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Theme 1: Transformation of the West

Module by: Richard Daniel

Summary: This module discusses information concerning the Transformation of the West.

Key 3 Transformation of the West

OVERVIEW Although the Great Plains and the Great Basin were the home of nomadic native American tribes and wild animals, by the 1890s the great migration of pioneers had established a line of settlement to the Pacific coast. Migrants to the West were attracted by gold and silver deposits, railroad lines, and the federal government's land policy.

Homestead Act (1862): Allowed settlers to buy 160 acres for a small fee if they occupied and improved it for 5 years.

  • The act served as an impetus to Western settlement, and some400,000 homesteaders became landowners.
  • The bleak life on the Great Plains, however, caused most home­steaders to abandon their property.

Morrill Land Grant Act (1862): Provided that federal land be used to finance land grant agricultural colleges. Scientific and mechanical methods of farming were taught and were responsible for the devel­opment of the agricultural Midwest.

Timber Culture Act (1873): Passed as an amendment to the Homestead Act, it allowed homesteaders to receive grants of an additional 160 acres if they planted 40 acres of trees on the land within 4 years.

Desert Land Act (1877): Resulted in the purchase of 2.5 million acres of Western land.

  • Anyone could secure tentative title to 640 acres in the Great Plainsor Southwest for 25 cents an acre.
  • After irrigating a portion of the land within 3 years, the settlercould receive full title to the land for another $1.00 per acre.

Timber and Stone Act (1878): Authorized sales of barren land at $2.50 an acre.

Mining towns: As in the California gold rush of 1849 and the Colorado rush of 1859, the mineral-rich areas of the West were the first to be extensively settled.

  • Following prospectors and commercial miners came ranchers andfarmers.
  • Copper, lead, tin, quartz, and zinc proved to be more profitablethan gold and silver in the long term.

•These communities were melting pots containing native Ameri­cans, Mexicans, blacks, Chinese, and white; there were fewwomen.

Cattle industry: A significant element in the West's economy.

  • Mexican ranchers had developed the ranching techniques thatwere subsequently utilized first by Texans, then by Great Plainscattlemen and cowboys.
  • During the 1860s, the long drive came into being as cattle weredriven to distant markets and pastured along the trial.
  • By the 1970s special market facilities for cattle were establishedat Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.
  • Other trails and market outlets were created (e.g., Dodge City,Kansas; Cheyenne, Wyoming) to rival Abilene.
  • Two severe winters (1885-86 and 1886-87) and a scorching sum­mer marked the decline of the open-range cattle industry and theend of the long drive.

Cowboys: Integral to the long drive, cowboys were often veterans of the Confederate Army, white Northerners, Mexicans, or foreigners, with freed blacks comprising the next largest group.

Owen Wister: Author of a western novel, The Virginian, which typified the romance of the West by painting an idealized picture of the rugged, free-spirited cowboy. Representing the ideal of the "natural man," the cowboy became a revered American symbol.

Mark Twain: One of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century and the author of a series of novels (e.g., The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn) during the 1870s and 1880s that depicted the vision and spirit of the frontier West.

Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian from the University of Wisconsin whose paper, "The Significance of the Frontier," argued that the closing of the frontier had ended an era in American history.

  • Using the census report of 1890, Turner explained that the settle­ment of the frontier had provided an explanatory framework forAmerican development.
  • His work also illustrates the psychological power of the frontier inthat, with its passing, Americans began to realize that revitalizingopportunities were also vanishing.

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