American Westward Movement

B

Overland to Oregon

This geographic knowledge opened the way for ordinary citizens to move across the country to the Far West. The area immediately west of the farming frontier, the Great Plains, offered little to farmers who were used to working on land with plentiful rainfall and having trees to build houses. Settlers traveled across the Great Plains to get to the Pacific Northwest, then called the Oregon country, which by the 1840s had a reputation as an agrarian paradise, where soil and climate would nearly guarantee a settler’s health and prosperity. The central valleys of California were pictured in the same way. Oregon and California, however, were more than 2000 miles from Missouri, on the other side of plains, deserts, and the nation’s two tallest mountain chains.

Nonetheless, beginning in the 1840s some people were willing to make the trek to their imagined promised land. Between 1841 and the late 1860s, more than a third of a million persons moved from the Missouri valley to the Pacific Coast. Most followed overland trails, including the Oregon and California trails. These two routes left Missouri and followed the Platte River through southwestern Wyoming, and then split. The Oregon Trail went northwest over the Blue and Cascade mountains to Oregon, and the California Trail went southwest over the Sierra Nevada to California. At first, most of those who traveled these trails were farming families who settled in what is now central California and along Oregon’s Willamette valley. The former was part of Mexico, and the latter was claimed by both the United States and Britain. This migration extended the influence of the United States, which was soon to wrestle with Mexico and Britain for control of the land all the way to the Pacific.

C

Addition of Territory

Between 1845 and 1848 the United States rapidly pushed the national border to the Pacific Ocean, increasing its territory by more than 1.2 million square miles, more land than was added by the Louisiana Purchase. It acquired these lands in three great chunks, through annexation, diplomacy, and a war. This acquisition of land was probably the most important step taken by the U.S. government in encouraging westward expansion.

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas, which had been an independent republic since winning its independence from Mexico in 1836 (see Texas Revolution). The next year President James K. Polk negotiated a treaty with Britain that gave the United States land that would become the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Also in 1846 the nation went to war with Mexico. After almost two years of fighting, Mexico surrendered nearly half of its territory. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico relinquished its claims to Texas, and the United States acquired land that would become the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

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D

The Mining Frontier

In January 1848 only a month before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, some employees of John Sutter, an early promoter of California settlement, found traces of gold in the American River, where they were building a mill. Their discovery sparked the gold rush of 1849. Thousands of people flooded along the overland trails, and at least as many came by ship, some from Australia and Asia and others from the eastern United States and Europe. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the continent for the gold fields. Few found the wealth they expected, and most returned home. Enough stayed, however, to establish California as a state just two years after the gold rush began. The rush overwhelmed the Hispanic and Native American peoples already living in California. White settlers took land claims from many Hispanics and killed many Native Americans.

More than $1 billion in gold was mined in California. There and elsewhere in the West two types of mining were practiced. In placer mining, individual prospectors took gold from streams that had eroded the gold from its first home somewhere further upstream. Lode mining took gold from its original source, usually in veins, or areas of mineral deposits, that ran through some Western mountains. To find this gold, prospectors had to dig and blast their way into the rock. Locating and extracting gold through this method was extremely expensive, and working deep in the earth was very dangerous. However, the rewards were usually much greater than those from placer mining. Most lode mining was done by large companies, and mines became an industrial enterprise with wage workers and corporate owners.

Once gold was found in California, prospectors scoured the West in search of other bonanzas. Although none proved as rewarding as California’s, many deposits of minerals were discovered. There were gold rushes in Colorado in 1859, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and Arizona and Nevada in the 1870s. In 1859 silver was discovered in far western Nevada in what became known as the Comstock Lode. Eventually this region produced more than $300 million in silver. Other silver strikes were made in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. The West proved to be one of the world’s great reservoirs of valuable metals.

E

Railroads

With such an explosive growth in population on the Pacific Coast, there was a need to connect these distant communities with the eastern states. The answer seemed to be a railroad linking the two parts of the continent. Building a transcontinental system, however, was enormously complex and expensive. In 1862 Congress agreed to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to two corporations to construct the railroad. These companies were also given millions of acres of Western land to sell in order to pay back the loan. In effect, Western land was being used to pay for the West’s own expansion. With the help of thousands of Irish immigrant laborers, the Union Pacific Railroad was built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, the Central Pacific was built eastward from northern California, edging over the Sierra Nevada through the efforts of Chinese workers imported for the job. In 1869 the two railroads joined at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Over the next 20 years, other transcontinental railroads were built: the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Southern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. Most were also financed by massive gifts of public land to private corporations. Many other lines appeared, connecting the larger railroads and reaching into remote areas. By the 1890s a web of steel rails covered much of the West.

The growth of railroads encouraged westward expansion more than any other single development. Railroads made it easier for settlers to move west, and railroad corporations vigorously promoted settlement in order to sell the land given them by the government. Railroads also helped industry develop in the West. Many new industries—mining and lumbering, for instance—relied on railroads to carry in equipment and materials that could never have been brought in otherwise. Western companies used the railroads to export the rich resources they found there. The railroads also made it easier to transport troops and war materials, and thereby accelerated the end of Native American independence.

F

Ranching and Farming Frontiers

Railroads were also responsible for the growth of ranching. After the American Civil War, the Northeast and Ohio Valley had a growing demand for beef. At the same time, southern Texas had a huge supply of cattle, mostly descendants of Spanish stock called longhorns. The railroad provided the means of linking supply with demand—the Texas cattle with the Northern cities. Cattle were herded northward out of Texas along the Chisholm and Great Western trails to towns on the Great Plains. There they were loaded onto specially built rail cars and carried by the newly built railroads to slaughterhouses in Kansas City, Chicago, and other urban centers. Cowtowns like Abilene, Caldwell, and Dodge City in Kansas and Oglalla in Nebraska became famous as playgrounds for cowboys at the end of long, difficult cattle drives.

By the late 1880s cattle drives were no longer necessary. New railroads connected more of the West to eastern markets. In addition, as Native American tribes were defeated and confined to reservations, cattle ranching spread into the Great Plains states of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Montana. Ranching also boomed in the Southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. New breeds of cattle that could withstand the harsh conditions could now be fattened on plains grasses and shipped to eastern dinner tables.

Ranching became a big business. The largest ranches often were corporations funded by millions of dollars in stock sold in the East, Britain, and Europe. As in many expanding industries, however, problems soon developed. Rapid growth led to overstocking and overgrazing of pastures, and providing the cattle with water was difficult because of the arid climate. The grasslands could not support all the cattle, which became weakened from hunger and were unable to survive the severe winters. The brutal winter of 1886 to 1887 killed tens of thousands of cattle on plains ranches. In the aftermath many ranchers switched to sheep, which could survive with less water than cattle.

One of the original forces behind westward expansion—farmers looking for better land—was also important in the development of the plains states. Once again the railroads played a crucial role. Even the richest lands were useless without a way to transport harvested crops to markets. As more of the interior was reached by rail lines, farmers began moving in, often buying the land that the railroad corporations had received from the government.

The government encouraged agricultural expansion more directly with the Homestead Act, passed in 1862. The act offered 65 hectares (160 acres) virtually free to any citizen willing to develop the land. Lawmakers hoped that the Homestead Act would lead to agricultural development in the western states, but this goal was not achieved. Because of the lack of rainfall in much of the West, a successful farmer often needed more land than the Homestead Act offered. Furthermore, much of the best land had already been sold or given to railroads. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of farming families moved west under the law.

These farming families settled on millions of acres that had been shunned by farmers who had crossed over the region earlier to settle in more inviting places on the Pacific Coast. These families farmed the plains with new techniques and equipment developed after the Civil War. The government, in an effort to contribute to the development of these new methods, conducted research in the newly created Department of Agriculture and endowed agricultural colleges under the Morrill Act (1862). To produce crops with less rainfall, farmers on the Great Plains used new methods of dry farming and irrigated land close to streams. They learned to build sod houses cheaply out of bricks made of soil and held together by grassroots, but they also relied on many products from distant factories, such as barbed wire, which made cheap fencing in treeless areas. As in mining and ranching, corporations began buying land for large farms. The modern America of industry and big business was reaching into the farming frontier.

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