Explain how the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad, mining, and the cattle and farming economy drove the settlement and development of the West, and the geographic factors involved (Tennessee Academic Standards for Social Studies, United States History and Geography, US.02 and US.03).

What this topic is asking

Standards US.02 and US.03 ask how the West was settled in the decades after the Civil War, and what role government policy, new technology, and geography played. For the EOC that means knowing the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad, the mining and cattle booms, the farming frontier on the Great Plains, and how the Census declared the frontier closed in 1890. Many items pair the topic with a map of rail lines, cattle trails, or settlement patterns.

Government policy: land and railroads

The federal government actively promoted settlement. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to any settler who paid a small fee and farmed it for five years. Millions of acres were claimed, including by immigrants, single women, and some African Americans (the "Exodusters" who left the South).

The government also granted railroads vast tracts of public land along their routes, which the railroads sold to settlers to raise money. This linked two policies: railroads carried homesteaders west and profited by selling them land.

The transcontinental railroad

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, when the Union Pacific (building west) and the Central Pacific (building east) joined at Promontory, Utah. The Central Pacific relied heavily on Chinese immigrant laborers; the Union Pacific used many Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans.

The railroad transformed the West. It connected the region to national and world markets, let farmers and ranchers ship goods east cheaply, carried settlers and immigrant labor in, and bound the country into a single economy. Railroads also encouraged the growth of cities and set the time zones the country still uses.

The mining and cattle booms

Mining strikes (gold and silver in California, Nevada, Colorado, and the Dakotas) drew waves of prospectors and created boomtowns that often went bust when the ore ran out. Mining tied the West to industry's demand for metals.

The cattle boom sent huge herds from Texas up trails like the Chisholm Trail to railheads in Kansas, where they were shipped east to feed growing cities. The era of the cattle drive and the open range was short: barbed wire (which let farmers fence land cheaply), overgrazing, and a brutal winter ended it, and ranching became a fenced business.

The farming frontier and Plains geography

Farming the Great Plains meant overcoming a tough environment: thick sod, little rain, few trees, and brutal weather. New technology made it possible:

• The steel plow to cut through dense prairie sod.
• Barbed wire to fence land without wood.
• Windmills to pump underground water.
• Dry farming techniques to conserve moisture, and later mechanized reapers.

Even so, drought, dust, debt, and isolation made the farmer's life hard, and grievances over railroad rates and falling crop prices would soon fuel the Populist movement.

The closing of the frontier

In 1890, the U.S. Census announced that a continuous frontier line no longer existed, settlement had spread across the whole country. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in his "Frontier Thesis" that the frontier experience had shaped American democracy and individualism, and that its closing marked the end of an era, helping push the nation to look for new frontiers overseas.

Try this

Q1. Explain how the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad worked together to settle the West. [2]

• Cue. The Homestead Act gave settlers free farmland; the railroad carried them west and shipped their crops to market, so together they made farming the Plains practical and profitable.

Q2. Name two new technologies that helped farmers settle the Great Plains. [2]

• Cue. Any two of: the steel plow, barbed wire, windmills, dry farming, and mechanized reapers.