Settling the Last Frontier: Miners, Cowboys, and Farmers

1. Three groups of pioneers settled this last American Frontier: Miners; Cattlemen/Cowboys; Farmers The Great West: Economic Opportunity and Westward Migration

2. Railroads • Congress supported the building of railroads with land grants and loans. • Railroads drastically sped up the process of settlement and commercial exploitation of the West. • Railroad construction in the South was part of the Compromise of 1877 Circa 1885 Construction of Central Pacific Railroad

3. 1880 1890

4. Promontory Point: the Transcontinental Railroad • Two huge railroad companies The Union Pacific Railroad company and Central Pacific Railroad met at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869. • Used mostly immigrant labor for the backbreaking dangerous work. • The Story of Us – “Heartland” (stop at 11:50 mark)

5. The Mining Frontier • Mining was the first boom in the West • The California Gold Rush is the first of several booms. • Ex. The Comstock Lode: Huge Mineral Deposits • Most of the new strikes can only be exploited by large mining companies.

6. The Cattle Frontier • No one fenced in their cattle (open-range system) • Each spring, ranchers hired cowboys to round up and drive their cows across the open range all the way up to the nearest railroad junction (cow towns like Dodge City, Kansas – home of Wyatt Earp) to ship to eastern markets. • This is called “the long drive.”

7. Invention of Barbed Wire – so large tracks easily and cheaply fenced by farming Homesteaders, and later, by fellow ranchers… • Beef Prices dropped because of oversupply, then… • Extreme and bad weather during 1880’s – brutal winters and summer droughts – cattle starved. So ranchers begin to grow hay/grains to feed cattle (instead of foraging) – more fencing and more tender meat breeds become favored. End of the Open Range

8. The Farming Frontier • Railroads sold land leftover from their land grants • Homestead Act 1862: Gov. gave 160 acres to people who were willing to stay there for 5 years and improve it. • Land was now cheap and available for settlement in the West, so people (both American and immigrant) came to make new lives for themselves. • Last great Land Rush:1889 Oklahoma Land Rush • By 1890 the US Census declared that the entire frontier, except for a few isolated pockets, had been settled • A “sodbuster” home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFrVoG-edFc

9. Black settlers moving west to find their “promised land” (name comes from Exodus of the Bible) • It was the first general migration of blacks following the Civil War • As many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado Exodusters

10. Life on the prairie was really hard and farming this land was nearly and impossible task, without guidance. So the government passed the Morrill Act in 1862 to establish agricultural colleges so that new farming techniques and inventions could be explored. Morrill Act

11. ENTRY #7, PART A: (start film at 11:51 mark) As you watch today’s film The Story of Us – “Heartland”, make a list of the challenges faced by Homesteaders during Western Migration/Settlement. And, how did the Homesteaders face these challenges? ENTRY #7, PART B: What conflicts would have arisen between all the different types of people who were settling the last (western) frontier of America? And who was the perpetual loser in all this? ENTRY #7