History 200

History 200 DL

Week 2

Richard White - "Contingency"

Dr. Bruce Haulman

Richard White, in the following article, argues that the West could have been different, but that contingent events (in this case Congressman Fort's bill and the Custer defeat at Little Bighorn) created the West we know today.

Other Wests

Richard White

The West could have been different. Events are patterned; history is not random; but the world is also surprising. Historians devote their careers to explaining how the world came to be the way it is; at best, they give only idle moments of thinking to how easily it might have been otherwise.

I am an historian of the American West. I have tried in my work to explain how the federal government came to play such a large role in the West. I have examined conflict between Indian peoples and whites. I have looked at environmental change and destruction. I write about these things because they link the past and the present. They explain the present. But this focus on the present is, at least in part, a problem.

In one way or another the events in the West that academic historians research, that popular historians endlessly retell, and that readers find "relevant" are those past events that seem connected to the present, which seem to produce it. It is certainly a legitimate function of history to produce, as the cliché goes, a usable past. But there is a danger in our obsession with mapping out the routes to the present, because in doing so, we slice off all that is not "relevant" and thus distort the past. We eliminate its strangeness. We eliminate, most of all, its possibilities. History should do more than just validate the inevitability of the present.

What I am attempting in this essay is quite simple. I am looking for crossroads, points where history might have gone in another direction, but did not. I am looking for contingency in routes between the western past and present, but the contingency I am after is not chance. It is instead the multiple possibilities that reside in most situations and the occasional fragility of the causes that produce one outcome rather than another.

The contingency of the present has become a staple of science fiction plots: time travelers make a small change in a past event and thus create a very different present. The plots, as in Back to the Future, with time machines and variants on mad scientists, are farfetched. The premise is not. Small changes in one period can yield significant differences in another. Contingency is not the whole story, but it is part of the story.

Because the nineteenth-century West did not hold within it a single genetic code that caused the modern West to flower like a rose, western historians should at least show a decent curiosity about how it might have been, about other potentials resting within the western past. My technique here will be to ... try to demonstrate how other possibilities once existed.

...

American domination [of the West] involved not only other peoples but nature itself, and the great symbol of that domination was the near-extinction of the bison, or buffalo. These herds once existed in their millions, then, in a seeming blink of an eye, they were gone. We, with a different environmental consciousness, sometimes lament the slaughter of the bison as tragic but inevitable. It is a tawdry stance; it is, in effect, to enjoy the luxury of simultaneously condemning and excusing the slaughter. Nineteenth-century Americans thought they could preserve the buffalo.

The history of the destruction of the bison has recently become far more complicated than simple slaughter by white hunters. The decline of the bison began long before the white hide-hunters arrived. Drought, exotic disease transmitted by horses and cattle, competition with horses for critical winter habitat in the river valleys, increasing Indian population of the Great Plains all depleted the herds before the hide-hunters administered the coup de grace following the Civil War.

With the buffalo in decline, the nation neither greeted the final slaughter with equanimity nor saw it as the inevitable price of progress. In the West the Santa Fe Mexican editorialized during 1873 against "the buffalo slaughter going on the past few years on the plains and which increases every year" as "wantonly wicked" and a development that "should be stopped by the most stringent enactment's." Even some of the hunters felt guilt in what they did, although they sought to justify their actions to themselves and others. Revulsion at a slaughter seen as unnecessary, excessive, immoral, and expensive even appeared in Congress. Congressman Greenbury Fort of Illinois submitted bills "to prevent the useless slaughter of buffaloes within the Territories of the United States." The arguments for preserving buffalo were simple and straightforward. The "useless and wanton destruction" was a "cruel waste." Many military officers stationed in the West contended that the slaughter of the buffalo caused expensive wars with the Indians and forced the government to supply them with beef to replace the vanished bison. The buffalo should be a larder for Indians, settlers, and travelers.

There were arguments in favor of extermination. Some congressmen and military men contended it desirable. Representative John Hancock of Texas offered that "the sooner we get rid of the buffalo entirely the better it will be for the Indian and the white man too" because removing the buffalo would remove an obstacle to "humanizing and civilizing [the Indian] and making him [self-sustaining]." The Orwelian logic of making Indians self-sustaining by eliminating the source of their sustenance did not go unchallenged. Fort did not think that "in order to civilize the Indian" it was necessary to "reduce him to starvation." And if this were true, why stop with the buffalo, why not kill all that lived and breathed in the West? "Why not also kill all the deer, the elk, and beautiful antelope? Why not poison the rivers and kill al the fish? Why not destroy all the game?"

Under the terms of Fort's bills, Indians would retain a free hunt. Settlers and travelers would be able to take bulls but in no "greater number ... than needed for food by such person, or that can be used, cured or preserved for food by such person, or for the market." There would be a one-hundred dollar fine for each offense. Slaughter for the hides alone would be prohibited. A second bill providing for a tax on hides would finance wardens to police the hunt. Since the heavy hides had to go out on the railroads, policing would be relatively easy.

In 1874 as the slaughter of the southern herd reached a climax, Congressman Fort's bill actually passes both houses of Congress. It needed only President Grant's signature to become law. The signature never came. President Grant voiced no opposition to the bill; he did not veto it. He simply did not sign it, whether from his own objections or inefficiency or other causes. The pocket veto killed the bill. It was resurrected in 1876, but this was the year that Custer died and arguments that involved preserving the buffalo for Indians did not go far. And so the slaughter went on unimpeded. A substantial roadblock had been only a signature away. Certainly the buffalo would have declined, law or no law, but with protection they would probably never have reached the desperate straits they eventually did.

...

By revealing to us the contingency of the present, how different alternatives existed in the past, history indicates that small changes in one time can yield large differences in another.

Return to Week 2 Assignments