Westward Expansion: Economic and Social Transformation
Westward Expansion: Economic Development
Learning Objective: Explain the causes and effects of the settlement of the West from 1877 to 1898.
The development of the western United States after 1865 differed from earlier settlement patterns due to industrialization.
Transcontinental railroads played a key role.
Transcontinental Railroads
Railroad building coincided with the settlement of the western frontiers.
Railroads promoted settlement and linked the West with the East, creating a national market.
First Route:
During the Civil War, Congress authorized land grants and loans for the first transcontinental railroad to connect California to the Union.
The Union Pacific (UP) started from Omaha, Nebraska, and built westward, employing war veterans and Irish immigrants under General Grenville Dodge.
The Central Pacific started from Sacramento, California, and built eastward, employing about 20,000 Chinese immigrants led by Charles Crocker, who faced the risks of laying track and blasting tunnels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The two railroads met on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, which was marked by driving a golden spike into the rail tie.
Additional Routes:
By 1893, four more transcontinental railroads were completed:
Southern Pacific: New Orleans to Los Angeles.
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe: Kansas City to Los Angeles.
Northern Pacific: Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington.
Great Northern: St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle.
Shortline and narrow-gauge railroads opened the western interior to settlement by miners, ranchers, farmers, and business owners.
Negative Effects:
Railroads transformed the West, but many failed as businesses.
Construction occurred in areas with few customers and little promise of profit.
The rush for natural resources damaged the environment and nearly exterminated the buffalo.
American Indians paid a high human and cultural price.
Settlement of the Last West
Before 1860, the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Western Plateau were known as “the Great American Desert”.
The plains received less than 15 inches of rainfall annually, insufficient for farming.
Winter blizzards and hot, dry summers discouraged settlement.
After 1865, the Great Plains changed dramatically:
Buffalo herds were wiped out.
Open lands were fenced in by homesteads and ranches.
Steel rails crisscrossed the land.
New towns were established.
Ten new western states were created.
Only Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma remained as territories.
The Mining Frontier
The California Gold Rush of 1849 set the pattern for other gold rushes.
Individual prospectors used placer mining, searching for gold in mountain streams with simple tools.
Mining companies employed deep-shaft mining, requiring expensive equipment and wealthy investors.
Experienced miners came from Europe, Latin America, and China.
Gold and silver strikes occurred in South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona.
The discovery of gold near Pike’s Peak, Colorado, in 1859 brought nearly 100,000 miners.
The Comstock Lode in Nevada produced over 340 million in gold and silver by 1890, leading to Nevada's statehood in 1864.
Idaho and Montana also received early statehood due to mining booms.
Rich strikes created boomtowns known for saloons, dance-hall girls, and vigilante justice; many became ghost towns.
Some mining towns evolved into industrial cities, such as Virginia City, Nevada, which added theaters, churches, newspapers, schools, libraries, railroads, and police.
San Francisco, Sacramento, and Denver expanded into prosperous cities.
The Cattle Frontier
Ranchers realized the economic potential of the grasslands from Texas to Canada after the Civil War.
Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros, raised cattle on a small scale in Texas, contributing traditions like the “Texas” longhorn cattle.
By the 1860s, about 5 million wild cattle roamed freely in Texas.
The Texas cattle business was easy to enter because both cattle and grass were free.
Railroads and Cattle
Railroad construction into Kansas opened eastern markets for Texas cattle.
Joseph G. McCoy built the first stockyards in Abilene, Kansas, where cattle could be sold in Chicago for 30 to 50 per head.
Cow towns like Dodge City sprang up along the railroads.
Millions of cattle were driven up the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving Trails.
Cowboys, including African Americans and Mexicans, earned about a dollar a day for dangerous work.
Decline of the Cattle Drives
Long cattle drives ended in the 1880s.
Overgrazing destroyed the grass.
A winter blizzard and drought in 1885–1886 killed off 90 percent of the cattle.
Homesteaders used barbed wire fencing to cut off access to the open range.
Wealthy cattle owners developed huge ranches and used scientific ranching techniques, raising new breeds of cattle and feeding them hay and grains.
The Wild West was largely tamed by the 1890s, changing American eating habits from pork to beef and creating the legend of the American cowboy.
The Farming Frontier
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land free to any family that settled on it for five years.
Railroad promotions and land speculators induced native-born and immigrant families to farm the Great Plains between 1870 and 1900.
About 500,000 families took advantage of the Homestead Act, while five times that number purchased land.
Problems and Solutions
Sodbusters built homes of sod bricks.
Extremes of weather, grasshopper plagues, and loneliness challenged pioneer families.
Water was scarce, and wood was almost nonexistent.
Joseph Glidden's invention of barbed wire in 1874 helped farmers fence in their lands.
Mail-order windmills were used to drill deep wells for water.
Many homesteaders discovered that 160 acres was not adequate for farming the Great Plains.
Severe weather, falling crop prices, and the cost of machinery caused the failure of two-thirds of the homesteaders' farms by 1900.
Western Kansas lost half its population between 1888 and 1892.
Success on the Great Plains
Those who survived adopted “dry farming” and deep-plowing techniques.
They planted hardy strains of Russian wheat.
Government programs built dams and irrigation systems.
Farmers Organize
By the end of the 1800s, farmers had become a minority in American society.
The number of U.S. farms more than doubled between 1865 and 1900, while the percentage of farmers in the working population declined from 60 percent in 1860 to less than 37 percent in 1900.
Farmers faced economic threats from railroads, banks, and global markets.
Changes in Agriculture
Farming became increasingly commercialized and specialized.
Northern and western farmers raised single cash crops for national and international markets.
Farmers procured food from stores and manufactured goods from mail-order catalogs.
They became dependent on large and expensive machines.
Larger farms were run like factories.
Small, marginal farms could not compete and were driven out of business.
Falling Prices
Increased production of crops in the United States, Argentina, Russia, and Canada drove prices down.
The money supply did not grow as fast as the economy, causing deflation.
Wheat and corn prices per bushel:
1867: Wheat 2.01, Corn 0.78
1889: Wheat 0.70, Corn 0.28
Farmers with mortgages faced high interest rates and the need to grow more to pay off old debts, which lowered prices.
The results were more debts, foreclosures, and farmers becoming tenants and sharecroppers.
Rising Costs
Farmers felt victimized by the national economy.
Industrial corporations kept prices high through monopolistic trusts.
Wholesalers and retailers took their cut.
Railroads charged high rates for the shipment and storage of grain, often charging more for short hauls with no competition than for long hauls with competition.
Local and state governments taxed property and land heavily but did not tax income from stocks and bonds.
Tariffs protected American industries but were viewed as unfair taxes on farmers and consumers.
Fighting Back
Farmers began to organize for their common interests and protection.
National Grange Movement:
Organized in 1868 by Oliver H. Kelley as a social and educational organization.
It became active in economics and politics to defend members against middlemen, trusts, and railroads.
Grangers established cooperatives.
In several states, the Grangers successfully lobbied state legislatures to pass laws regulating railroad and elevator rates.
Granger laws made it illegal for railroads to fix prices or give rebates to privileged customers.
In Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court upheld the right of a state to regulate businesses of a public nature.
Farmers’ Alliances:
Farmers formed state and regional groups known as farmers’ alliances.
Like the Grange, the alliances taught farmers about scientific farming methods.
Unlike the Grange, alliances had the goal of economic and political action.
The alliance movement grew quickly and had serious potential for creating an independent national political party.
By 1890, about 1 million farmers had joined farmers’ alliances.
In the South, both poor White and Black farmers joined the movement.
Ocala Platform:
In 1890, the National Alliance met in Ocala, Florida, to address the problems of rural America.
The Alliance attacked both major parties as subservient to Wall Street bankers and big business.
The Ocala Platform called for significant reforms:
Direct election of U.S. senators.
Lower tariff rates.
A graduated income tax.
A new banking system regulated by the federal government.
The platform also demanded that Treasury notes and silver be used to increase the amount of money in circulation to create inflation and raise crop prices.
It proposed federal storage for farmers’ crops and federal loans.
The alliances stopped short of forming a political party.
Local and state candidates who supported alliance goals received decisive electoral support from farmers.
Many of the reform ideas of the Grange and the farmers’ alliances would become part of the Populist movement.
Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development
Learning Objective: Explain the causes and effects of the settlement of the West from 1877 to 1898.
The historical perspective on the social and cultural development of the West has changed since the 1890s.
The settlement of the Great Plains and Far West was initially recorded as a frontier to be conquered by Europeans.
Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian immigrants, and other migrants were also there to shape the culture and diversity of the region.
The Closing of the Frontier
The Oklahoma Territory, once set aside for American Indians, was opened for settlement in 1889.
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the entire frontier had been settled, except for a few pockets.
Turner’s Frontier Thesis
In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
He presented the settling of the frontier as an evolutionary process of building civilization.
People arrived in waves: hunters, cattle ranchers, miners, farmers, and those who founded towns and cities.
Turner argued that 300 years of frontier experience had shaped American culture, promoting independence, individualism, inventiveness, practical-mindedness, and democracy.
However, people also became wasteful of natural resources.
Role of Towns and Cities
Historians have challenged Turner’s evolutionary view.
Frontier cities played an early and primary role in development.
Developers tried to create settlements overnight.
Boosters competed to capture the county seat or state capital, a state asylum, a railroad depot, or a college.
Urban markets made frontier development possible.
The cattle ranchers’ frontier was linked by railroads to Chicago and eastern markets.
The development of the frontier after 1865 was interdependent with the growth of towns and cities.
American Without a Frontier
The closing of the frontier troubled Turner.
He saw the frontier as a safety valve for releasing discontent.
The frontier had always held the promise of a fresh start.
Turner wondered if the United States would be condemned to follow the patterns of class division and social conflict that troubled Europe.
By the 1890s, the largest movement of Americans was from rural communities to the cities.
Migrants saw more opportunity in industry than in agriculture.
The era of the western frontier and the dominance of rural America was on a decline.
American Indians in the West
American Indians in the West in 1865 belonged to dozens of different cultural and tribal groups.
In New Mexico and Arizona, Pueblo groups like the Hopi and Zuni lived in permanent settlements raising corn and livestock.
The Navajo and Apache peoples of the Southwest were nomadic hunter-gatherers who raised crops and livestock and produced arts and crafts.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Chinook, Shasta, and other tribes developed complex communities based on abundant fish and game.
About two-thirds of the western tribal groups lived on the Great Plains.
These nomadic tribes, such as the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, and Comanche, had given up farming after the introduction of the horse by the Spanish.
By the 1700s, they had become skillful horse riders and developed a way of life centered on the hunting of buffalo.
In the late 19th century, conflicts with the U.S. government were partly the result of White Americans having little understanding of their tribal organization and nomadic lifestyle.
Reservation Policy
In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson’s policy of moving eastern American Indians to the West was based on the belief that lands west of the Mississippi would remain “Indian country.”
This expectation proved false as wagon trains rolled westward and plans were made for building a transcontinental railroad.
In 1851, at Fort Laramie (Wyoming) and Fort Atkinson (Wisconsin), the federal government began to assign the Plains tribes large tracts of land—reservations—with definite boundaries.
Most Plains tribes refused to restrict their movements and continued to follow the migrating buffalo.
Indian Wars
In the late 1800s, settlement by miners, ranchers, and homesteaders on American Indian lands led to violence.
Fighting between U.S. troops and Plains Indians was often brutal.
In 1866, during the Sioux War, Sioux fighters wiped out an army column under Captain William Fetterman.
Following these wars, another round of treaties attempted to isolate the Plains Indians on smaller reservations with federal agents promising government support.
Gold miners refused to stay off American Indians’ lands if gold was found.
Minor chiefs and younger warriors denounced the treaties and tried to return to ancestral lands.
The Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 ended recognition of tribes as independent nations and ended negotiation of treaties.
Conflicts included the Red River War against the Comanche and a second Sioux War led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Before the Sioux were defeated, they ambushed and destroyed Colonel George Custer’s command at Little Big Horn in 1876.
Chief Joseph’s effort to lead a band of the Nez Percé into Canada ended in defeat and surrender in 1877.
The slaughter of most of the buffalo by the early 1880s doomed the way of life of the Plains peoples.
Ghost Dancers and Wounded Knee
The last effort of American Indians to resist U.S. government controls was the religiously inspired Ghost Dance movement.
Leaders believed it could return prosperity to American Indians.
Sitting Bull was killed during his arrest.
In December 1890, the U.S. Army gunned down more than 200 American Indian men, women, and children in the massacre of Wounded Knee in the Dakotas.
This tragedy marked the end of the Indian Wars.
Assimilationists
The injustices done to American Indians were chronicled in Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881).
This book created sympathy and generated support for assimilation.
Reformers advocated formal education, job training, and conversion to Christianity.
They set up boarding schools such as the Carlisle School to segregate American Indian children and teach them White culture and skills.
Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
The Dawes Act of 1887 was designed to break up tribal organizations.
It divided tribal lands into plots of up to 160 acres.
U.S. citizenship was granted to those who stayed on the land for 25 years and “adopted the habits of civilized life.”
The federal government distributed 47 million acres of land to American Indians.
90 million acres of former reservation land were sold to White settlers.
The new policy proved a failure.
By the turn of the century, disease and poverty had reduced the American Indian population to just 200,000.
Changes in the 20th and 21st Centuries
In 1924, the federal government granted U.S. citizenship to all American Indians.
The Indian Reorganization Act (1934) promoted the reestablishment of tribal organization and culture.
Today, more than 3 million American Indians, belonging to 500 tribes, live in the United States.
Mexican Americans in the Southwest
Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 increased trade and cultural exchange with the United States.
The Santa Fe Trail linked Santa Fe, New Mexico, and western Missouri.
Mexican landowners in the Southwest and California were guaranteed their property rights after the Mexican War, however they often lost their lands to new Anglo arrivals because of legal proceedings.
Hispanic culture was preserved in Spanish-speaking areas, such as the New Mexico territories and the barrios of California.
Mexican Americans moved throughout the West to find work, finding employment in sugar beet fields, mines, and railroad construction.
Mexicans were drawn by the economic development of the region.
Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and White settlers competed for land and resources.
The Conservation Movement
Concerns over deforestation sparked the conservation movement.
Paintings and photographs helped to push Congress to preserve icons such as Yosemite Valley and Yellowstone.
Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz advocated creation of forest reserves and a federal forest service.
Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland reserved 33 million acres of national timber.
The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 and the Forest Management Act of 1897 withdrew federal timberlands from development and regulated their use.
“Conservationists” believed in scientific management and regulated use of natural resources.
“Preservationists,” such as John Muir, aimed to preserve natural areas from human interference.
The establishment of Arbor Day in 1872 and the efforts of the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club reflected a growing environmental awareness by 1900.