1. The Great West: Who went, why did they go and what did they experience?

2. Why Go West?
Push Factors: things that make (usually bad) settlers want to leave their homes
Political instability
Economic hard times
Racial discrimination for AA
Pull Factors: things (usually good) attracting settlers
Get rich fast
Gold
Silver (Comstocke Lode)
Private property
Gov’t was practically giving the land away (Homestead Act and Oklahoma Land Rush)
Independence and spirit of individualism

3. Homestead Act Another pull factor
Government offered farm plots of 160 acres to anyone willing to live on the land for five years, dig a well, and build a road
Many were former slaves

5. Life in the West Morrill Land Grant:
Plagued by windstorms, blizzards, droughts, locusts and loneliness
Tough life but were inventive
Create sod homes
Build wind mills to harness wind for electricity
Used the steel plow to help cultivate land
Morrill Land Grant:
Passed by Congress to give lands to states so they could establish higher education agricultural schools
A&T University
NC State

6. “Exodusters”
African Americans who fled the South after Reconstruction and headed West to Oklahoma and Kansas looking for more opportunities
Get their name from the Book of Exodus when Moses led his people to the Promised Land which was Oklahoma for the Exodusters

7. Exodusters in Nicodemus, Kansas

8. Problems in the West
To keep order, vigilantes (self-appointed law enforcers) settled disputes but still lots of crime
Cities only “boomed” when the resources were plentiful…when they were gone (the bust) so were the people and the town became a Ghost Town

9. Ghost Towns?

10. Transcontinental Railroad
A railroad between the East and West to transport goods
Built by private companies, not the government but still gave their support by giving loans for the land to companies
Central Pacific laid tracks east of Sacramento, CA
Use Chinese immigrants for labor
Union Pacific laid tracks west from Nebraska
Use Irish immigrants for labor
Two tracks met at Promontory Point, Utah

11. Union Pacific
Central Pacific
Chinese Immigrants
Irish
Immigrants

12. Promontory Point, Utah

13. More Pull Factors Comstock Lode: Oklahoma Land Rush:
first major discovery of silver in U.S.
discovered under what is now Virginia City, Nevada
Helped spur advances in the technology of mining
Oklahoma Land Rush:
Gov’t going to sell plots of land in Oklahoma
50,000 line up but only 42,000 plots
Biggest rush to the West in one single day (April 22, 1889)
Major pull factor

15. Cattle Kingdom
The Texas longhorn roamed freely on open range (not fenced in)
Were branded for identification
Ranchers hired cowboys to round up their cattle, took them on cattle drives to the railroads for eastern markets
Invention of refrigerated railcars by Gustavus Swift…meat can be shipped not the entire cow…much cheaper…decreases need for cattle drives and cowboys
The age of open range ends because of barbed wire

16. Cattle Drive

17. Closing the Frontier?
In 1890 Census, government said that the frontier (place of uninhabited wilderness in the West) was closed
No more empty land in America?
Frederick Jackson Turner writes his Frontier Thesis encouraging “rugged individualism”
Meaning that people can support themselves out West