Looking Into the West Topic 2.2

Looking Into the West
Topic 2.2

Moving West

•Frontier - “the land or territory that forms the furthest extent of a country's settled or inhabited regions

•Harsh weather

•Vast area

•Native Americans

•“Pull”-Pacific Railway Acts

•Passed in 1862 and 1864

•Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads received land grants

•1 mile of track=10 square miles of public land on both sides

•Railroad received more than 175 million acres of public land

•“Pull”-Morrill Land-Grant Act

•Gave state governments millions of acres of western land

•Sell the land to raise money for “land-grant” colleges specializing in agriculture and mechanical arts

•Sold land to bankers and land speculators

•“Pull”-Homestead Act

•Settlers could receive 160 acres for a fee of $10

•Settlers must meet Special Conditions

•By 1900, there were 600,000 claims covering more than 80 million acres

•Special Conditions

•Had to be 21years old or head of family

•American citizen or immigrants filing for citizenship

•Built a house at least 12’X14’

•Lived on the land for six months out of a year

•Farmed the land five yrs in a row before claiming ownership

Settlers from far and wide
(DEMOGRAPHICS)

•Cheap land and new jobs attracted people

•German immigrants built tight knit farming communities

•Irish, Italians, European Jews, Chinese were drawn to the west

•Mexican and Mexican Americans contributed to ranching

•African Americans rode or walked westward to flee violence and exploitation

Frederick Jackson Turner

• “American intellect owes its striking characteristics to the frontier”

•Emphasizes the individual effort of settling the west

•(Manifest Destiny)

Homestead Act of 1862 allowed citizens to claim 160 acres for $10.00 filing fee and a pledge to live on and farm the land for five years. / Between 1862 and 1900 nearly 600,000 families claimed homesteads
Timber Culture Act of 1873 allowed people to claim additional acres of land if they planted trees on one quarter of it within four years. / Farmers were able to increase their farms to a workable size.
Desert Land Act of 1877 allowed people to buy 640 acres of land in very dry areas (or $1.25 per acre if they promised to irrigate part of it. / Many false claims made by people who dumped a bucket of water, claiming they had irrigated the land.
The government encouraged completion of the transcontinental railroads by providing land and money. / The building of the transcontinental railroads became a race between the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. The more track each company built, the more land and loans it would get.
The transcontinental railroads helped speed the settling of the West. / They gave hopeful settlers quicker routes to homesteads in the West.
The transcontinental railroads helped tie the East and West together. / Raw materials from mines, ranches, and (arms could be shipped to the East, while finished goods from the Eastern factories could be more easily shipped to settlers in the West.

Miners
Ranchers
Farmers

Topic 2.2

The Klondike Gold Rush

•1896-1899

•Actually in Canada

•Last great American Gold Rush

Finding Gold

•Individual prospectors look for traces of gold in mountain streams
(placer mining)

Boom Towns

•Rich strikes created boom towns
saloons, dance-hall girls, vigilantes

•Many became ghost towns just a few years later.

•Other towns that served the mines became important commercial centers.

–San Francisco, Sacramento, Denver

Mining Towns

•Similar to industrial cities

•Workers were also from Europe, Latin America, and China.

•½ the population was often foreign born

•Greatly increased Western population

Foreign Backlash

•Resentment among whites

•Miner’s Tax ($20 / month) in CA

•Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
prohibited further Chinese immigration

Ranching

•Civil War – TX is cut off from CSA
5 million heads of cattle roam freely

•TX cattle business – easy to enter
FREE CATTLE!

•Ranchers Kill off the buffalo

Railroads

•RR starts in Kansas
(Cow towns) RR goes to KC, St. Louis, Chicago

•Steers bought for $5 / head
and sold for up to $80 / head

•Refrigerated railcars made it even cheaper.

Cattle Drives

•RR didn’t go into TX
Cowboys drove cattle to Kansas

•1 cowboy per 300-500 cattle
up to 1,500 miles to Kansas
$30 per month, paid in 1 lump sum

End of Cattle Drives

•1880s
overgrazing destroyed the grass

•1885-1886
blizzard and drought
(90% of cattle die)

Farming

•Homestead Act of 1862
160 acres is yours after 5 years

•500,000 Homestead families
2.5 million families had to buy land from the RR

Housing

•Made of sod
strips of grass with thick roots and earth attached

•No trees to make houses
No trees to make fences

Hard Times

•Many discover that 160 acres is not enough to survive.
2 of 3 farms fail by 1900

The Family

•Everyone had to work in order to survive

–Men did heavy manual labor

–Children collected wood & carried water

–Women did chores around the house, managed the money, raised the children, provided food (crops, butter, chickens, milk)

Bonanza Farms

•Run like big business

•High volume

•Drove down prices

•Squeezed out the small farmers

Dry Farming

•The only way to farm successfully in the GP

–Crops that don’t require much water

–Keeping fields free of weeds

Frontier Myths

•Not as wild as you thought…

The Closing of the Frontier

•The move westward began in the 1860’s

•In 1890, the Department of the Interior declared that the frontier was settled.

•Government begins to reserve land.

•The West opened and closed in a generation…