individualists, working to make it on their own. In reality the federal government was more active in the American West than in any other region. In the postwar period it provided settlers with land, fought and then corralled Indians, bolstered markets through contracts to feed and clothe Army personnel and hundreds of thousands of reservation Indians, and funded and protected the railroads that got western products—including cattle—to eastern markets. The mythologized cowboy embodied the resentment of southern Democrats and their northern compatriots, who believed that the Republicans were
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