Rush to California and the silver found in Nevada in 1859 drew more attention and more people.
Settlers preferred the prairies and the plains, arid, hard-soil areas immediately west of the Mississippi. Dime novels post-Civil War often set their frontier Indian battles in Missouri or even Illinois. The Forest Princess; or, The Kickapoo Captives. A Romance of the Illinois appeared in 1871. Putting the mountains to the north, as in the Dakotas, allowed Gast to depict a flat route through Kansas and Nebraska instead of an impossible obstacle.
That tells me both that the body of water at the east of Gast’s drawing is the Mississippi River where the Missouri River meets it and that it’s purely symbolic. The city on the eastern bank is clearly St. Louis, then a hub for railroads - no coast to coast systems existed in 1872; separate companies terminated in St. Louis where you could switch between eastern and western systems.
However, no bridge spanned the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Eads Bridge was in construction but it isn’t a cable suspension bridge as shown. I can’t figure out what bridge it might be; my guess is that it represents the Brooklyn Bridge that was in its very early stages also. Currier and Ives did a lithograph of it in 1872 that closely resembles this bridge, although John Roebling had finished a similar cable-stayed bridge over the Ohio River in 1867. Majestic cable-stayed bridges with towers taller than any city buildings became the symbol of what a modern bridge - made of steel - looked like, and was far more picturesque that a flat-topped ribbed arch like the Eads.
Symbols all the way down.
Ah, if that’s the accepted categorization then I suppose that I was wrong.
Classic open-range cattle rearing had a fairly narrow lifespan, between the time that railroads made it possible to ship cattle to the stockyards of the East and the introduction of barbed wire, The improved version patented in 1874 made it practical to begin fencing in grazing land and transforming free range cattle operations into ranches.
All of human history says that. The Ancient Egyptians held most of the middle east as vassal states. Israel bounced around as a subject of them, Asia Minor (e.g. the Akkadians), and the Mesopotamian states. But likewise, the Old Testament encourages the Ancient Israeli state to go out and take over other people, and my read of the whole anti-masturbation thing would be that they wanted to grow their populace to be large enough to go out conquering. They just didn’t have the arable land to support such efforts.
The history of India is a mess of groups trying to take one another over; likewise Europe after the fall of Rome. Shipwrecked sailors who washed up on random islands in the 19th century, who were later saved and documented their experiences, relate native groups who would attack other villages on the island to take slaves, cannibalize some folk, and force women into marriage.
When the Hawaiians encountered the Europeans, they began trading for projectile weapons to go conquering the other islands, and created the Hawaiian kingdom.
To the extent that we might ever have some vision of some peaceful society, in history, that’s almost always going to connect to a lack of documentation on said society.
Expansionism is a factor of having the resources to go out and conquer. Historically, there generally wasn’t any moral guidance against doing such.
War… war never changes.
Stranger
Indeed the O.T. relates that the peoples of Israel clamored for a king– i.e., a war leader who would transform them from a coalition of tribes to a mighty empire– even though the prophet Samuel explicitly warned them that kings inevitably became tyrants. But they got their king and briefly their empire; and the tyranny that had been foretold. They also saw what happened when (supposedly) they stopped depending on the God who had kept them alive that far by a succession of literal miracles and thought they could be badasses on their own, only to discover who the real badass empires were.
And they were also certain that what the natives had didn’t count as “civilization”, despite some rather large (by the standards of the time) cities, elaborate codes of law and international relations, and so on.