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After the Civil War, westward expansion continued into the late 19th century, eventually fulfilling its “Manifest Destiny.” By the end of the 1890s, American settlement stretched from coast to coast. The question is: how did this happen, and why?
Government Subsidies for Transportation and Settlement
The federal government created policies that helped to finance the growth of the West. Between 1850 and 1871, the federal government gave railroads about 170 million acres for laying down railroad tracks in the West. The goal was to build a transcontinental railroad—a rail network that connected the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When the golden spike was driven into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, it set a precedent for even more rail lines in the West.
The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, offered 160 acres of land free to citizens who had improved or farmed it for five years, making it easier for new settlers to get hold of the land.
Factors That Led to the Economic Expansion of the West
Railroads made it much easier to get to the West and created many jobs. Many of these jobs were dangerous and low-paying, so they were mostly filled by immigrant labor, particularly Chinese and Irish. The railroad linked the West, a food source, with the East, a source of manufactured goods. Additionally, cities (sometimes called “boom towns” because they sprang up so fast) developed at railroad hubs. Cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s moved huge herds of cattle from their grazing ranges to the railroad heads where they were loaded onto railroads. In 1878, Gustavus Swift invented the refrigerated rail car, which meant that the cattle could be slaughtered before they were shipped, and the cattle trails became obsolete. This became another sign that the “Wild West” was disappearing.
Factors That Motivated Settlers to Go West
Settlers were motivated to leave the urban centers of the East Coast and “Go West” for a variety of reasons. There was overcrowding and a lack of farmland in the East. The transcontinental railroad created jobs and made it easier both to get to the West in the first place and to receive supplies once one got there. Discoveries of gold in Colorado in 1858 and South Dakota in 1874 also drew tens of thousands of miners to the region.
Mechanization of Farming
The mechanization of farming, or the application of machines to doing farmwork, began to appear in the 1860s and 1870s. Examples include steam tractors, new types of plows, new ways of preparing soil for seeding, and the use of commercial fertilizer. Joseph Glidden’s invention of barbed wire was another cause for the end of the cattle drives, allowing ranchers to fence in rangeland, which ended open-range grazing. By the 1890s, most agriculture had become mechanized and commercialized.
Farmers’ Issues
As you can imagine, all of this mechanization of farming made life more difficult for small farmers. Farmers felt they needed to buy new machinery to keep up with the large commercial farms. This machinery was very expensive, so farmers had to borrow money to buy it. When crop prices were low, farmers would grow more crops to make their payments, further lowering crop prices. This happened because of supply and demand—if the supply of crops goes up but there is no increased demand for the crops, prices will fall, and farmers will make less money.
These problems led to farmers mortgaging their farms so they could buy more land and produce more crops, but good farming land was becoming scarce. Banks were foreclosing on farmers who couldn’t make their payments and were taking back the farmers’ land. To make things worse, railroads were charging excessive prices for shipping and storage, which Western farmers needed to get their crops to markets in the East.
Farmers’ Organizations
One way farmers responded to these issues was by creating organizations. These organizations served both social and political purposes and eventually led to some government action in the farmers’ favor. These organizations included the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance, organizations, similar to a labor union that let farmers work together to get better prices from the railroads, discuss issues that impacted their profits, and gave them a chance to fight back against the big businesses that oppressed them. A series of Supreme Court cases called the Granger Cases laid the foundation for some state regulation of commerce. In Munn v. Illinois, the Court ruled that the government could regulate industry that affects the public interest (like rates in a public grain storage facility).
