Topic 2Final Settlement of the West

Standards

• SS.912.A.3.1: Analyze the economic challenges to American farmers and farmers’ responses to the challenges in the mid to late 1800s.• SS.912.A.2.7: Review the Native American experience• SS.912.A.3.6: Analyze changes that occurred as the United States

shifted from agrarian to an industrial society

Goals

• identify all of the major economic challenges faced by American farmers from 1865-1900• analyze the responses farmers used to deal with the economic

challenges they faced during this time period.

Terms to know

• Frontier• Great Plains• Push and pull factors• Transcontinental railroad• Indian wars• Reservation• Buffalo soldiers• Sand creek massacre

• Sioux Indians • Little Big Horn• Wounded Knee• Homestead Act• Boom town• Open range• Cowboy• Barbed wire

• Sod House• Dawes Act

Farming Boom 1870-1890

• Technology improved• Bonanza farms-large farms/ thousands of acres• Oliver Dalrymple- had over 61,000 acres• Stopped by severe drought

Farmer complaints

• Low agricultural prices• Foreign competition• Gold standard• Insufficient and expensive credit• High interest rates• High mortgage rates• High railroad rates• High rates charged by middlemen• High insurance costs• High prices for manufactured goods

Doesn’t everybody complain?????

• Go ahead and complain about Mr. Valdes for the next 30 seconds

Were the complaints valid?

• Farm product prices fell, but so did everything else. We were making more!• Railroad? No• Mortgages? No• No patterns of wide complaint. Each area had different problems• If you were close to railroad, you did well• Farming not attractive

Definition of the Gold Standard

• My normally extensive Economics Glossary does not have an entry on the gold standard, so we'll have to look elsewhere for a definition. An extensive essay on the gold standard on The Encyclopedia of Economics and Liberty defines the gold standard as "a commitment by participating countries to fix the prices of their domestic currencies in terms of a specified amount of gold. National money and other forms of money (bank deposits and notes) were freely converted into gold at the fixed price." A county under the gold standard would set a price for gold, say $100 an ounce and would buy and sell gold at that price. This effectively sets a value for the currency; in our fictional example $1 would be worth 1/100th of an ounce of gold. Other precious metals could be used to set a monetary standard; silver standards were common in the 1800s. A combination of the gold and silver standard is known as bimetallism.• Source http://economics.about.com/cs/money/a/gold_standard.htm

Responses to Economic Challenges

• Agrarian Crusade (1865-1900)1. Away from the doctrine of laissez-faire2. Toward the doctrine of government responsibility for the economic

well being of all Americans

Granger Movement

• National Grange-provided activities for its member that were isolated in the plains• As more people started complaining, these clubs became political• Their politicians got elected and made Granger laws-against railroad

prices• Made co-ops to do middleman’s work and brought farmers together

through profits

Farmers’ Alliance

• Northwestern Alliance • Southern Alliance

Southern Alliance

• Formed in Texas 1875• Excluded lawyers, bankers, merchants, warehouse operators• Why?• Published newspapers• Colored Farmers’ Alliance

Northwestern Alliance

• Differed with the South on exclusion and segregation

Both joined

• Formed the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union in 1889

Thomas Watson

Leonidas Polk

Mary Elizabeth Lease

Ocala Demands (FL 1890)

• Government warehouses for loans

• SS.912.A.3.1: Analyze the economic challenges to American farmers and farmers’ responses to the challenges in the mid to late 1800s.

1. Challenges=Table with main complaint and detail2. Response=analyze Agrarian Crusade