Chapter 16: The American Chapter 16: The American WestWest

By Neil HammondMillbrook High School

I) FARMERS: Big Government & Rugged Individualism

• A. 1862 Homestead Act – huge departure from previous policy…GOAL = to settle west

– For a $10 fee people could buy 160 acres of land to people who wanted to move out West.

– The land could become theirs if they worked on it for five years and made improvements (house etc.)

THE GREAT PLAINS

• Thanks to the Homestead Act, people were willing to take the risk and move West

Two Migrant GroupsTwo Migrant Groups• Excitement took hold among Scandinavians as Danish and Norwegian immigrants flocked to MN and the Dakotas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF3z-j8o39I

• Exodusters– Some Southern blacks escaped the Jim Crow South…4000 blacks in Kansas in the 1880 census

• Women played an important role on these farms and enjoyed greater legal rights and voting rights. By the 1870s there was a steady flow of settlers to the Great Plains

SODBUSTERS• For many, the

move out West was tough

• Farmers who farmed the Great plains were known as Sodbusters

• A typical sodbuster house dug into an existing hill

Farming Becomes Big Business

• a. Some settlers were able to establish large wheat farms by using the new technology of the day (newly designed steel plows, and mechanical reapers and threshers

• b. Much of the Dakotas and the eastern area of Kansas and Nebraska became known as the “Wheat belt”

A Threshing Machine

A Mechanical Reaper

Taming the LandTaming the Land• Environmental Impact

• Farmers saw themselves as conquerors of nature….BUT

• They did not understand that plowing under the native bunch grasses rendered the soil vulnerable to erosion and sandstorms. Or that the attack on biodiversity, which was what farming the plains really meant, opened pathways for exotic, destructive pests and weeds. They knew that wheat crops depleted the soil, but not that the remedy that worked elsewhere—letting the land lie fallow periodically—raised salinity to destructive levels (because, without absorption by the native grasses, rainfall dissolved salts in the underlying shale).

Taming the LandTaming the Land• Few counted the environmental costs when there was money to be made. By the turn of the century, about half the nation's cattle and sheep, a third of its cereal crops, and nearly three-fifths of its wheat came from the newly settled lands. But this was not a sustainable achievement. In the twentieth century, this celebrated nation's bread basket was revealed to have been, in words of modern scientists, “the largest, longest-run agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.”

Taming the Land: Taming the Land: Importance of TechnologyImportance of Technology

Farmers’ WoesFarmers’ Woes• NOT stereotypical pioneers

– railroads, eastern capital financed ranching, wheat an international commodity. The nerve center of the Great Plains, indeed, was Chicago, from whence, at the hub of the nation's rail system, the wheat pit traded western grain and consigned it to world markets; the great packing houses turned livestock into the nation's beef; and building supplies, McCormick reapers, and Sears, Roebuck catalogues flowed backed to western ranches and homesteads.

• Farmers embraced this commercial world– land seen as a commodity– they borrowed during boom times and bought new farm equipment–

Farmers’ WoesFarmers’ Woes• But many farmers struggled.

• a) They understood that they were tiny players in a big economic game

• b) They understood the disadvantages they faced in dealing with the big businesses that supplied them with machinery, arranged their credit, and marketed their products.

• c) What could they do? One answer was cooperation

The Grange MovementThe Grange Movement• Patrons of Husbandry founded in 1867. Spreads throughout rural America…especially popular in the Midwest states of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota

• At FIRST, Granges attempted to improve the social lives of their members, providing meeting places and a rich array of dances, picnics, and lectures.

• BUT the Grange soon added cooperative programs, purchasing in bulk from suppliers and setting up its own banks, insurance companies, grain elevators, and, in Iowa, even a manufacturing plant for farm implements.

The Farmers Get The Farmers Get Political!Political!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKIWjnEPNY

• The power of government might also be enlisted on the farmers' side. In the early 1870s the Grange encouraged independent political parties that ran on antimonopoly platforms. In a number of prairie states these agrarian parties enacted so-called Granger laws regulating grain elevators, fixing maximum railroad rates, and prohibiting discriminatory treatment of small and short-haul shippers.

• But what really hurt farmers was something they had little control over: world prices. By the 1880s, wheat production woes had shifted to Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas

Positives & Negatives

• Great Plains becomes the “wheat belt”

• A new part of the country was opened up for settlement

• In the late 1800s it became harder for the smaller farmer to survive

• Farmers grow one cash crop – become “slaves to world market”

• Native Americans are forced off land

The Far WestThe Far West• Fewer than 100,000 Euro-Americans lived in the Far West before 1850. The Mineral wealth of the region led to its population growth

• California began the trend, but other mining discoveries were made in the 1850s and after the Civil War

•Remote areas turned into a mob scene of settlers…prospectors made their own mining codes, which limited mining claims and discriminated against the Chinese, Mexicans and African Americans in the region

2) MINERS: Strike it Rich

• The West’s rich deposits of gold, silver and copper served the growing industrial needs of the East

• The precious metal deposits all brought the first wave of settlers to the Rocky Mountain states

New Strike

• Word of a new strike would bring a stampede of early prospectors, who would mine the shallow deposits of ore with picks, shovels and pans

• Big mining companies would move in afterwards and mine more deeply

• Prospectors of the “Pikes Peak” Gold Rush in Colorado in 1859. Over 100,000 people rushed to Colorado in 1858-9. Most left empty-handed.

Boom and Bust• Towns like Virginia City, Nevada grew up

almost overnight (30,000 people)

• Towns like that would quickly become deserted if the precious metals ran out and became “ghost towns”.

South Park City, CO

Ghost town – currently a living history museum

Positives & Negatives• The discovery of precious

metals pumped millions of $ into the economy

• Spurred railroad growth

• Led to the settlement of the Rocky Mountains and Northern Great Plains

• Lawlessness in towns

• Boomtowns became Ghost towns

• Environmental issues

• Native Americans are forced off land, forcing bitter conflicts

• Labor unions out West were RADICAL…leading to big conflicts between owners and miners

Cowboys: Railroads Allow Ranching to Blossom

• The first cowboys were found in the Spanish New World Empire in the 1500s

• Cowboys were responsible for looking after great herds of cattle who roamed on open ranges

• With the spread of railroads after the Civil war, ranching became big business and an American Cowboy culture grew up (heavily influenced by Mexican Cowboy culture – lots of cowboy words are Spanish…lasso, lariat, bandana, Tapaderas)

Cowboys: Railroads Allow Ranching to Blossom

• In 1867 Joseph McCoy built a stockyard next to the railroad in Abilene, Texas. That summer, cowboys herded a few thousand cattle from Texas to the Abilene stockyard, in what they called the “long drive”. There the cattle were loaded into boxcars and shipped east. Over the next 20 years, cowboys drove more than 5 million cattle to Abilene and other cow towns.

The End of the Long Drive

• The cattle industry collapsed in 1887

• That winter, whole herds of cattle died in the coldest winter anyone could remember

• Many ranchers lost everything. Those who didn’t reduced their herds and fenced their grazing lands (using barbed wire!). They built barns and raised hay, so they could shelter and feed their cows. The days of the open range and cowboys was OVER. Cowboys settled down on ranches and became ranch-hands