6.2 & 6.3: Westward Expansion
6.2: Explain the causes and effects of the settlement of the West from 1877 to 1898.
6.3: Explain the causes and effects of the settlement of the West from 1877 to 1898
Hello hello hello! We’ve arrived in Unit 6, which stretches from the years 1865 to 1898 and now, we’re going to be talking about the period after the Civil War, the New South, industrialization, capitalism, the Gilded Age, and immigration. And for this set of notes, we’re going to be first starting off westward expansion!
Homestead Act and the Mechanization of Agriculture
Since the Civil War, many changes had taken place in the west. In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed, giving 160 acres of free land to any settler who migrated out to the west to live on it and farm it. Agriculture also began to be mechanized, replacing manual labor with machines. For example, the mechanical reaper and combine harvester were invented during this period for harvesting crops. This caused corn and wheat production to double from 1870 to 1990. However, these new technologies were very expensive. This made it difficult for smaller farmers to compete with larger ones, causing many small farms to go into debt and close. THis led to large farms dominating the market. Because large farms were able to produce a lot of crops, this then caused the prices of crops to drop, causing more small farmers to struggle because they were now making less money from their crops. This situation made it difficult for people on the frontier to succeed.
Railroads
Now, why were the farmers having so much trouble with railroads? Because at the time, the federal government loved railroads and wanted to use them to get as many people as possible to move west into the frontier. Republicans returned to Henry Clay’s American System and began using federal funds to kickstart the creation of more railroads all over the United States. They wanted these railroads to encourage migration to the west and as a result, they passed the Pacific Railroads Acts, which granted railroad companies large amounts of land for low prices to give them room to build a transcontinental railroad. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed, connecting Alameda/Oakland, California to Omaha, Nebraska. Within the next few decades, four more transcontinental railroads were completed, all stretching from the central United States to the western regions along the Pacific Coast. This, alongside the Homestead Act mentioned previously, encouraged migration to the west.
Farmers’ Struggles and Grange Movements
Farming in the west during this time was difficult for small farmers. Large monopolistic industrial trusts kept the prices of goods such as clothing and furniture extremely high, making it difficult for farmers to buy anything. Additionally, they had to compete with large-scale bonanza farms, which were farms owned by companies that had access to advanced machinery that the small farmers didn’t. Railroads also kept their prices high, making it difficult for small farmers to transport their goods to market. These difficulties led to many smaller farmers organizing themselves in order to push for reforms and change the situation.
This led to the creation of the National Grange Movement in 1868, which was a movement that pushed for education for farmers and for states to regulate railroad rates. They also pushed to make harmful corporate practices illegal. These laws became known as the Granger Laws. After the Panic of 1873, the Farmers’ Alliance was founded to unite farmers and help them improve their lives. This allowed for farmers to buy and sell goods collectively to make more money. In Munn v. Illinois, the Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate private industries that affect "the common good”. These movements also led to the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, creating the Interstate Commerce Commission. This was an agency created to set regulations on the railroad industry and prevent them from charging extremely high prices.
The Cattle Frontier
So what were these new settlers like? Well, people weren’t the only things being brought over to the west. They brought their cattle and culture with them as well. Through the use of railroads, thousands of cows were brought over the west. This created the cattle frontier, a stretch of land extending north to south from the Canadian border to Texas. In this frontier, cattle ranching became very common. In the late 1860s, Joseph McCoy promoted the cattle trade in Kansas, encouraging farmers to take their cattle from Texas to Abilene, Kansas to bring them to market and put them on trains to ship them to the rest of the eastern United States. During this period, cowboys steered herds of thousands of cows to Kansas to be shipped away on trains.
The Frontier
The settlement of the west also changed the land in the west. As settlers arrived from the Homestead Act, many trees were cut down and many fences were built around all the new homes being built. The first pioneers to the west became known as the sodbusters because they were the first to begin cultivating the soil. Later, other farmers bought land from railroad companies that were selling the land that they had received from the government after completing their railroads. However, in the following decades, many of these farmers would go bankrupt due to mechanization and the creation of larger farms. By 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the western frontier was officially closed, after the last major territory, the Oklahoma Territory, was opened for settlement. Since the 1830s, the Oklahoma Territory had been designated as a reservation for Native Americans. However, after it was opened for settlement, there was no more empty land left to settle and the frontier ended.
In 1893, the closing of the frontier led to a man named Frederick Jackson Turner to publish an essay titled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. In this essay, he argued that Americans should be concerned about the frontier’s closing. He argued that ever since the United States began a nation, people had always had the opportunity to move westward and seek a better life. However, with no more land left to settle and explore, he believed that Americans would fall into class conflicts and war just like Europe, because now people had no “free” land left to escape to whenever things got bad.
Native American Resistance
Many Native Americans tried to resist westward expansion. Ever since the first transcontinental railroad was built, the United States established the reservation system. This system gave tracts of land for the natives to live on and protected the land from American settlement. However, native populations were not allowed to leave the land, which restricted their freedom. Additionally, native populations were struggling to survive due to their food sources dying out. Railroad companies and settlers had killed tons of buffalo wherever they went, nearly driving them to extinction. Additionally, the U.S. government tried to force the natives in these reservations to become more like white people and to assimilate to western society. They often did this by forcing them to attend boarding schools and cutting their hair. This led to many conflicts between the U.S. and native tribes.
In 1864, one of these conflicts led to the Sand Creek Massacre, in which the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were massacred and many were scalped by the Colorado military. In 1871, the Indian Appropriation Act was passed. This ended the sovereignty of Indian nations, meaning that people could now settle on the reservations. It also nullified all previous treaties that had been made with the natives. As a result, many native groups began resisting and in some cases, it led to violence.
In the Sioux Wars, the Sioux rose up against the U.S., setting off a series of wars that lasted until 1891 which led to the government restricting them to smaller and smaller reservations. In 1876, as part of the northern Sioux Wars, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his army died fighting against the Lakota Sioux and other groups of natives and this became popularly known as “Custer’s Last Stand”, leading to a desire for vengeance across the U.S. As resistance from the natives continued, the Dawes Severalty Act was passed in 1887 which ended the reservation system, opening them up for settlement, and dividing it into plots of land to be farmed by the natives. Roughly 90 million acres of reservations were sold to white settlers. Additionally, assimilation further continued to be attempted by the government by forcing natives through an American education and converting them to Christianity.
These native resistances continued, leading to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. For years leading up to the massacre, Wovoka, a spiritual leader, had been leading natives in the Ghost Dance. The natives believed that this dance would call upon the ghosts of their ancestors from the dead to drive out the settlers and get rid of them. The Lakota Sioux had been practicing this dance and in 1890, the U.S. government sent the military to occupy their reservation and watch them. One day, a gun went off and the reservation quickly erupted in violence. In the end, roughly 300 Lakota were dead, bringing an end to native resistance during this period.
Mining
But railroads weren’t the only thing motivating westward migration. There was also the discovery of gold and silver in the west. Starting with the California Gold Rush in 1848, thousands of Americans flocked to the west with a desire to strike rich mining gold and silver. For example, gold was discovered in Pike’s Peak in 1869, causing over 100,000 people to migrate to Kansas and Nebraska. Boomtowns were spontaneously created as people traveled to areas where gold was found, two examples being Denver City and Boulder City. And because everybody, regardless of race or social class, wanted to find gold, these boomtowns were very diverse.
