1. “From Sea to Shining Sea”
U.S. History 11
Introductory Unit
Note Packet Two
“From Sea to Shining Sea”
Coach Styles

2. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
The Homestead Act of 1862 and the eventual defeat of the Indians opened up millions of acres to hundreds of thousands of Americans who dreamed of answering the call to “GO WEST!”
The West was a place of new opportunity.
It was a place for new beginnings.
It was a place with a future.
For many, it was “The American Dream.”

3. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
The new settlers of the West were different from the early Western wanderers, such as the mountain man, the bachelor soldier, and the lonely prospector.
The West was now attracting the farmer and the family.
With the family came permanent, stable communities.

4. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
The pioneers who first settled the West recognized its great potential.
Farmers, miners, and ranchers all searched for ways to unlock the potential of the West.

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FARMING ON THE PLAINS
Despite the hopes of many settlers, the Great Plains was not a farmer’s paradise.
Challenges included:
Unpredictable and often insufficient rainfall
Extreme temperatures, exceeding 100⁰ F in the summer with raging blizzards and bone-chilling cold in the winter.
Drought and hot winds fed dust storms and prairie fires.
Grasshoppers, locusts, and boll weevils ravaged crops and destroyed property.

6. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
New technology was a tremendous aid to the large western farms.
New farm implements, such as multiple-furrow plows, harrows (equipped with spring teeth to dislodge debris and break up the ground), and automatic drills, saved the farmers much time and effort.
Steam-powered threshers arrived on the scene by 1875, and cornhuskers and cornbinders by the 1890s.

7. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
Congress had established the federal Department of Agriculture in 1862 as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Act.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the department gathered statistics on markets, crops, and plant diseases.
Government publications helped spread information on new farming techniques, including crop rotation, hybridization, and the preservation of water and topsoil.
Hybridization (def): The crossing of different plants to produce new varieties.

8. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
New machines and farming techniques increased farm output enormously.
The result was bonanza farms (def): Farms controlled by large businesses and managed by professionals.
Specializing in single cash crops raised for sale in massive quantities, bonanza farms promised huge profits to their investors.
The massive output of the western farms created problems as well:
When the supply of a product rose faster than the demand, the market became glutted and prices fell.
Glut (def): Substantial oversupply of a product.
To compensate for lower prices, farmers planted even more, causing prices to drop further—An increasing number of farmers were falling further and further into debt.

9. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
The gold strike at Sutter’s Mill, California in 1849 was the first of several large strikes in the West.
The lure of quick wealth brought people of all colors, ethic backgrounds, and levels of education into booming mining towns.
In 1859, rumors of gold strikes around Pikes Peak, Colorado brought on a stampede of wagons with the words, “Pikes Peak or Bust.”
Also in 1859, a silver strike in Nevada’s famous “Comstock Lode” brought on another rush.

10. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
Miners, working alone or in small groups, searched for metal that was close to the surface.
Using a technique called placer mining, miners shoveled loose dirt into boxes and then ran water over it, causing the heavy minerals to sink to the bottom.
Before long, all of the easily gathered precious metal was gone and by the 1860s, most of the gold and silver that remained in the West was locked in quartz and deeply buried.
By this point, most prospectors straggled home, leaving the mining cities that had been bustling boomtowns to turn into deserted ghost towns.

11. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
While the miners were taking advantage of the mineral wealth of the West, another group was taking advantage of its endless acres of grass.
During the 1860s and 1870s, cattle ranching boomed.
The destruction of the buffalo and the removal of Indians to reservations emptied the land for grazing cattle.
The open plains offered a rancher limitless pasture and, at the same time, the growing population of the eastern cities drove up the demand for beef.

12. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
By the end of the Civil War, cattle that sold for $3 to $5 a head in Texas brought $30 to $50 a head in the meat markets of Chicago and St. Louis.
At first, western cattlemen reached these markets by gathering up their herds and driving them across the open range.
Railroads provided a fast and easy route to market.
The transcontinental railroad (which was started in 1863 and ended in May 1869 when the Union Pacific from the east joined rails with the Central Pacific from the west at Promontory Point, Utah) shortened the trip from the East Coast to West Coast from three months by boat and stagecoach to eight days by railway.
“Cow towns,” such as Abilene and Dodge City in Kansas and Cheyenne in Wyoming Territory sprang up along railroad lines and were built specifically for receiving cattle.

13. Introductory Unit : “From Sea to Shining Sea” NP 2
The cattle boom ended in the 1880s because of several factors:
In 1874 Joseph Glidden invented barbed wire, allowing farmers to fence their land to keep out grazing cattle, causing much conflict between farmers and ranchers. Slowly, the open range (used by ranchers to graze their herds) began to disappear.
Cattlemen contributed to their own downfall by overstocking the market causing beef prices to fall. They also allowed their cattle to overgraze the dwindling prairie.
The harsh winters of 1885 through 1887 resulted in some ranchers losing up to 85% of their cattle to freezing temperatures and starvation. Thousands of ranchers were ruined.