The Far West: The Southwest Indians

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The Far West contained some of the most arid territory in the United States, and some of the wettest and lushest. It contained the flattest plains and the highest mountains. It contained vast treeless prairies and along with those, many peoples. The western civilizations had many tribes, including more than 300,000 Indians. There was a complex interaction between the pueblos and the Spanish which produced an elaborate caste system in the Southwest. At the top were the Spanish, the Pueblos were subordinate but still largely free under them, there were Indians who had been captured in war and enslaved, known as genizaros under them. The genizaros were Indians without tribes and had become part of Spanish society. This caste system reflected how …show more content…
The Plains Indians were a diverse group of tribes and language groups that had strongly relied on buffalos for many sources of things such as food or clothing. The Plains Indians typically lived as farmers or lived nomadic lifestyles. The Plains Indian was the most powerful Indian group in the west. In California, Spanish settlement had begun with a string of Christian missions along the Pacific coast. Soon after, the new Mexican Government begun to reduce the power of the church, and the mission society largely collapsed. The arrival of Anglo-Americans before and after the Civil war was disastrous. So vast were the numbers of English-speaking immigrants that the californios, which were the Hispanic residents, had little power to resist the onslaught and lost much of their land, experiencing many …show more content…
Americans in Texas adopted these methods from Mexicans and Texans and carried them to the northernmost ranges of the cattle kingdom. Texas had the strongest root for the cattle kingdom in the country, leading many trails out of Texas. By the end of the Civil War, an estimated 5 million cattle roamed the Texas ranges. Many people drove their cattle in different trails and ranges. This earliest of the “long drives,” in other words, established the first, tentative link between the isolated cattle breeders of south and west Texas and the booming urban markets of the east. The drive laid the groundwork for the explosion of the ”cattle kingdom”. Between 1867 and 1871, cattlemen drove nearly 1.5 million head up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene—a town that, when filled with rampaging cowboys at the end of a drive, rivaled the mining towns in rowdiness. Eventually, the open-range industry would never recover from a suffering defeat, and it would be displaced for good, this was after two severe
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