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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

Manifest Destiny and the Environmental impacts

of Westward Expansion

Darren Dobson

Abstract
Even before the founding of the Republic, Americans desired to expand Westward
taking with them their unique civilization across the continent. By the 1840s this
idea of the United States extending its boundaries was encompassed by the phrase
Manifest Destiny. Americans not only considered Westward expansion a desirable
objective but an endowment from God through which they could take their
democratic republicanism across North America. The purpose of this article is to
explore American interpretations of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s
and its environmental impacts on the Western territories, specifically the role which
democratic society, Christianity, and capitalism played in transforming the land,
nature, and relationships with Native peoples.

This paper has been peer reviewed

41
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

“[W]e are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one
another, to walk in his ways and keep his Commandments and his
ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that
we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in
the land whither we go to possess it.” – John Winthrop, onboard the
Arbella, 1630.1
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” – The
Unanimous Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen
United States of America, July 4, 1776.2
From the first settlers in Massachusetts (1620), through to the War of
Independence (1776-1783) and beyond, Americans have seen
themselves as an exceptional people. What made them exceptional
was their widespread belief that they were God’s new chosen people
or as Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop positioned “the God
of Israel [is] among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist a
thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and
glory…For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill. The
eyes of all people are upon us.”3 By the nineteenth century American
understandings of their own exceptionalism was the cornerstone of
what it meant to be an American citizen. As academic Godfrey
Hodgson has noted this idea was predicated upon ‘the belief’ that ‘the
United States’ was ‘the richest and most powerful of’ all the world’s

1 John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630’, accessed on 31/1/2014

at: http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html
2 ‘The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776’, in Paul S.Boyer, Clifford

E.Clark, Jr., Hawley, Sandra McNair, Joseph F.Kett, Neal Salisbury, and Nancy
Woloch, (eds), The Enduring vision A History of the American People Volume One: To
1877 , Concise Fifth Edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), A-1.
3 Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’.

42
FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

nations and states whilst also being ‘politically and morally

exceptional’ to all other peoples in the world.4
Thus, Americans from their very earliest beginnings believed
that God had bestowed upon them a mission to spread their supreme
civilization, in particularly, freedom, whether in religion, commerce,
or race. American religion was catered for by a variety of different
Protestant Christian faiths such as Lutherans, Anglicans,
Presbyterians, and Congregationalists who would later compete with
new Christian denominations including the Wesleyan Methodists and
Anabaptists. According to academic Walter Russell Mead it was
‘American religion’ which helped ‘to create a distinct grand narrative
that tie[d] the Abrahamic story of Israel and Christ together with the
institution of capitalist modernity’ and therefore is representative of ‘a
new call from God.’5
So with Christianity being the glue that bound American
society and its citizens, capitalism would allow Americans to realise
their freedom to an even higher level. This additional liberty was to be
achieved by acquiring money to elevate an individual up the social
ladder. The Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American race represented the
pinnacle of American freedom. Being white skinned meant that one
had the capacity for civilization, Christian morality, and an upstanding
citizen while at the same time giving back to other free white
Protestant Americans. If however, a person or group of people fell
out of this paradigm, then it was up to all white Americans to bring
forth the benefits of their civilization and help these people to realise
their own freedoms so long as these were in line with Protestant
Christianity, American Republicanism and capitalism.

4Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2009), 10.
5Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern
World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 258 & 298.
43
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

With Independence realised and the Republic formed in 1783,

the United States of America covered approximately the area between
the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. This young nation’s
ideal of freedom was attached to the belief in territorial expansion
across the North American continent’s Western regions. At this time
Americans were largely involved in agriculture as small autonomous
farmers. Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and a prominent
political leader, realised this economic structure and the dream to own
land were at American democracy’s core.6 Jefferson believed that land
ownership and the ability to produce goods from natural resources,
would enable farmers to control their own labour and financial
independence. North America’s western section was considered to be
a huge and empty land mass, into which expansion seemed the likely
provider for American agrarian growth and the promise of freedom.
During the nineteenth century the U.S.A. acquired its Western
territories in several stages. First, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from
France in 1803 effectively extended the country Westward beyond the
Mississippi River to the Continental Divide.7 In 1811, John Quincy
Adams, who had been appointed by President James Madison (1809-
1817) as the first ever United States Minister to Russia, and would
later become President himself (1825-1829), added his own
interpretation of this sentiment: “The whole continent of North
America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled
by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system
of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general
tenor of social usage and customs.”8

6 Eric R.Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), 284.
7Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 60 & 80.

8 John QuincyAdams, ‘Letter to John Adams, August 31, 1811’, in Walter

A.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader States: The American Encounter with the World
Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 78; & Paul S.Boyer,
Clifford E.Clark Jr., Sandra McNair Hawley, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury,
Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, (eds), The Enduring Vision: A History of the
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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

By the 1840s, additional Western regions were incorporated

into the nation, with Texas annexed in 1845, the Oregon territory by
treaty with Britain in 1846, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
following Mexico’s defeat in 1848.9 These territories practically
doubled the U.S.A. by 1,200,000 square miles, extending the country
through to the Pacific coast. Western expansion across the continent
was completed in 1853 with the additional land acquisition from
Mexico along the Southern border, known as the Gadsden
Purchase.10 American exceptionalism now needed to reach and appeal
to a wider and more diverse population which now included far more
white European immigrants. In 1845, John L. O’Sullivan, newspaper
and magazine editor, captured the desired public sentiment when he
explained American exceptionalism as being ‘the fulfilment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence
for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.’11
There has been a very substantial and detailed historical
scholarship assembled over time dedicated to Manifest Destiny. Some
of the more recent scholarship includes; David S. Heilder and Jeanne
Heilder, Manifest Destiny, (2003), Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of
American Exceptionalism, (2009), and Amy S. Greenburg, Manifest
Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents,
(2012). The Heidlers’ have attempted to present Manifest Destiny in a
balanced fashion, showing that it was not a phenomenon that simply
sprung up in the 1840s, and that ‘American expansion did not achieve
a robust dynamism until the middle of the nineteenth century ignores
the forces that promoted territorial expansion as early as colonial

American People Volume One: To 1877, Concise Fifth Edition, (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2006), A-16.
9 Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 80.
10 Ray Allen Billington, Western Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New

York: Macmillan, 1949), 585.

11 John L.O’Sullivan, ‘Manifest Destiny, 1845’, in Mark S.Joy, American

Expansionism, 1783-1860: A Manifest Destiny? (London: Longman, 2003), 111; &

Charles H.Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1980), 16.
45
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

times.’ They also go to some lengths to reveal that Manifest Destiny

in the 1840s and 1850s did not always have the universal support of
all Americans. That while some ‘Americans, marvel[ed] over this
spectacular achievement, both encouraged and proclaimed it as an
obvious event’ that there were other ‘Americans [who] were not so
sure’ and ‘decried the expansion as an enormous mistake and
predicted it would have an extravagant price.’ The Heilders sum up
this balance saying that it was ‘a testament to the vagaries of the
American experience that both sides were right: the realization of this
manifest destiny was a stunning triumph; the consequences of
realizing it would be appalling.’12 Hodgson evaluated that this
phenomenon was ‘in ethical or philosophical terms’ a ‘manifest
destiny of white Protestant Americans to “overspread” a continent
that was far from empty.’ But he considers that the Americans who
ventured west to fulfil their destinies ‘were also motivated in part by a
sense of mission to bring Christianity and civilization to peoples seen
by nineteenth-century white men as benighted, as well as by the same
hunger for land and resources that drove Americans westward.’13
Amy Greenburg considers that 'only the United States had Manifest
Destiny.’ She supports both the Heilders’ and Hodgson’s position
that ‘while Manifest Destiny was a creation of the nineteenth century,
the concept of American exceptionalism (the belief that the United
States occupies a special place among countries of the world) is
actually older than the nation itself.’14
Despite the very large historiography about Manifest Destiny
during the 1840s and 1850s, there appears to be a dearth of material
that specifically focuses upon the three prongs of American
republicanism, Christianity, and capitalism and how these ideologies
impacted upon the Western environment and native peoples. This

12 David S.Heidler, and Jeanne T.Heidler, Manifest Destiny (Westport, Connecticut:

Greenwood Press, 2003), xv & 1.
13 Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, 61.
14 Amy S.Greenburg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief

History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 4.

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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

becomes particularly noticeable when wanting to understand how

these three driving forces of Manifest Destiny became mechanisms
through which American settlers in the West viewed and transformed
the environment and Indians they encountered. This article will look
at Manifest Destiny both as an ideology and as a practice for settling
and civilizing the West. In particular, I will explore how American
settlers who moved West during the 1840s and 1850s used Manifest
Destiny to direct and justify their use of these lands. To achieve this
objective I will specifically investigate the roles played by American
democracy, Christianity, and capitalism and how these ideals
transformed the West’s land, nature, and Indian peoples. For
American republicanism I will be looking at the importance
Americans placed on owning land as being representative of their
democratic liberty. I will also explore how American Christianity by
the mid-nineteenth century had splintered into a broad number of
separate denominations was another motivational force for Manifest
Destiny. Given the very large number of Protestant groups, I will
limit my focus mostly to the Mormons in the southwest and other
groups such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions in the Oregon territory. With regards to capitalism I will
analyse the effects that travel, farming, the railroad, and California’s
God Rush had on the West. However, before I can commence this
investigation, I believe that it is necessary to describe the variety of
environmental conditions and local peoples whom American pioneers
encountered in the West.
The Western Environment and Peoples
Americans in the 1840s and 1850s moved to or through a large area
that contained diverse environmental conditions and native peoples.
One way to look at this Western region is to explore the Oregon Trail
which many Americans would use to reach their destinations. The
Oregon Trail was not a single track, path or trail, but many routes
over which pioneers travelling in wagons journeyed. By 1843,
thousands of Americans searching for new beginnings had made the
1,900 mile journey starting at Independence, Missouri. From here the
47
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

trail followed the Platte and South Platte rivers, where the pioneers
travelled over South Pass into Fort Bridger in south-western
Wyoming at the halfway mark. By this point they had been on the
trail for about seventy days, and were now in desperate need of
supplies. Luckily Fort Bridger had a trading post from which the
travellers could purchase the required items. Departing Fort Bridger,
the journey entered its final stages and headed northwest to Wyeth’s
Fort Hall by following the Snake, Boise, and Columbia rivers.15 But
not all pioneers followed the track this way and with gold discovered
in California in 1848, many other Americans diverted their passage at
South Pass to head southwest crossing the Great Basin through Utah
and Nevada onto Sacramento.16
American settlers encountered a large region between the
Great Plains and the Pacific coast which was comprised of rolling
prairies, grass-covered plains, towering mountains and dry deserts. 17
In comparison to the lush forest vegetation of the Eastern U.S.A.,
few trees and rivers marked the landscape, except for some tree
growth along streams and in elevated areas. Pioneer Alphonse B. Day
travelling across the Prairie on the Oregon Trail in 1849 noted how
his travelling companions ‘passed over a verry pretty country but
destitute of timber only on branches and they Scarce, we saw 12 dead
horses & one mule this day.’18 Overall the West was an extremely dry
region receiving an average annual rainfall of less than twenty inches.
Another traveller, Josiah Greggs identified the difficult environmental
conditions, most noticeably water shortages, saying how on one
occasion his traveling band found ‘but little water that night, and

15 Walter A.McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 243.
16 Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1970),

17 Billington, Western Expansion, 405; & Boyer et. al, The Enduring Vision, A-17.
18 Alphonse B. Day, ‘Diary entry for May 17-19, 1849’, in Trails of Hope: Overland

Letters and Diaries, 1846-1869, 8, accessed on 29/6/2013 at:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Diaries/id/31/r
ec/11
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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

none at all the next day, we began by noon to be sadly frightened; for
nothing is more alarming to the prairie traveller than a “water-
scape”’.19 From these conditions, the land was suitable for the
sporadic bunchy grasses, scattered greasewood and sage-bush.20 The
dominant environment was referred to as the Great Plains and was
distinguished by its plateau as formed by Eastward flowing streams
from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River. The Plains
experienced severe and sometimes violent weather conditions from
the blizzards that swept down from Canada producing low wind chill
conditions and periodic droughts. A sub-humid climate was
representative in most places across this region and was the habitat of
various plant and animal life. The Plains environment is segmented by
a variety of grasses which survived the semi-arid condition. In the
Eastern section, tall grass exists of between three to six feet high,
while further West grows short grass matting. To the South, lower
rain levels produced desert grass which grows in clumps, separated in
between by sun-baked soil. The Great Plains also supported a wide
variety of animal life including antelope, donkey-eared rabbits,
coyotes, wolves, and especially bison.21 The bison’s presence helped
shape soil, water, and grassland ecologies while also providing the
native North American nomadic hunting societies who lived in the
West with food, clothing and tools.22
Apart from the environmental conditions Americans
journeying West also came into contact with the many different native
tribes who lived here. Historian Robert Utley places Native American
numbers in this region prior to the 1840s at approximately 360,000.
He claims that ‘seventy-five thousand ranged the Great Plains from
Texas to the British possessions’ while ‘the nomads of the southern

19 Josiah Gregg, in Max L.Moorhead, (ed.), Commerce of the Prairies (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 54.
20 Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 8 & 82-83.

21 Billington, Western Expansion, 406-409.
22 Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 15.

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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

Plains shared their domain uneasily with some 84,000 Indians [The
Five Civilized Tribes of the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw,
and Seminole] uprooted from their eastern homes by the U.S.
government and swept westward to new lands.’ While ‘Texas claimed
25,000’, California and New Mexico another ‘150,000’ native peoples,
and ‘the Oregon Country…was home to 25,000 Indians.’
Yet, while these Western peoples shared many cultural
similarities, they considered themselves to be vastly different.23 The
West’s Native Americans included: the Shawnees (Ohio); Sauk and
Fox (Wisconsin) who moved south and were allies with the
Kickapoos and Potawatomis, Chippewas or Ojibwas (northern
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Canada); the Cheyennes and Arapahos
(Wisconsin and Minnesota moved to the buffalo plains); the Blackfeet
(upper Missouri River and into Canada); the Winnebagos (Wisconsin);
the Sioux (Minnesota moved to the northern buffalo plains); the
Osages (Missouri); the Iowas, Otos, Missouris, Kansas or Kaws,
Poncas and Omahas (Missouri River and its tributaries in Iowa and
eastern Nebraska); the Crows (between the upper Platte and
Yellowstone Rivers); the Mandans (two permanent villages on the
Missouri River in North Dakota); the Paiutes (the Great Basin in
Wyoming); the Utes (eastern edge of Great Basin to western and
central Colorado); the Bannocks (southern Idaho); Hopi Pueblos
(Arizona); the Commanches (south-western Kansas through to
western Texas and eastern New Mexico); the Lipans (Texas); the
Kiowa-Apaches and Navahos (Arizona and New Mexico); the Yuma,
Mohave, Hualapai, Yavapai, and the Havasupai (deserts and canyons
close to the lower Colorado River in Arizona and Nevada); the
Flathead (western Montana); the Kalispels (Idaho and eastern
Washington); the Spokanes (eastern Washington); Nez Perce (plateau
country of central Idaho and eastern Oregon and Washington); the
Walla Wallas and Palouses (northwest of Nez Perce); the Coeur
d’Alene, Pend d’Oreille, Cayuse, Umatillas, Chinook, Squaxon,

Robert M.Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, Revised Edition (Albuquerque,

23

New Mexico: The University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 4-6.

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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

Nisqually, and Puyallup (Oregon Country); the Yakimas (south-

central Washington); and the Modocs and Klamaths (northern
California and south-central Oregon).24
Republican Democracy’s Environmental Affects
Underlying Manifest Destiny was the promise that in the West
Americans could realise their democratic independence via land
ownership. The West held cheap plentiful lands abundant in rich
resources.25 Upon becoming President in 1845 James K. Polk (1845-
1849) fully advocated Manifest Destiny stating:
As our population has expanded, the Union has been cemented and
strengthened. A[s] our boundaries have been enlarged and our
agricultural population has been spread over a large surface, our
federative system has acquired additional strength and security….It is
confidently believed that our system maybe safely extended to the
utmost bounds of our territorial limits.26
Americans considered the West to be the Great American desert, an
empty space which needed to be occupied and exploited. However,
the West was far from the empty unoccupied void pioneering and
land hungry Americans believed it to be. In order to acquire this land
they would have to deploy dubious and often deceitful methods and
in so doing disrupt the the large Native American population who
lived in the West.27

24 Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 9-12; & Utley, The Indian Frontier
1846-1890, 4.
25 Worster, Under Western Skies, 19; & Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny:

The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 1981, 83.
26 James Knox Polk, ‘Inaugural Address, Washington D.C., March 4, 1845’,

accessed on 28/6/2013 at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/polk.asp]

27 Mark S. Joy, American Expansionism, 1783-1860: A Manifest Destiny? (London:

Longman, 2003), xxvii.

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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

Through land ownership, Americans saw themselves as being

full and equal citizens.28 On this basis the federal government looked
to direct and allocate the sale of these public lands to settlers.
However, the emigrants’ speedy arrival in the 1840s and 1850s
predated any organised government land distribution. The pioneers
would not be deterred and quickly claimed possession by squatting on
selected land until the government was ready to officially sell this
land. Yet, while squatters sat and waited for their government they
came into contact and conflict with Native Americans. One such
example occurred in 1853 in western Iowa on the Nebraska border
between squatters and some Omaha natives. While the Omaha were
out hunting they encountered a large number of squatters who
encouraged them to return to their camp. The camp was actually a
farmhouse where squatters outnumbered the Omaha. Here, one
squatter declared that he was ‘unwilling for you [Omaha] to wander
over this land.’ Debate continued between the squatters and the
Omaha, with one Native American replying: ‘The land is not yours.
The President did not buy it. You have jumped on it.…Why do you
consider me a fool? You are now dwelling a little beyond the bounds
of the land belonging to the President.’ The Omahas managed to
return to their hunting the next morning only to be harassed and shot
at by a large number of these squatters who chased after them on
horseback. Somehow, the natives managed to not only hold their
ground but turn their assailants around to cease any further attack on
this particular occasion.29
The Western wilderness’ beauty and bounty became a vital
ingredient for Manifest Destiny as the physical environment in which
pioneers were settling provided raw materials upon which to further

28Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 50 & 63.

29Pathin-Nanpaji, ‘An Encounter between Omaha Hunters and White Squatters
in Iowa, 1853’, in Amy S. Greenburg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial
Expansion: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 74-
76.

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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

American civilization. The enthusiasm to transform and tame the

Wild West, gave purpose and meaning to the pioneers’ lives.30
According to O’Sullivan in 1845, ‘the Anglo-Saxon foot was already
on [the]…borders’ of the West, where ‘the advanced guard’ and
‘irresistible army’of American pioneers had ‘began to pour down
upon these territories.’ He went further by stating that these believers
of Manifest Destiny brought with them ‘the plough and the rifle, and
marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative
halls, mills and meeting-houses.’31 Yet, despite this democratic
vanguard, these new settlers possessed no knowledge of the grassland
environment. This was initially caused by the wagon convoys whose
wheels together with the hard hoofed livestock scoured the earth.
One traveller Josiah Gregg explained this mass migration noting how
‘the wagons [were] usually drawn by eight mules or the same number
of oxen. Of late years, however, I have seen much larger vehicles
employed, with ten or twelve mules harnessed to each, and a cargo of
goods of about five thousand pounds in weight.’32 Once at their
destinations in Oregon, California and the Great Plains, settlers cut
and burned the grassland and polluted the river habitats as they built
settlements, farms, ranches and other enterprises.33
Carrying their preconceived notions about dominating nature,
these settlers transformed the native grassland ecology by planting
crops such as wheat and corn. The overgrazing by domesticated
animals combined with these crops to degenerate native species’

30 Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Fourth Edition (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xi & 40.
31 O’Sullivan, John L., ‘Annexation, 1845’, in United States Magazine and Democratic

Review, Volume 17 Number 1 (July-August 1845), 5-10, accessed on 28/6/2013 at:

http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/HIS/f01/HIS202-
01/Documents/OSullivan.html
32 Gregg in Moorhead, Commerce of the Prairies, 24.
33 Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado

(Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 88; & Peter Coates, Nature:
Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 108.
53
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

habitats, including bison, wolves and coyotes.34 Local animals,

especially the bison, which grazed across the Great Plains in huge
herds, were seen as restrictions to settlers progress and declared pests
allowing for this creature to be systematically exterminated.35 The
bison populations were drastically lowered from this hunting but were
also affected by the presence of cattle. Mormon pioneer Joseph
Young expressed Americans fascination and fear of the bison noting
the excitement when his group ‘first…saw buffalo’ close to their
camp. Unfortunately it seems that the bison in this instance were just
as curious as Young explains that ‘the buffalo…came into the camp
[and] one Bull made a Brake on the herd’ leaving the pioneers no
choice but to shoot and kill this animal.36 The importance settlers
placed on their cattle combined with the need to protect these
animals, displays their poor temperament toward native animals. The
introduced animals reduced the availability of food on the Plains as
their dietary requirements and water consumption overlapped with
the bison’s own needs for survival. Bison numbers were also
decimated the transference of bovine diseases such as anthrax,
tuberculosis and brucellosis.37 However, the declining bison numbers
would also impact upon Native Americans’ food supplies and
existence.38 This was especially the case for the Plains Indians who as
nomads followed the bison herds across the grasslands, using these
animals for food, shelter and clothing.
By the 1840s and 1850s, the hunger for Western land saw the
federal government dedicated to removing or subduing Indians.

34 Robert V.Hine, & John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretative
History (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press, 2000), 317.
35 West, The Contested Plains, 47, 89-90 & 161-162.
36 JosephYoung, ‘Diary entry for July 25, 1850, Platte River Nebraska’, 73, in Trails

of Hope: Overland Letters and Diaries, 1846-1869, accessed on 29/6/2013 at:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Diaries/id/7677
/rec/53
37 Dan Flores, ‘Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from

1800-1850’, in The Journal of American History, Volume 78 Number 2 (1991):481.

38 Hine and Faragher, The American West, 3.

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FJHP – Volume 29 – 2013

Americans agreed that as the Indians’ economy was based on hunting

and gathering, they failed to improve the land and as a consequence
these native peoples had abandoned their right of ownership over
these lands.39 In 1846, US Senator Thomas Hart Benton echoed these
sentiments justifying dispossessing Native Americans saying:
Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have
found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites, and
civilization, always the preference of Whites, has been pressed as an
object, while extinction has followed as a consequence of its
resistance….the Red races have often felt their ameliorating
influence.40
However, previous methods used to reduce and subjugate
Eastern Indians would prove more difficult against these far more
aggressive and better equipped Western tribes. This often resulted in
bloody clashes between settlers and Native Americans and in turn
would force the federal government to acquire Indian lands through
negotiating treaties and other persuasive methods. Once these treaties
were signed into effect the territories formerly inhabited by Native
Americans officially became opened to thousands of settlers. This
resulted in the Western land rushes where pioneers, under military
supervision, would have to wait until a specified deadline to mark out
their respective land claims.41 However, before the settlers could claim
the lands, the federal government would need to appear to be
acquiring it from the Indians. One technique employed was holding
treaty councils with those Indians who stood in the path of white
settlement. These treaties effectively forced natives to acquiesce to
white occupation and ownership of their lands, as the Indians
forfeited traditional hunting grounds in exchange for being relocated

39 Joy, American Expansionism, 4.

40 Thomas Hart Benton, ‘The Destiny of the Race, Speech delivered to the United
States Senate’, in The Congressional Globe, May 28, 1846, accessed on 28/6/2013 at:
http://clio.missouristate.edu/FTMiller/LocalHistory/Docs/Benton/destinyofthe
race.htm
41 Billington, Western Expansion, 476-77.

55
Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

to specified areas from which they were not permitted to stray

beyond.42 The idea being that on these new sites the Indians would
abandon to hunting on the Plains, stop fighting wars with each other
and most importantly that they would cease all hostile actions towards
settlers. On 17 September 1851, one such treaty occurred between the
US government on one side and the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos,
Crows, Gros Ventres, Assiniboines, Arikaras, and Shoshonis on the
other at Fort Laramie on the North Platte River.43 Under the Fort
Laramie Treaty, these Native Americans in return for agreeing to
relocate would receive:
For the damages which have or may occur by reason thereof to the
Indian nations,…, and for their maintenance and the improvement of
their moral and social customs, the United States bind themselves to
deliver to the said Indian nations the sum of fifty thousand dollars per
annum for the term of ten years, with the right to continue the same
at the discretion of the President of the United States for a period not
exceeding five years thereafter, in provisions, merchandise, domestic
animals, and agricultural implements, in such proportions as may be
deemed best adapted to their condition by the President of the United
States, to be distributed in proportion to the population of the
aforesaid Indian nations.44
This enticement to move off traditional hunting grounds and opening
the land to settlers, meant that the federal government could keep the
Indians bound by being reliant on the supply of financial aid and
material supplies. While the Laramie Treaty did not allocate a title to
the places where these Indians were relocated, this practice became
known as reservations and by the end of the 1850s was widely
implemented across the West.45

42 Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 141.

43 Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 165.
44 ‘The Fort Laramie Treaty, Article 7, September 17,1851’, accessed on 7/3/

2014 at: http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/fort_laramie_treaty_of_1851.htm

45 Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, 51-60.

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Regardless of possessing these lands, the settlers feared

potential savagery from dispossessed Indians. In 1846, to combat this
problem and ensure Indian subjugation continued, the U.S. Congress
authorised a series of military bases be constructed near to new
settlements. These forts were built at strategic locations along the
Oregon Trail and manned by special army units to deal quickly with
any Indian threat. However, these armed garrisons were so thinly
spread across the frontier that they were little more than a token
effort. The soldiers could not easily maintain the facilities or cover
their areas of operation. The natives of course had the upper hand
when it came to their intimate knowledge of the land and terrain. This
allowed them to regularly evade capture as they knew where to hide
and when and from where to strike.46
Christianity’s Environmental Impact
In the 1840s, American Protestantism and utopian beliefs were
further fuelled by Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion.47 Many
Americans believed that through their Christian faith and their
democratic principles that they were divinely empowered to expand
their civilization.48 In seeking to fulfil their mission in the West,
American Christians equated themselves with the Israelites from the
book of Exodus, perceiving that they were God’s new chosen people
destined for a new land.49 They believed that just as God had led the
Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt, He was now leading them
from the inequity of the East and into the Promised Land of the West.50
These Christian emigrants operated under such scripture as: ‘Leave

46 Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, 36-37.

47 Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 5.
48 Coates, Nature, 104.
49 Billington, Western Expansion, 572.
50 Charles M. Segal, and David C. Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny

(New York: Putnam, 1977), 105.

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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

this place, with the people you brought out…Go on to the land
where milk and honey flow.’51
While Americans believed the West to be their sanctuary they
were also aware that this unknown territory contained dangers, chiefly
the temptation of sin. But this strengthened the pioneers’ resolve to
follow in the Israelites’ footsteps as God was testing them by the trials
and tribulations they endured in the West.52 One group that wandered
to the West with the intent purpose of establishing their own religious
community were the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. These particular pioneers were not thought of as
being Christian by the other American denominations and as such
had endured significant persecution. In 1846, twelve thousand
Mormons journeyed by covered wagon from Illinois, searching for an
isolated location. The next year they discovered their new home in
what is now known as the Utah desert but at this time was still
Mexican territory. Yet, in this desert they were free to worship God in
their own unique Christian way, including polygamy.53 The Mormons
held that the land belonged to God and that as His people they were
to use it profitably. Underlying the Mormons’ faith was the tenant
that the entire group’s welfare was more important than that of any
individual.54 In 1848, Levi Jackman described his devotion to the
settlement and his brethren:
[I] pray that I may be enabled to do mutch good on the earth in
assisting to build up thy kingdom [settlement in Utah] and when I
shal have compleated my mision on this earth I pray that my last
days may be among my friends and can nection and that my
senses may remain bright that I may admisiter words of

51 ‘Exodus 33:1-3’, in The Jerusalem Bible (Popular Edition, London, 1968), 96.
52 Segal and Stinebeck, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, 105.
53 Greenburg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion, 22.
54 William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, New York, 1961, 299.

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consalation to them as I bid adieu to this life these and all auther
neaded blessing I ask in the name of Jesus Amen.55

The West’s wild nature presented an obstacle to progress,

prosperity, power and godliness. Adhering to the Biblical belief that
Satan ruled in the wilderness, the settlers further justified their
providence to replace evil with the benefits of Christian society.56 In
their eyes, nature was a villain and as pioneers they were the heroes
who would transform the untamed wilderness into civilization. Only
when settlers had cleared the land and made it fertile for their crops
could they consider their work to be successful.57 The Mormons
reflected this Christian mentality that it was God’s wish that nature’s
desolation be converted into a lush agricultural garden. Emmeline B.
Wells was an early Mormon pioneer and echoed this thought when
she first saw the chosen settlement site in Utah:
This is the place where they intend to put in a crop. this afternoon
I crossed the creek or river found the most beautiful spot I ever
saw viewing it from the opposite bank the ground was covered
with a carpet of green and interspersed with flowers which might
have done honor to the Elysian bowers Today Br. Brigham told
them from the stand that no one should return to Nauvoo with
his counsel until they had done something towards helping
build[ing] up this place to help those who stay and those who shall
come after they made some arrangements for work bricking fence
building log houses.58

55 Levi Jackman, ‘Diary entry for August 6, 1848’, 58 in Trails of Hope: Overland
Letters and Diaries, 1846-1869, accessed on 29/6/2013 at:
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Diaries/id/7657
/rec/18
56 Segal and Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, 32.
57 Joy, American Expansionism, 17-24, & 39-41.
58 Emmeline B.Wells, ‘Diary Entry for 1846’, 75-76, in Trails of Hope: Overland

Letters and Diaries, 1846-1869, accessed on 1/7/2013 at:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Diaries/id/7676
/rec/54
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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

By 1850, the Mormons had used their resources to irrigate more than
16,000 acres of desert to grow their crops and constantly rebuilt dams
by constructing bigger and stronger versions.59 Under the guidance of
their divine mission and interpretation of Manifest Destiny, Christians
extended their faith into the West and helped to transform nature into
civilization.60
From their Christian mission, Americans would spread God’s
word to the Indians and convert these primitives.61 This Christian
desire to bring Indians closer to God was inseparable from the forced
requirement that the natives abandon their traditional hunting and
gathering cultures by yielding to the federal government’s treaties and
relocations to reservations.62 This notion was strengthened by the
moral opinion that hunting was incompatible with God’s plan to use
land for the creation of a civilization.63 To commence the Indians’
Christian conversion, missionaries were sent out among the Indian
tribes to educate them about civilization.64 However, those American
settlers who pushed into the West under the mandate of civilising the
Indians also inadvertently brought with them disease, guns, horses,
cattle, and cut down trees to establish homesteads, all of which
degraded the natives’ environment. This impact was heavily felt by
the Indians because of their interconnectivity and reliance upon this
environment for their very way of life. This had an additional impact
as European flora and fauna began to supersede the embattled native
varieties to further reduce the native peoples’ food sources.65

59 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 77-80 & 110.

60 Billington, Western Expansion, 540.
61 Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation

(New York: Knopf, 1963), 246.

62 Segal & Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, 30.
63 Albert K.Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in America

History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 77.

64 Joy, American Expansionism, 11.
65 Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, 11, 13-14.

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Unfortunately for Native Americans, the increased contact

with missionaries, would lead to higher incidents of diseases such as
influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis, dysentery, measles, and small pox.66
This was due to Indians lacking immunity to these diseases, which
once contracted swept through native communities reducing their
populations by millions.67 One example of epidemic disease occurred
in the Oregon territory in the winter of 1846-47 between the Cayuse
and the Whitman Mission. This Mission came about due to the Nez
Perce asking for Christian instruction in the mid-1830s. By 1836, the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions dispatched a
party led by Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa to the Nez
Perce and other surrounding tribes including the Cayuse. The
Whitmans established a Mission and for eleven years taught the
natives how to worship God as Christians. 68 The winter of 1846-47
was brutal and compounded further by the natives’ wild game
perishing from the extreme cold and competition with American
cattle as well as the occurrence of a very later salmon run. Suffering
from cold and hunger, the Cayuse also became heavily infected with
severe measles. Typical during times of such hardships, people look
to place blame for their plight. This case was no different, as many
Cayuse believed that the white missionaries in the area had
deliberately infected them with this disease. On November 29, 1847,
the Cayuse attacked the Mission giving no warning and killed the
Whitmans along with eleven other men. Many other missionaries
were wounded with some managing to escape to tell this tale.
Apparently the Cayuse also took the remaining live women and
children prisoners.69

66 West, The Contested Plains, 283.

67 Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, 11, 13-14.
68 Heilder, Manifest Destiny, 118-119.
69 Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 154-155.

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Capitalism and the Western Environment

By 1840, the US had caught the railroad bug as evidenced by the
3,000 miles of track built and in operation. This transportation was
faster, less expensive to build, and able to journey farther and to a
greater number of places across the US. Nine years later, the revenue
railroads earned from freight exceeded the profits they made from
passenger travel.70 Railroads would eventually compliment capitalism
and its expansion into the West. The railroad network’s construction
received massive federal government support directly in response to
the American public’s enthusiasm.71 Freight and passenger cars,
carried far more cargo Westward then horse drawn wagons. While the
railroads did not completely render other transportation methods
obsolete they did provide the West with a duel function. First, by
transporting more people and freight into the new communities,
while also shipping Western agricultural produce, cattle and raw
materials back to Eastern markets.72 About the railroad, O’Sullivan
noted ‘the projected rail-road across the continent to the Pacific’
needed to ‘be carried into effect’ as it would bind ‘together in its iron
clasp our fast settling Pacific region with that of the Mississippi
valley.’73 The relationship between the railroad and capitalism in the
West meant that the federal government would need to undertake
detailed explorations to survey potential railroad sites, offer
protection from Indian aggression, and use public lands to entice
foreign and domestic investment.74 This desired economic growth
would be catered for by selling land along the railroads to settlers and
other immigrants.

70 Boyer et. al., The Enduring Vision, 183.

71 Mead, God and Gold: Britain, 154.
72 McDougall, Throes of Democracy, 150.
73 O’Sullivan, ‘Annexation’.
74 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of

Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 6 &

213.
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Western farming, ranching, freighting, and other mercantile

businesses provided many settlers with vast opportunities to become
wealthy. The shared capitalist stimuli also triggered an agrarian
demand for lands on the Plains. Here, farmers prepared fields
alongside every available water source and extensively irrigated to
grow corn, barley, oats, vegetables and hay for their cattle. Initially
farmers used equipment such as wooden mouldboard ploughs with
cast-iron shares and the all-iron prairie-breaker weighing 150 pounds
to produce their crops, but this apparatus was inadequate for
ploughing farther out West. This early failure combined with the high
demand for Western crops back in the Eastern states as well as in
Europe generated a massive wave of agricultural inventions in the
1850s ranging from ploughs, seeders, corn huskers, and reapers to
butter churns, yokes, and beehives.75 However, the employment of
these inventions reduced the soil fertility and prevented regrowth of
native grasses, and exposed existing trees and plants to harsh
weather.76
The West’s growing capitalist economy brought about the
Great Plains’ environmental decline. The early settlers and merchants
required pasture, water and other available resources. On the Plains
pastoralism emphasised herding exotic cattle and other domesticated
animals to be sold for meat, hides and wool.77 These cattle, sheep and
horses stocked the ranges drastically reducing bison populations from
about thirty million to roughly ten million by the 1850s. As already
discussed these dwindling numbers impacted the Plains’ natural cycle,
as the grasses were not be eaten and fertilised by the bison to restore
nutrients to the soils and reproduce new plant life. Instead cattle
grazing stripped these fields barren and did not replace soil fertility as
these animals were shipped off to outside markets to be slaughtered.78
Added to this impact, railroads cut deep scars into the landscape and

75 McDougall, Throes of Democracy, 129-130.

76 West, The Contested Plains, 68, 90, & 250.
77 Worster, Under Western Skies, 37-40.
78 Hine and Faragher, The American West, 317-320.

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polluted the air along their routes with noise, ash and the potential
danger for fire. These factors resulted in creating a strip of barren
land which ran through the bison range permanently separating them
into northern and southern herds.79 The Indian nations watched as
settler’s industries exhausted the natural resources to displace them
from their homes and destroy their culture.80 The symbiotic
relationship between Plains Indians and the bison meant that this
animal’s reduction would weaken Indian societies, making them far
more reliant upon American civilization and trade networks.81 The
bison decline also resulted in a drastic reduction in traditional
practices of ceremonies as well as a sense of identity for those Plains
Indians who hunted this game. Cheyenne Chief Yellow Wolf captured
this impact when watching Americans enter his people’s territory
along the Arkansas River on August 26, 1846:
...is a man of considerable influence, of enlarged views, and gifted
with more foresight than any other man in his tribe. He frequently
talks of the diminishing numbers of his people, and the decrease
of the once abundant buffalo. He says that in a few years they will
become extinct; and unless the Indians wish to pass away also,
they will have to adopt the habits of the white people, using such
measures to produce subsistence as will render them independent
of the precarious reliance afforded by the game.82

The West’s capitalist enterprises were further boosted by the

emergent mining industry following gold’s discovery in California in
1848.83 The Gold Rush from the late 1840s likewise affected the
Sierra Nevada Mountains as miners blasted out rocks, hunted native
animals, cleared forests, and spoiled the rivers with debris depleting

79 Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 165.

80 Coates, Nature, 124.
81 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-

1900 (New Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 291.

82 Yellow Wolf, ‘Near Bent’s Fort, Arkansas River, August 26, 1846’, in Robert M.

Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, Revised Edition (Albuquerque, New Mexico:
The University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 2.
83 Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 67, 81, & 126.

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fish stocks. In 1849, Edward Jackson journeyed through Gold

country in California and even tried his own hand at mining noting
how ‘I mined a little, & found to my satis faction, [sic] that gold is to
be found in any place you are a mind to dig in these three vallies.’84
With gold apparently plentiful in California, people’s greed for it
increased, eventually leading to hydrologic mining in 1852 which
involved blasting high power water onto hillsides to displace on a
daily basis between fifty and one hundred tons of earth. This
advanced mining denuded hillsides of their topsoil, polluted water
systems and eventually low land farms.85
The California Gold Rush witnessed thousands of miners
flood into the territory to force the state’s admission to the Union
two years later. The new state commenced its existence by instituting
a brutal anti-Indian policy that legalized into indentured servitude
native children and adults. California’s justices of the peace were
further endowed with the power to sell these Indians’ services to the
highest bidder, and simultaneously deny natives any legal recourse
ruling their testimonies inadmissible in courts. Under this system,
California’s Indians were taken into virtual slavery, most noticeably
women to be used by miners.86 Native American life on the gold
fields were further impacted as their homelands were overran pushing
them out into barren areas devoid of food.87 Not surprising many
miners displayed their lawlessness, especially when law enforcement
was largely absent on the gold fields. In 1855, one hostile group of
miners in northern California abused some local natives they came
into contact with so badly that these Indians returned the violence in

84 Edward Jackson, ‘Diary Entry for September 11-13, 1849, Yuba River Valley,
California’, in Trails of Hope: Overland Letters and Diaries, 1846-1869, accessed on
1/7/2013 at:
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Diaries/id/7658
/rec/30
85 Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 19-20, 67-68, 83-86,& 90.
86 Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 164-165.
87 Hine & Faragher, The American West, 248.

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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

kind sparking the Rogue River War (1855-1856).88 As a young Army

lieutenant, George Cook was stationed during the Gold Rush near the
mining town Yreka, and witnessed Native Americans’ mistreatment.
He writes:
It was of no unfrequent occurrence for an Indian to be shot down
in cold blood, or a squaw to be raped by some brute. Such a thing
as a white man being punished for outraging an Indian was
unheard of….The consequences was that there was scarcely ever a
time that there was not one or more wars with the Indians
somewhere on the Pacific coast.89

Conclusion
Even before John L. O’Sullivan first coined the phrase of Manifest
Destiny, the Western frontier for Americans was the place to take
their democracy, religion and capitalism. By the 1840s and 1850s,
Manifest Destiny entered into the common vernacular, providing
hope for independence through land ownership and justifying the
nation’s mission to expand freedom. However, this push for freedom
would come to radically alter the West’s natural environment
including the indigenous population and wildlife. The settlers who
carved out their new civilization saw the West as a wilderness to be
subdued. They encountered difficult environmental conditions from
limited water sources and trees, and the low average annual rainfall.
Instead of lush forest vegetation, settlers found rolling prairies, grass
covered plains, steep and rough mountain ranges, and dry deserts.
Here, the sub-humid environment was home to severe warm winds,
freezing Northern blizzards, and frequent droughts.

Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, 158.

88

George Cook, ‘His Autobiography’, in Ange Debo, A History of the Indians of the
89

United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 158-159.

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These new settlers’ hunger for land drove them to create an

imagined place that they would civilize by establishing farms, ranches
and settlements. As the vanguard of American civilization
transforming the West these settlers were rewarded by their national
government with sponsorships for land improvements, guaranteed
land rights, and water transportation.90 However, in developing this
new society, settlers through their ignorance, failed to work the
grassland environment for long term sustainability. New farming
technologies, combined with domesticated livestock, scoured the
earth, burnt and cut grass, and polluted the few waterways. The cattle
and sheep exhausted the food supply and transferred diseases such as
anthrax and tuberculosis to drastically reduce local wildlife
populations. These settlers also impacted on the Indian peoples,
destroying their nomadic lifestyle as they could no longer freely hunt
bison across the Plains. Native Americans were obstructed by barbed
wire fences marking property boundaries and then via treaties that
forced these peoples to live on reservations comprised of undesirable
lands.
On these reservations, Indians were expected to adopt
American civilization as they learnt to become farmers and Christians.
Meanwhile, these tribal peoples were made dependent on the
government’s financial annuities and protection under established
federal agencies.91 However, the combination of land greedy pioneers
and resistant Indians led to further frontier violence. Realising this
violence was having a direct impact on the newly settled lands, as well
as the efforts to entice more settlers from the Eastern States to the
West; the US government backed up the reservation system with its
military forts stationed nearby to reservations and American
settlements. While both the reservations and the garrisons were
flawed and did not always improve the conditions between settlers
and Indians, these two mechanisms were designed to provide
protection and quall any Indian uprisings. Such installations in the

90 Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 62 & 112.

91 Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 179, 284, & 326-330.
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Manifest Destiny- Darren Dobson

West acted during the 1840s and 1850s as symbols of American

influence, control and forced civilization upon a growing number of
native peoples.92
Added to this mix was settlers’ wide embrace of the various
Protestant Christian religions, through which they equated their
Western migration with the biblical story of Exodus. American
settlers saw themselves as the new Israelites, chosen by God to go
into the wilderness to improve the land as He commanded. The
Mormons were one such group who followed this ideology, as they
transformed the Utah desert with dams and irrigation construction.
Yet, once settlers had successfully established their new communities,
many turned their attention to saving the Indians by introducing them
to Christianity. But this close and frequent contact between Christian
missionaries and native people fatally exposed the latter to infectious
epidemics including influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis and smallpox.
Indians’ high susceptibility to old world infections combined with
frontier violence and the bison’s mass slaughter all contributed to
radically decimate their populations.93 Overall, settlers could justify
Indian dispossession and population decline by declaring the natives
to be irredeemably savage from their refusal to embrace the benefits
and opportunities of American Christian society.94
Amidst this atmosphere, a dynamic capitalist market emerged
in the West. This was especially noticeable with the development of
railroads, which generated trade links back to the Eastern states.
Western business enterprises became inter-reliant and inter-active.
Together these new industries depleted soil fertility and made it
difficult for native vegetation to regrow. Nature was further affected
by capitalist industry as native species were extensively hunted for
their pelts, hides and bones. The bison’s disappearance across much
of the Plains broke the natural cycle of eating the grass and fertilising

92 Billington, Western Expansion, 290-291, & 409.

93 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 198.
94 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 104.

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the soil. Instead domesticated animals exhausted the vegetation and

soils while also failing to replenish the land due to ranchers
transporting this livestock to other locations to be slaughtered. The
discovery of gold in California in 1848, also devastated the mountain
ecologies as miners cleared forests, hunted native animals for food,
and deposited debris into the rivers.
Capitalism’s mass slaughter of bison, barbed wire fencing,
windmill and rifle production, was the final toll for the nomadic
Indian lifestyle. Capitalist enterprises pushed the remaining few
Indians who had not already moved onto reservations, off of their
traditional homelands and into areas devoid of food supplies. Hungry
Indians raided American settlements for food and perpetuated the
frontier violence which developed. The Western landscape had been
altered dramatically. This Manifest Destiny would take on a life of its
own, as American society, Christian faiths, and capitalistic economies
altered the lands, nature and Indian peoples of the West.

About the Author

Darren Dobson holds an Honours Degree of Bachelor of Arts and

Masters of Arts (History) from Monash University. His Masters
Thesis was titled: ' A Fearful Excitement': The Baltimore Riot in
American Civil War History and Memory. His research interests
include 19th Century US History with a particular focus on the 1850s
and the American Civil War.

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