The Iron Horse in Indian Country: Native Americans and Railroads in the Us West

In 1872, artist John Gast rendered one of the more famous depictions of nineteenth-century Western settlement, a painting titled American Progress. Gast’s painting celebrated the US colonization of the West as the culmination of industrial progress by foregrounding two relatively new technologies: the telegraph and the railroad. For Gast, as for so many other Americans, the Iron Horse seemed destined to serve as the literal engine by which the industrial acumen and God-given civilization of the expanding nation would conquer western lands and peoples. On Gast’s canvas, American Indians shuffled toward the painting’s edge. Faced with the locomotive’s irrepressible force, Gast assumed that native peoples, incapable of adapting to modernity, would have no choice but to fade away.

The Iron Horse in Indian Country shows how indigenous Americans across the trans-Mississippi West actively engaged with western railroads, not simply as passive bystanders to and victims of railroad expansion and dispossession as they have traditionally been cast. Foregrounding the hidden histories of native entanglements with the Iron Horse between the 1850s and 1930s, Alessandra La Rocca Link reveals how they played central roles as guides, passengers, entrepreneurs, wage-earners, and tribal citizens. Many Indians became wage earners (and, in some cases, wage payers) at a historic moment when the federal government sought to sequester natives on isolated reservations and limit their labors to agriculture. Indigenous political envoys made authorized and unauthorized visits to Washington, DC for negotiations among native leaders, railroad corporations, and the federal government, the beginnings of tribal and intertribal activism that would accelerate in the early twentieth century. The railroad provided Indigenous communities with a tool that they often put in the service of sustaining their cultural and material lives in the face of colonization. Indeed, the end of formal treaty relations with Native Americans in 1871 resulted from growing concerns about private negotiations taking place between corporations and tribal governments that directed the course of settlement in the region. Additionally, railroads facilitated a growing intertribal, Indian identity, as Native Americans used proliferating western railroad networks to visit one another, thus forging and renewing cultural, political, and social ties. Such ties were critical to the survival of Indigenous communities facing demographic decline over the course of the nineteenth century.

Just as the West shrank with the arrival of the horse on the Plains, so too would it shrink as steam-powered locomotives brought far-flung locales into the traveling range of many Lakotas, Navajos, Cherokees, and others. Presenting a story that goes beyond the narrative of dispossession of Native land and resources, The Iron Horse in Indian Country demonstrates how the locomotive-powered settlement of the West was constantly contested, thwarted, and negotiated by the original inhabitants of the region who appropriated and repurposed this technology to transform it into a literal and figurative vehicle of survival.

Alessandra La Rocca Link teaches at the Upper School of Louisville Collegiate School. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Colorado Boulder and was a fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.