William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody experienced the western frontier in its heyday, then recreated its drama and romance on stage. Born in Iowa in 1846 and moved to Kansas Territory the year it was opened for settlement, Cody had already led a colorful life before he was out of his teens. At times a trapper, prospector and rider for the Pony Express, he also fought for the Union in the Civil War and excelled as a frontier Army scout during the Indian Wars. Cody earned his nickname while working as a buffalo hunter supplying meat to railroad construction crews (1867-1868). Edward Z. C. Judson, a writer using the pen name Ned Buntline, realized that Cody’s real life adventures were ideal for fictionalizing in dime novels. Judson made Cody the hero of his novel, then persuaded him to star in his play, The Scouts of the Prairie (1872). Cody remained on the stage thereafter — always playing himself — amid further stints as a hunter and Indian fighter. In 1883 Cody organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized the myths and legends of the vanishing frontier. In addition to cowboys, Indians, horses, buffalo and longhorns, the troupe included at various times sharp shooter Annie Oakley and Chiefs Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Buffalo Bill’s show toured throughout the world, where it was seen by more people in its 30 years than any other single entertainment.

The last major Indian campaign took place in the Southwest. Kit Carson’s Civil War campaign had subdued the Navajo and the Mescalero Apaches, but the Chiricahua Apaches remained unbroken. Led by Chief Cochise, they terrorized parts of Arizona and New Mexico until the only white man Cochise trusted, Thomas Jeffords, persuaded him to make peace and accept a reservation on traditional Chiricahua land (1872), where Jeffords served as the Indian agent. But the forced transfer of the Chiricahua to the San Carlos reservation two years after Cochise’s death (1874), led to a renewal of raiding, this time under the principal leadership of warrior chief, Geronimo. for nearly a decade, Geronimo and his “renegade Apaches” kept U.S. and Mexican Army units busy, waging skillful guerrilla warfare characterized by rapid movement and carefully-laid ambushes. The number of his pursuers had grown to more than 5,000 before Geronimo finally surrendered his little band of less than 50 in September, 1886 to end the Apache wars. Geronimo and his “hostiles,” together with many “friendly” Chiricahuas, were imprisoned in Florida and then Alabama, before being moved in 1894 to Fort Still, Oklahoma, where Geronimo died in 1909. Despite his status as a “prisoner of war,” Geronimo became a popular figure, making appearances at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 Inaugural Parade.

On June 25, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his troops to annihilation in the famous battle of the Little Big Horn. Undistinguished at West Point, Custer won recognition as a bold cavalryman during the Civil War, then went on to head the Seventh Cavalry in campaigns against the Plains Indians. Court-martialed in 1867, his command was suspended for nearly a year. In 1874, Custer led the expedition that confirmed the presence of gold in the sacred Black Hills territory of the Sioux, touching off a white invasion. When the Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government, they were ordered off their unceded lands and onto reservations. Those who resisted were branded “hostiles,” the Army sent to retrieve them. It was such a mission that brought Custer and his 225 men to the valley of the Little Big Horn, or, as the Indians called it, Greasy Grass, River in southern Montana, supposedly to reconnoiter the area. There, unbeknownst to Custer, was the largest Indian army ever assembled, about 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by such chiefs as Crazy Horse, Gall and the revered Sitting Bull. Though his men and horses were exhausted and he had been ordered to await reinforcements, Custer nonetheless ordered the attack that resulted in his own death and that of his men. Critics censured his recklessness, but news of “Custer’s last stand” incited the nation’s wrath against the Sioux.

The years and decades after the Civil War witnessed tremendous westward expansion — expansion that was fundamentally incompatible with the traditional lifestyle of the Indians. A final showdown was inevitable and it came in a series of Indian Wars between the so-called “hostiles” — tribes or tribal factions who resisted expropriation of their lands and refused to live on reservations — and the U.S. Army. Between 1865 and 1890, the Army battled many tribes in many places. It fought Apaches in the Southwest, Bannocks, Modocs, Utes and Nez Perce in the Northwest; and on the Plains, Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and largest and most powerful of the Indian tribes, Sioux. With their superior horsemanship and knowledge of terrain, the Indians were not without victories. In 1868, Chief Red Cloud won his two-year campaign to oust the Army from forts along the Bozeman Trail, a route which passed through Sioux hunting grounds in the Powder River country of Wyoming. And, in 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated U.S. troops in battles at the Rosebud and the famous Little Big Horn. But in the end, the Army — superior in numbers and technology — prevailed, aided in part by the destruction of the buffalo, the Plains Indians’ primary source of food.

African-Americans were active participants on the western frontier, particularly in the years after the Civil War. Many cowboys were black, skilled as cowhands, horsebreakers and riders on the long drive. Although the top jobs of trail boss and ranch foreman were closed to them, blacks often filled the next most authoritative position — the chuckwagon or ranch cook. Blacks also homesteaded. In the late 1870s, tens of thousands of black “Exodusters” fled the poverty and discrimination of the post-Reconstruction South to found farming communities in Kansas, such as Nicodemus. And blacks served with distinction in the Indian Wars of 1865-1890. Two cavalry regiments (the Ninth and Tenth) and two infantry regiments (the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth) of the U.S. Army were composed of blacks, under white officers. These “buffalo soldiers” — as the Indians called them because of the texture of their hair — fought in numerous engagements against Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Ute and Sioux warriors, several times coming to the aid of beleaguered white troops. they also took part in patrolling the disquiet Texas-Mexican border and staffed the garrisons of many frontier posts. Between 1870 and 1890, 14 black soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery as were four black Army scouts.

The 1872 Act of Congress which created Yellowstone National Park set aside two million acres in Wyoming Territory as a public “pleasuring-ground” whose natural beauties and wonders were to be preserved for posterity and protected from exploitation or private gain. Thus was born the nation’s first national park, destined to become the model for others all over the world. Yellowstone had been the home of Native Americans for centuries before the first white explorer, John Colter, passed through the region in 1807. Colter’s stories of boiling geysers and other natural wonders were simply not believed, and the accounts of most other explorers in the next half century were similarly discredited. but after the Civil War, successive government expeditions made systematic explorations of the area and brought back information whose authenticity could not be doubted. The Folsom-Cook expedition (1869) and the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition (1870) yielded detailed descriptions of Yellowstone’s geysers’, hot springs, waterfalls, mountains and forests, while the photographs of William H. Jackson and the paintings of Thomas Moran, both of whom accompanied the Hayden expedition in 1871, provided a compelling visual record. Railroads had now made the region more accessible and by the 1880s it had become a mecca for tourists.

Although the East was the main theater of the Civil War, there were battles in the West as well. In 1862, Union forces defeated Texas troops at La Glorietta Pass, New Mexico, forcing the Confederates to withdraw from the New Mexico Territory. But it was not the conflict between North and South that produced most of the bloodshed in the West during this time. It was the clash between Indians and whites. The withdrawal of federal garrisons at the outbreak of the Civil War, together with the provocation of white encroachment, produced a rash of Indian uprisings. In the Southwest, the Apaches and Navajos raided frontier settlements until subdued and relocated by volunteers under Gen. James Carleton and Col. Kit Carson (1862-1864). Carson also led the 1864 campaign to halt Kiowa and Comanche attacks on the Santa Fe trail. In 1862 the Santee Sioux of Minnesota killed more than 600 settlers, after federal Indian agencies had failed to pay “annuities” due and needed for food. The Santee were captured, punished and removed from Minnesota to the Dakota Territory. Hostilities in Colorado led to one of the worst atrocities by whites — the San Creek Massacre of 1864. Promised military protection, chief black Kettle’s Cheyenne and Arapahoe encampment was attacked instead by Col. John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers. After the Civil War ended, the Indian Wars only intensified.

With its vast distances the West was peculiarly dependent on river transportation — at least until the coming of the railroads. Since the early 19th century, fur traders had floated their pelts down the natural highway of the Missouri and its tributaries to make St. Louis the great fur center of the nation. At the same time a hardy breed of rivermen poled and steered heavily-laden flatboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans, the early West’s great outlet. But such river traffic was largely one-way, and only when steamboats made it possible to travel upstream was western travel revolutionized. The two decades before the Civil War witnessed tremendous growth in steam navigation on the upper Mississippi, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Red River of Texas. Overlanders to California and Oregon took steamboats up the Mississippi to St. Louis, then continued up the Missouri (the “Big Muddy”) to jumping off places like Independence. By 1860 steamboats had penetrated 2,200 miles up the Missouri’s winding course as far as Fort Benton in Montana, fostering a river trade that lasted until the 1880s when it lost out to the railroads.

Born: 1822, Point Pleasant, OH
Died: 1885

Apart from his years in command of the victorious Union forces in the Civil War, the life of Ulysses S. Grant was filled with sorrow and setbacks. Alcoholism forced the unremarkable West Point graduate to resign from the Army after serving in the Mexican war under General Zachary Taylor. Grant tried various jobs, and finally settled down as a clerk in his father’s Illinois leather goods store. He re-enlisted when Civil War broke out. His military acumen earned him successive promotions, and in 1864 Lincoln appointed him General-in-Chief. Roughly one year later, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. In 1868, Grant was chosen by the Radical Republicans to follow the beleaguered Andrew Johnson.

The war hero proved a poor chief executive, filling many jobs with corrupt or incompetent relatives and friends. Although personally honest, he drew criticism for accepting expensive gifts and his two terms in office were plagued by scandals. After he left, Grant joined a New York investment firm and lost his entire fortune through the chicanery of his associates. He completed his memoirs — a work of clarity and grace — while dying of cancer. The proceeds were to pay off his creditors and provide for his family.

Eighteenth President
Republican