GOAL #4

1. GOAL #4

2. How did westward migration and the agricultural revolution impact the West?

3. Early Westward Migration

4. Some went West for economic opportunity • Miners for gold, silver, and copper • Some went West for land • Farmers and ranchers • Some went West to escape religious persecution • Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the Mormons

5. African American families left the South at the end of the War, some went West for opportunities • Women went West with husbands or alone to start new lives • The Chinese and Irish went West to work on the Transcontinental Railroad • News of a strike in an area, prospectors flocked to the area in hopes of getting rich

6. Placer mining

7. Early prospectors took the shallow deposits of minerals • Placer mining, simple equipment, pick ax, shovel, pan, sluice box

8. Hydraulic and Quartz Mining

9. Surface deposits gone, corporations moved in and started hydraulic mining • Water cannons washed away surface soil to expose deeper mineral deposits • Environmentally devastating • State governments passed laws to regulate the disposal of sediments • Quartz mining, deep underground mining

10. Required tunnels, explosives, and a rail system to move rock, soil, and minerals from the mine • Dangerous, cave-ins a constant threat as were poisonous gases • Deposits played out commercial mining disappeared, or continued on a limited basis

11. Comstock Lode

12. 1859, Henry Comstock staked a claim in Six-Mile Canyon • Almost pure silver ore • Miners rushed to Virginia City • Overnight the town goes from a frontier town to boomtown • Population of about 30,000 • Virginia City had an opera house, shops with clothing and furniture from Europe

13. Several newspapers • A six story hotel with the first elevator in the West • The silver veins ran out in several years • Mines closed, the town economy collapsed, the citizens moved on to new opportunities • Boom to Bust was common throughout the West

14. Boomtown Crime

15. Boom periods brought crime • Prospectors fought over claims • Thieves on the trails and streets • Little law enforcement • Citizens formed vigilance committees to capture and punish criminals • The innocent were often punished and the guilty often went free

16. Most citizens respected the law and attempted to deal fairly and firmly with the accused • Boomtowns mostly male population attracted women • Women were property owners and town leaders • May work as cooks or in laundries

17. Other women worked in hurdy gurdy houses where they danced with men for the price of a drink

18. The Colorado, Dakota and Montana Territories

19. Development/settlement in Colorado, Dakota, and Montana spurred by mining

20. Pike’s Peak

21. Gold discovered at Pike’s Peak in 1865 • Resulted in a gold rush- “Pike’s Peak or Bust” • Turned out to be a bust for most miners • “Pike’s Peak Hoax”

22. Leadville

23. There was plenty of gold and silver in the Colorado Mountains, it was just hidden under the surface and hard to extract • One of the richest strikes was at Leadville • Deep deposits of lead held silver • In the summer of 1879 people arrived at the pace of about 1,000 per week • Leadville was one of the most legendary boomtowns

24. Mining in Colorado yielded over $1 billion • This led to the building of railroads through the Rocky Mountains • Denver, the supply center for the mining areas became the second largest city in the West after San Francisco

25. The Northern Great Plains

26. Gold in the Black Hills of Dakota and copper in Montana led to the growth of the Northern Great Plains • Miners went in first in the late 1870s • The miners were followed by the railroads in the 1880s • The farmers and ranchers followed the railroads • Congress divided the Dakota Territory, admitted North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and several other states

27. Cattle Ranching

28. Some went West post Civil War not to mine but build large cattle ranches on the Great Plains • Cattle ranching developed because of the Texas Longhorn, descended from Spanish cattle • Well adapted to living on the prairie, tough grass and little water • 1865 5 million Longhorns on the grasslands of Texas • Mexicans brought cattle ranching to New Mexico, California, and Texas before they were part of the United States

29. The Open Range

30. The cattle industry grew in the US because of the open range • Ranchers turned their cattle to graze on government land free of charge • No boundaries by private farms

31. Mexican Cowhands

32. Mexican cowhands developed tools and techniques to round up and drive cattle • They taught Americans cowhands these skills

33. Growth of the Cattle Industry and the Civil War

34. Prior to the Civil War there was no financial incentive for ranchers to round up Longhorns • The price of beef was low • Transporting cattle to Eastern markets was not profitable • Railroad construction during the Civil War changed the cattle industry • Eastern cattle were slaughtered in large numbers to feed Union and Confederate troops

35. By the end of the Civil War the price of beef was up • It was now profitable to round up Longhorns • Needed a way to move the cattle East

36. Railheads

37. 1860s, there were railroads on the Great Plains • The rail lines ended at Abilene and Dodge City in Kansas and Sedalia in Missouri • These towns were known as railheads

38. The First Long Drive

39. Ranchers and dealers realized if the cattle were driven several hundred miles to the railheads, they could be sold for a huge profit and shipped east to market • 1866, ranchers rounded up 260,000 head of cattle and drove them to Sedalia • Only a fraction of the herd survived the first Long Drive

40. The first long drive was a financial success even with the dead loss • Cattle could be driven to the north to the railheads and sold for 10 times the price per head in Texas

41. The Chisholm Trail

42. Other cattle trail opened • A major route to Abilene, Kansas was the Chisholm Trail • 1867-1871, 1.5 million head of cattle travelled the Chisholm Trail • Abilene matched the boomtowns when it filled with cowboys at the end of the drive • Railroads expanded west, trails from Texas went to more towns in Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, and Wyoming

43. Long Drive

44. Each spring the ranchers met with the cowboys • They rounded up the cattle from the open range • Ownership was determined by brand • Strays with no brands were mavericks-these were divided among the ranchers and then branded

45. Combined herds could number 2,500-5,000 head of cattle • Cowboys with major ranchers went north with the herd • Cowboys in the early drives were former Confederate soldiers who went west to escape the harsh life in the South during Reconstruction

46. Other cowboys were Hispanics and African Americans • Trail life was dangerous, took discipline, endurance, and courage to survive the dangers of the drive • Cowboys collected wages at the end of the drive and spent their money in town • Life at the railheads was exciting

47. Cowboys told exaggerated tales of daring • These stories were used for dime novels-adventure books that sold for a dime • Dime novels helped spread the myth of the West back East

48. Ranching as Big Business

49. Millions of head of cattle were driven north from Texas to Kansas • Some of the cattle went straight to the slaughter houses, others were sold to ranchers building up herds and grazing them in Montana, Wyoming, and other territories • Eastern and British investors jumped in on the cattle boom

50. Range Wars