With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900-1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. Many school districts segregated Tejano and Anglo children into separate facilities with the Mexican schools grossly underfunded and often offering only a grade school education. In 1930, when 90% of the schools in South Texas were segregated, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Tejano advocacy group organized the previous year, supported the first major court challenge in Texas to end school segregation. The Texas Court of Appeals, however, ruled that school districts could use such criteria as language and irregular attendance due to seasonal work to separate children in school. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, LULAC and the newly formed American G.I. Forum, an advocacy group of Mexican American veterans, assisted in a lawsuit. The federal district court ruling in that case prohibited school segregation based on Mexican ancestry. Localities devised ways to evade the ruling, however, and de facto segregation continued. Student protests in the late 1960s achieved an end to some discriminatory practices. In subsequent years a new civil rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), continued the fight in the courts, eventually concentrating on the introduction of bilingual and bicultural programs into schools. In the following interview, Ed Idar, associated with both the Forum and MALDEF, related a successful grassroots effort in the early 1950s to desegregate a school without a court ruling.

In the late 17th-century, Spain's empire in the Americas extended north to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California, where Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries began to settle. The missionaries resettled the indigenous Pueblo people into peasant communities, building forts and missions to subdue and convert them to Catholicism. The New Mexico Pueblo people resisted Spanish conversion efforts and forced labor demands. Their sporadic resistance became a concerted rebellion in 1680 under the leadership of the charismatic El Pope. The revolt was the most successful of Native American efforts to turn back European colonists, and for over a decade the Pueblos were free from intrusion. But in 1690 the Pueblos were weakened by drought and Apache and Comanche raiders from the north. Spain retook territory and interrogated and punished the rebels in their "reconquest" of the Pueblo. A Keresan Pueblo man called Pedro Naranjo offered his view of the rebellion and its causes.

In this autobiographical sketch published in 1903 in the Independent magazine (which ran a series of about eighty short autobiographical "lifelets" of "undistinguished Americans" between 1902 and 1906), Chinese immigrant Lee Chew looked back on his passage to America, and his years as a launderer and merchant on both the East and West coasts.

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Fears of the "tramp menace" were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. In this 1893 letter to Kansas governor Lorenzo Dow Lewelling, out-of-work cook R. L. Robinson expressed dismay for the harsh treatment he and a traveling companion received while looking for work in Kewanee, Kansas. Lewelling was far more sympathetic to jobless travelers than other government officials, in part, from personal experience. He himself had wandered the roads in search of work in the 1870s depression.

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including creative artists. Visual artists working for the Federal Art Project created murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and established community art centers in remote areas. The murals often depicted ordinary Americans, at work or in struggle, rendered in heroic, larger than life style. Few of the post office murals commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Art displayed the humor of Orr C. Fisher's paean to corn. But the Iowa-born Fisher's work suggests the kind of regional boosterism and pride of place that characterized many murals painted by local artists.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. Reminiscing in the 1930s for an interviewer from the Federal Writers Project, cowboy George Martin recalled the tough work, rough conditions, and long days required to keep up with the demands of cattle raising in Texas.

The Progressive Era's most controversial environmental issue was the 1908-1913 struggle over federal government approval for building the Hetch Hetchy dam in a remote corner of federally-owned land in California's Yosemite National Park. The city of San Francisco, rebuilding after the devastating 1906 earthquake, believed the dam was necessary to meet its burgeoning needs for reliable supplies of water and electricity. At Congressional hearings on Hetch Hetchy held in 1913, supporters of the plan like Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief Forester of the United States and a noted environmentalist, argued that conservation of natural resources was best achieved through management of the wilderness. Preservationist and Sierra Club founder John Muir did not testify before Congress, but he argued against the Hetch Hetchy plan in this excerpt from his 1912 book, The Yosemite. In the end Congress chose management over aesthetics, voting 43-25 (with 29 abstentions) to allow the Hetch Hetchy dam on federal land.

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym "Dame Shirley," was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819-1906). The letter was written to Clapp's sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp's subject in the "Shirley letters," as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte's stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

The availability of rail connections often determined whether a western community would survive or die. The rails fostered prosperity by bringing both goods and people. This trade, and the local service industries that sprouted up to capitalize on the movement of people and goods, drove many local economies. Here, David Hickman talked about the boom years that followed the arrival of the railroad in the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee in the 1880s.

The labor struggles of the early 20th century, many of which ended in violence and death, engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations. The most important--the Commission on Industrial Relations--was appointed by newly elected Democratic president Woodrow Wilson early in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike erupted in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. One of the most famous accounts of what came to be called the "Ludlow massacre" was the statement of a young electrical engineer, Godfrey Irwin, who was traveling through southern Colorado and provided an eyewitness account to a New York World reporter, reproduced here.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900-1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. Many school districts segregated Tejano and Anglo children into separate facilities. The Mexican schools were grossly underfunded and often offered only a grade school education. In 1930, when 90% of the schools in South Texas were segregated, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Tejano advocacy group, supported a court challenge to school segregation. The Texas Court of Appeals, however, ruled that school districts could use such criteria as language and irregular attendance due to seasonal work to separate students. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, LULAC and the newly formed American G.I. Forum, an advocacy group of Mexican American veterans, assisted in a lawsuit that eventuated in a federal district court decision prohibiting school segregation based on Mexican ancestry. Localities evaded the ruling, however, and de facto segregation continued. In 1955, LULAC and the Forum initiated a suit protesting the practice of placing Tejano children into separate classes for the first two grades of school and requiring four years to compete these grades. Ed Idar of the Forum, in an interview below, discussed this practice, which was finally outlawed in 1957. Student protests in the late 1960s--supported and complemented by a new civil rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)--achieved an end to more discriminatory practices and the introduction of bilingual and bicultural programs into schools. In the second interview, Pete Tijerina, the founder of MALDEF, related a successful student protest against discrimination.

On June 15, 1846, the United States and Britain signed a treaty dividing the Oregon Territory--which at that time stretched into British Columbia--at the forty-ninth parallel. The acquisition of Oregon, like the acquisition of Texas, was part of President Polk's program of territorial expansion. In 1847 the Illinois Journal, a newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, decided to publish letters from former Illinoisans who had been tempted by the promise of Oregon and emigrated there. Readers curious about what life was like in the wild, northern territory got a mixed bag of reviews. While all the settlers agreed that the region was healthy, they had different views regarding its climate, soil, water, timber--and its overall capacity to provide permanent happiness to restless Americans. The newspaper's selections from these letters are included here.

Few Anglos lived in San Antonio after the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 and Tejanos (Texas-Mexicans) continued their rule. Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was born into a prominent tejano family and had close ties with Stephen Austin, leader of the first American settlers in Texas. He became mayor or alcade at an early age and fought on the Anglo side with the coming of Texas' revolt against Mexico. However, his political situation increasingly became fragile because of the changing balance of power and Anglos' efforts to wrest control. When the Mexican General Vasquez captured San Antonio in 1842, he announced that Seguin held loyalties to Mexico and Seguin's enemies denounced him as a spy. Seguin fled to Mexico. Those Tejanos who remained in Texas often found their livestock and corn stolen; others had their land taken in disputes. After the Mexican War of 1846-48, Seguin returned north. The writing and publication of the Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin was part of his effort to set the story straight and appeal to Americans while also lashing out about the conflicted position of Mexican Texans.

Davis Waite, the Populist and pro-labor governor of Colorado, won national notoriety in the summer of 1893 after he declared that if change would not come peacefully, it was "better, infinitely better that blood should flow to the horses' bridles than our national liberties should be destroyed." A Republican-controlled lower house blocked many of Waite's initiatives, but he was nonetheless able to use his administrative powers to support workers. In the Cripple Creek strike of 1894, he brought in state troops on behalf of the striking miners--a rare use of state police power in an era when troops were routinely employed to break strikes. When opponents charged Waite's administration with partisanship, he replied defiantly: "Well, what if it is? Is it not the truth that for thirty years the two old parties have been legislating for the creditor class? It is true, and turn about is fair play."

The penetration of the railroads into the West in the late nineteenth century had a profound impact on local economies. For a period of ten years in the 1880s the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee experienced this phenomenon. One town boomed while its neighbors languished in economic isolation, largely as a result of the rail station in Genesee. In this oral history interview, Kenneth Platt described the railroad's impact on Latah County.

One of the most notable Indian warriors of the post-Civil War era was Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko), a military leader of the Teton Sioux. In the aftermath of Custer's defeat by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn in June 1876, U.S. troops relentlessly pursued both Indian leaders. Crazy Horse was arrested in September, taken to Fort Robinson (in what is now northwestern Nebraska), and ultimately killed by a soldier, perhaps after the Indian warrior resisted being locked in a guardhouse. One of the many versions of Crazy Horse's death and secret burial can be heard in this interview with George Kills in Sight, which was done by Joseph Cash of the University of South Dakota in 1967 when Kills in Sight was in his seventies. Kills in Sight's family--his father's mother was Crazy Horse's cousin and learned about Crazy Horse from his grandfather, Big Crow--taught him to revere Crazy Horse as a heroic figure. Kills in Sight concludes by describing how his grandfather and others took the body and secretly buried it.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with the most rudimentary of equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Sarah Thal, a German Jew who immigrated to North Dakota in 1882, recalled that "getting mail was a big event" on their North Dakota farm and that when she looked out the window onto the flat prairie she was "still unable to realize the completeness of our isolation."

The first great American conservation movement was born during the Progressive Era out of the concern that industrial growth and urban development threatened to extinguish America's wilderness. The era's most controversial environmental issue was the five-year struggle over federal approval for the flooding of a remote corner of federally-owned land in California's Yosemite National Park to build the Hetch Hetchy dam. The city of San Francisco, rebuilding after the devastating 1906 earthquake, believed the dam was necessary to meet its burgeoning needs for reliable supplies of water and electricity. In their 1913 testimony before the House Committee on Public Lands, former San Francisco Mayor James Phelan and Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief Forester of the United States and the most noted conservationist of his generation, put the utilitarian needs of San Francisco's citizens above the aesthetic and moral advantages of leaving Yosemite a pristine wilderness. In the end Congress chose management over aesthetics, voting 43-25 (with 29 abstentions) to allow the Hetch Hetchy dam on federal land.

The American West's history of radical unionism at the turn of the century reflects the breadth of nineteenth-century class struggle. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men were dead and the union was defeated. Though hostile to the Socialist-leaning WFM, American Federal of Labor leader Samuel Gompers issued the following June 20, 1904, statement in support of the striking miners at Cripple Creek.