Westward Expansion: Economic Development in two minutes
- The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 paid railroads by the mile in loans and land, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869.
- Chinese immigrants made up most of the Central Pacific's crews and struck for better pay in 1867, while Irish immigrants, veterans, and freedmen built the Union Pacific.
- Discoveries such as the Comstock Lode (1859) drew miners until corporations took over, and cattle drives to Abilene, Kansas, ended when barbed wire, drought, and hard winters closed the open range.
- The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to settlers who farmed the land for five years, and railroads advertised their own land across Europe to fill the plains.
- Machines and new wheat regions raised harvests, and wheat prices fell by about half between 1870 and 1894, which left farmers with mortgages, high freight rates, and shrinking incomes.
- Farmers organized in the Grange (1867) and the Farmers' Alliances, won state Granger laws and Munn v. Illinois (1877), and in 1890 demanded cheap credit and an income tax.
- On the exam: expect causation questions on how federal land and railroad policy opened the West and how falling prices led to the farm protests that fed Populism.
Topic 6.2 key terms
- Transcontinental railroad
The first rail line across the American West, joining Omaha and Sacramento. It was finished on May 10, 1869, when the Central Pacific (building east) met the Union Pacific (building west) at Promontory Summit, Utah. A trip that took months by wagon now took about a week.
- Pacific Railway Act (1862)
The law that paid for the transcontinental railroad. For every mile of track, Congress gave the companies federal loans (bonds) plus alternating square miles of public land along the route, and doubled the land in 1864. More track meant more money, so both companies raced.
- Land grant
Public land the government gave a railroad, in alternate square-mile sections along the track. The railroad sold it to raise money and to draw settlers.
- Panic of 1873
A financial crash set off when Jay Cooke & Company, a bank that sold railroad bonds, failed. It began a depression that lasted into 1879.
- Placer mining
Washing loose gold out of stream gravel with a pan or a shovel. It took almost no money, so one person could do it. The deep mines that came next took companies and investors.
- Comstock Lode
A huge deposit of silver and gold under Virginia City, Nevada, found in 1859. Its mines produced about $306 million by 1881, and the boom helped Nevada become a state in 1864.
- Mining Law of 1872
Federal law that lets U.S. citizens stake a claim on public land and mine it. The miner pays the government nothing for the ore. Still the basic law for hard-rock mining on federal land.
- Boomtown
A town that appeared almost overnight around a mineral strike. Some grew into cities, like Denver. Some emptied out when the ore did and became ghost towns.
- Long drive
Herds of Texas cattle walked hundreds of miles north to Kansas railroad towns, where they were sold and shipped east (about 1866–1886). The railroad made the drive worth the walk.
- Vaquero
A Mexican horseman and cattle herder. Texas cowboys borrowed the vaquero’s methods, gear and vocabulary when the cattle business moved north.
- Cow town
A town where a railroad met the cattle trails, like Abilene and Dodge City. Stockyards, buyers, hotels and saloons grew up around the herds, and the town lived on the trade.
- Barbed wire
Cheap fence wire with sharp barbs, made practical by Joseph Glidden’s 1874 patent. It let farmers and ranchers fence the treeless plains and ended the open range.
- Open range
Unfenced public grassland where ranchers turned their cattle loose to graze and rounded them up each spring. Owners had the cattle but not the grass. Overgrazing, wire and two hard winters ended it.
- Homestead Act
An 1862 law that let a citizen, or an immigrant who had filed to become one, claim 160 acres of public land and own it after five years of living on it and farming it.
- Great American Desert
The nickname early explorers and pioneers gave the dry Great Plains west of about the 100th meridian. In the 1870s, promoters worked to erase it.
- Mechanization
Replacing hand labor with machines. Steel plows, reapers and binders let one farm family grow far more wheat, which raised output and pushed prices down.
- Deflation
A general fall in prices. Farmers with fixed debts had to repay in dollars that were harder to earn.
- Bonanza farm
A giant wheat farm of thousands of acres, run by a hired manager and hired crews with the newest machines. Bonanza farms were an early case of consolidation in agriculture.
- mortgage
A loan that puts the farm up as security. If the family can't pay, the lender can take the land.
- grain elevator
A tall storehouse beside the tracks where grain was weighed, graded, stored and loaded onto railroad cars. Many stations had only one.
- middlemen
The buyers, graders and shippers who stand between a farmer and the final customer. Each one takes a cut.
- The Grange
Short for the Patrons of Husbandry, a national farmers' organization founded in 1867. It began as a social club for isolated farm families. After the Panic of 1873 it became a force for cooperatives and railroad regulation.
- Cooperative
A business owned and run by its members. Grange and Alliance farmers pooled their money to buy supplies in bulk and to store and sell grain, trying to cut out middlemen and win better prices. Many failed for lack of capital and management.
- Munn v. Illinois (1877)
The Supreme Court upheld an Illinois Granger law that capped what grain elevators could charge. Chief Justice Waite held that property 'clothed with a public interest' can be regulated by the state. Illinois was one of four states whose Granger laws capped railroad and elevator rates.
- Farmers' Alliance
Farmers' organizations of the 1880s and early 1890s that grew from Texas across the South and onto the plains. They sent out traveling lecturers, built bigger cooperatives, and pressed for changes in money, credit and railroad policy. The Colored Farmers' Alliance was a separate organization for Black farmers.
- Ocala Demands
The program the National Farmers' Alliance adopted at Ocala, Florida, in December 1890. It called for the subtreasury plan (federal loans to farmers on their stored crops), more money in circulation, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and land taken back from the railroads. The Populists would carry it into their platform.
- National Economist
The Farmers' Alliance's national weekly newspaper, published in Washington, D.C. It carried the Alliance's case on railroads, credit and money to farm families across the South and the Plains.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Paid by the Mile
1862–1873
Key terms: Pacific Railway Act (1862), Land grant, Transcontinental railroad, Panic of 1873
Congress didn't build the railroads. It paid for them, by the mile.
The Pacific Railway Act paid two ways. Loans: sixteen thousand dollars a mile on flat ground, forty-eight thousand in the mountains. And land.
Every other square mile along the track: a checkerboard, doubled in 1864. In all, railroads got more land than California.
Both companies were paid by the mile. So in Utah, their crews passed each other and kept grading. Until Congress named a meeting place.
Short of workers for the Sierra Nevada, the Central Pacific hired Chinese immigrants. By 1867, nine in ten were Chinese.
Leland Stanford
Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.
Leland Stanford
As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.
Same man, three years apart. In 1862, a governor addressing the legislature. In 1865, a railroad president writing to Washington, who needed those workers.
In the winter of 1866 and 1867, forty-four storms hit the Sierra. Avalanches swept away camps of Chinese workers.
The Central Pacific kept no record of its workers' deaths. No letter, diary or memoir by a Chinese railroad worker is known to survive.
Chinese workers earned about thirty dollars a month and bought their own food. White workers got meals with their pay.
Edwin B. Crocker
No danger of strikes among them.
In June 1867, some three thousand Chinese workers put down their tools on the same day. They wanted forty dollars a month and shorter shifts. The company cut off their food. After eight days, they returned.
The Union Pacific's crews: Irish immigrants, veterans of both armies, freedmen, Mormons. Their track crossed Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho country, and those nations fought it.
By 1893, four more lines crossed the West, some far ahead of any customers.
In September 1873, the bank selling Northern Pacific bonds closed its doors. The bubble had burst.
A City Under the City
1859–1880s
Key terms: Placer mining, Comstock Lode, Mining Law of 1872, Boomtown
Western mining followed one pattern. First, one person with a pan in a cold creek.
In 1859, prospectors struck the Comstock Lode in Nevada: silver and gold, under a mountain.
Mark Twain
Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.
Mark Twain
Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth.
At the bottom it could be 130 degrees. Tons of ice went down every day. Miners earned four dollars a shift, and formed a union.
Mark Twain
Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines.
So the mines belonged to companies, and the companies belonged to shareholders in San Francisco.
Twain tried prospecting too. By his own telling, he and two partners staked a rich claim, then missed the ten-day deadline to work it.
Mark Twain
I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.
Twain's ten-day rule was local. In 1872, Congress made one for everybody: keep working the claim, and it stays yours.
Strikes made towns overnight, and some emptied just as fast. In 1874, gold turned up in the Black Hills, on land the United States had promised the Lakota.
The Cattle Kingdom
1866–1887
Key terms: Long drive, Vaquero, Cow town, Barbed wire, Open range
After the war, wild longhorns, descended from Spanish cattle, filled Texas. A steer was worth about four dollars there. Up north, as much as forty.
Joseph McCoy built stockyards beside the railroad at Abilene, Kansas, in 1867. About 35,000 cattle came the first year.
Over twenty years, somewhere between five and ten million cattle walked north. The hands who drove them earned about thirty dollars a month.
The crews were young and mixed. Historians estimate one cowboy in four was Black. The job came from Mexican vaqueros, and so did its words: lariat, rodeo, chaps, bronco, stampede.
Bose Ikard was born enslaved in Mississippi. In 1866 he went up the trail with Charles Goodnight.
Charles Goodnight
Served with me four years on Goodnight-Loving trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches. Splendid behavior.
Cow towns boomed where the rails met the trails. In 1883 the Dodge City Times promised a market “so long as there is an unobstructed trail.”
In 1874 an Illinois farmer, Joseph Glidden, patented a better barbed wire. That year, 10,000 pounds sold. By 1880, more than 80 million. Farms and ranches fenced the range.
Too many cattle had eaten the grass down. Then came drought, and a terrible winter. Some ranchers lost half their herds. Some lost nine in ten.
When their owner wrote to ask about the herd, a young cowhand named Charles Russell painted the answer.
The open range lasted about twenty years. Then came fences, winter hay, and investors from back East and Britain. The cattle rode to Chicago by rail.
160 Acres
1862–1890
Key terms: Homestead Act, Great American Desert, Mechanization, Deflation, Bonanza farm
Free land. Plus about eighteen dollars.
The Homestead Act let a settler claim 160 acres by living there and farming it for five years. Immigrants qualified. So did women who headed households.
Railroads had land to sell, and they advertised it across Europe. A farm meant freight, and freight paid the railroad.
The Burlington named its Nebraska stops alphabetically: Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, and on to Lowell. The Northern Pacific named a Dakota town Bismarck, hoping for German money. The chancellor sent a thank-you note.
The land was not empty. Pawnee, Otoe, Kaw, Osage, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other nations lived there. As the claims filled in, the government moved them to reservations.
For settlers, the catch was rain. West of about the 100th meridian, most years brought under 20 inches.
Charles Wilber, a Nebraska promoter, had a theory.
Charles Dana Wilber
To be more concise. Rain follows the plow.
John Wesley Powell
Experience teaches that it is not wise to depend upon rainfall where the amount is less than 20 inches annually.
Congress ignored Powell. A run of wet years made Wilber look right.
Settlers built houses from bricks of sod, and burned dried cattle dung for fuel.
In 1874, grasshoppers came in clouds that blocked the sun. They ate the crops, the wool, the laundry, even the wooden tool handles.
The farmers who stayed leaned on machines. A horse-drawn binder cut the wheat and tied the sheaves in one pass.
On a well-equipped farm in 1830, 100 bushels of wheat took 250 to 300 hours of work. By 1890, it took 40 to 50.
American wheat harvests doubled, and Russia, India and Argentina grew more too. Prices dropped a third by 1889, and half by 1894.
After the Panic of 1873, Northern Pacific bondholders swapped their bonds for Dakota land and farmed it like a factory. A family with 160 acres was selling against them.
What's a Bushel Worth?
1889
Key terms: mortgage, grain elevator, middlemen, deflation
The wheat is in. Next comes the price.
Central Kansas, August 1889, and a good harvest. A typical family here earned title to its 160 acres years ago.
Since then, they've mortgaged the farm and bought a twine binder on credit.
The price comes in by wire from Chicago, and Chicago watches Liverpool. Nobody in Kansas sets it.
Add it up. The harvest was good. The money was not.
By December, farmers near Hiawatha, Kansas, were burning corn in their stoves. Corn sold at twenty cents a bushel. Coal cost a little more.
Drought came back after 1887, and thousands gave up. Some wagons heading east carried an old slogan.
But the farmers who stayed had been organizing for twenty years.
I Feed You All!
1867–1890
Key terms: The Grange, Cooperative, Munn v. Illinois (1877), Farmers' Alliance, Ocala Demands
Farmers had a problem. They started with a supper.
In 1867, Oliver Kelley, a Minnesota farmer clerking at the Department of Agriculture, founded the Grange. A club for lonely farm families: suppers, lectures, picnics.
It also had secret rituals, and officers named for Roman goddesses: Ceres, Pomona and Flora. Women held those offices. Kelley's niece, Caroline Hall, had insisted that women be full members.
After the Panic of 1873, farmers poured in: about 800,000 members by 1875.
Around 1875, this print put the farmer in the center: I Feed You All. The lawyer pleads for all. The railroad carries for all.
The doctor: I Physic You All. The broker: I Fleece You All. A landowner's view: no hired hands, no tenants, no farm women.
Granges bought supplies together, and ran their own stores and grain elevators. These were cooperatives, and many failed.
Then they went into politics. Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin passed Granger laws, capping what railroads and grain elevators could charge.
Elevator owners sued. The Supreme Court sided with Illinois.
Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite
Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large.
In the 1880s the Farmers' Alliances pushed further, sending lecturers out from Texas. They built bigger cooperatives, too.
By 1890 they claimed about a million members.
White Southern Alliances kept Black farmers out, so Black farmers built their own. In the South of the 1890s, organizing Black farmers was dangerous.
Rev. J. L. Moore
We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man's interests and the laboring white man's interests are one and the same.
In December 1890, at Ocala, Florida, the Alliance listed its demands. Loans on stored crops at two percent. More money in circulation. A graduated income tax. Senators elected by the people.
Congress had given the railroads millions of acres. The Alliance wanted the extra back, for actual settlers only. Next, they would try a party of their own.
In the Picture
1890 → 2014
Key terms: National Economist, Cooperative, Farmers' Alliance
By 1890, the people farming the West knew exactly who took a cut of every bushel. They had learned to organize.
One more picture. In 2014, the photographer Corky Lee brought Chinese Americans to Promontory Summit to take it again. Some were descendants of railroad workers. He called it photographic justice.
Absolute and Undisturbed Topic 6.3
The railroad maps showed the plains as empty land, waiting for farms. It wasn't empty.