1. The Transcontinental Railroad and The West

2. The West When geographers study reasons for major migrations, they look at what they call push-pull factors-events and conditions that either force (push) people to move elsewhere or strongly attract (pull) them to do so. Here are some push-pull factors for moving west.
Pull Factors
Government incentives
Pacific Railway Act
Morrill Land-Grant Act
Homestead Act
Private Property
Miners
Ranchers
Farmers
Push Factors
Crowding back East
Displaced farmers
Former slaves
Eastern farmland expensive
Ethnic and religious repression in Europe
Haven for outlaws

3. Manifest Destiny

4. Homestead Act 1862 Small fee ($1.25- $2.50/acre)
settlers received up to160 acres if:
21 yrs old
Citizens or immigrants filing for citizenship (no traitors “confederates”)
Minimum sized house
Lived on claim 6 months out of the year
Farm the land for 5 years in a row
372,000 farms
80 million acres

5. Pacific Railway Acts
1862, 1864
Large land grants to Union Pacific RR and Central Pacific RR
Goal to Build a RR linking E&W coast
175 million acres
Met at Promonotory Point Utah

7. Morrill Land Grant Act
1862
State governments received millions of acres of land to:
Sell
Create land grant colleges for agricultural and mechanical arts

9. Settlers From Far and Wide
White settlers mainly from the Mississippi Valley where land was expensive and difficult to obtain. It was primarily middle-class farmers and businesspeople who could afford to move west in search of a new start.
After the Civil War, thousands of African Americans rode or walked westward, often fleeing violence and exploitation.
German-speaking immigrants arrived seeking farmland. They brought the Lutheran religion with its emphasis on hard work and education.
Irish, Italians, European Jews, and Chinese settled in concentrated communities on the West coast. They took jobs in mining and railroad construction that brought them to the American interior.
Chinese immigrants came for the Gold Rush and stayed as farm laborers and building the RR from the west.

10. Benjamin Singleton “Exodusters”
Led groups of southern blacks on a mass “Exodus,” a trek inspired by the biblical account of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt to a prophesied homeland. Hence, the settlers called themselves Exodusters. Some 50,000 or more Exodusters migrated west.

11. Exodusters :

12. Homesteader Homes Built with available materials (sod) Small
Functional as a shelter

13. Homesteader lifestyle
Difficult
Subsistence farmers
Some livestock
Grasshoppers
Storms/fire
Distance
Lack of building materials

14. Storytellers of the Great Plains
Willa Cather
Inspired by the West and life on the Plains
Oh Pioneers
My Antonia

15. Oh Pioneers Hardship on the Plains
It was facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
The settlers sat about on the wooden sidewalks in the little town and told each other that the country was never meant for men to live in; the thing to do was to get back to Iowa, to Illinois, to any place that had been proved habitable.