3.1 Settling the West

Main Ideas
Miners seeking to strike it rich settled large areas of the West.
Ranchers built vast cattle ranches on the Great Plains, while settlers staked out homesteads and began farming the region.
The settlement of the West dramatically altered the way of life of the Plains Indians.

Vocabulary
placer mining, quartz mining, vigilance committee, open range, long drive, homestead, assimilate

Reading Objectives

1. Trace the growth of the mining industry and big ranches in the West.
2. Explain how and why people began settling the Great Plains.
3. Summarize problems caused by attempts to assimilate Native Americans.

Growth of the Mining Industry

• The growing industries in the East needed the West’s rich deposits of gold, silver, and copper. These deposits brought settlers to the West’s mountain states.
• Prospectors used simple equipment like picks, shovels, and pans to mine the shallow deposits of ore by hand. This process is known as placer mining. Corporations dug deep beneath the surface to mine the deposits of ore in a process known as quartz mining.
• In 1859 prospector Henry Comstock staked a claim for a silver mine in Six-Mile Canyon, Nevada. This caused Virginia City, Nevada, to go from an outpost to a boomtown almost overnight. Several years later, the mines ran out of silver and the boomtown became a ghost town. The cycle of boom and bust was repeated throughout the mountainous West.
• During boom times, crime was a serious problem. Vigilance committees formed to track down and punish wrongdoers.
• Mining helped the growth of Colorado, the Dakota Territory, and Montana. Mining in Colorado spurred the building of railroads through the Rocky Mountains. Denver became the supply point for the mining areas and the second largest city in the West after San Francisco.

Ranching and Farming the Plains

• The Great Plains region extends westward to the Rocky Mountains from around the 100th meridian—an imaginary line running north and south from the central Dakotas through western Texas.
• After the Civil War, many Americans began building large cattle ranches on the Great Plains. The Texas longhorn was a breed of cattle that could survive the harsh climate of the plains.
• The cattle ranching industry grew in part because of the open range—vast areas of grasslands owned by the federal government. Cattle raisers could graze their herds free of charge and without boundaries.
• During the Civil War, large numbers of eastern cattle were slaughtered to feed the Union and Confederate armies. After the war, beef prices soared. This made it worthwhile to round up the longhorns.
• The first long drive in 1866 across the Great Plains to the railroad in Sedalia, Missouri, proved that cattle could be driven north to the rail lines and sold for 10 times the price they could get in Texas.
• Railroads provided easy access to the Great Plains. Railroad companies sold land along the rail lines at low prices and provided credit.
• The federal government helped settle the Great Plains by passing the Homestead Act in 1862. For $10, a settler could file for a homestead, or a tract of public land available for settlement. The homesteader could get up to 160 acres of public land and could receive title of it after living there five years.
• Settlers on the Plains found life very difficult. The environment was harsh, with summer temperatures soaring over 100°F and winter bringing blizzards and extreme cold. Prairie fires and swarms of grasshoppers were a danger and a threat.
• By the 1860s, farmers on the Great Plains were using newly designed steel plows, seed drills, reapers, and threshing machines. These machines made dry farming possible. Farmers could work large tracts of land with the machines.
• Wheat withstood drought better than other crops, so it became the most important crop on the Great Plains. Wheat farmers from Minnesota and other Midwestern states moved to the Great Plains in large numbers to take advantage of the inexpensive land and the new farming technology. The Wheat Belt began at the eastern edge of the Great Plains and included much of the Dakotas and the western parts of Nebraska and Kansas.
• Wheat withstood drought better than other crops, so it became the most important crop on the Great Plains. Wheat farmers from Minnesota and other Midwestern states moved to the Great Plains in large numbers to take advantage of the inexpensive land and the new farming technology. The Wheat Belt began at the eastern edge of the Great Plains and included much of the Dakotas and the western parts of Nebraska and Kansas.
• Several events caused Great Plains farmers to fall on hard times. In the 1890s, a glut of wheat caused prices to drop. Some farmers lost their land because they could not repay bank loans they had taken out. A prolonged drought that began in the 1880s forced many farmers to return to the East.

Native Americans

• Some Native American nations of the Great Plains lived in communities and farmed and hunted. Most Native Americans of the Great Plains were nomads who moved from place to place in search of food. They followed the herds of buffalo.
• Native American groups of the Great Plains had several things in common. They lived in extended family networks and had a close relationship with nature. They were divided into bands with a governing council. Most Native American groups practiced a religion based on a belief in the spiritual power of the natural world.
• Native Americans had been under pressure for years from advancing white settlement. In 1862 the Sioux in Minnesota launched a major uprising.
• In 1867 Congress formed an Indian Peace Commission, which proposed creating two large reservations on the Plains. The Bureau of Indian Affairs would run the reservations. The U.S. army would deal with any groups that did not report to or remain on the reservations.
• This plan was doomed to failure. Signing treaties did not ensure that the government or Native Americans would abide by their terms.
• By the 1870s, buffalo were rapidly disappearing. By 1889 very few buffalo remained. The buffalo were killed by migrants crossing the Great Plains, professional buffalo hunters who wanted their hides, sharpshooters hired by railroads, and hunters who killed them for sport.
• Many Native Americans left their reservations to hunt buffalo on the open plains. In addition, when American settlers violated the treaties, the Native Americans saw no reason to abide by them.
• At the Lakota Sioux reservation in 1890, the Lakota were ordered by a government agent to stop the Ghost Dance—a ritual that was celebrating the hope that the whites would disappear, the buffalo would return, and Native Americans would reunite with their ancestors. The dancers fled the reservation and were chased by the U.S. troops to Wounded Knee Creek. Many Lakota were killed. This was the final Native American resistance to federal authority.
• Some Americans had opposed the treatment of Native Americans. Some people thought that the situation between whites and Native Americans could be improved if Native Americans could assimilate, or be absorbed into American society as landowners and citizens. This included breaking up reservations into individual allotments, where Native Americans would live in families and support themselves. This became the policy when Congress passed the Dawes Act in 1887.
• The Dawes Act was a failure. Few Native Americans had the training or enthusiasm for farming or ranching. They found the allotments too small to be profitable. Few Native Americans were willing or able to adopt the American settlers’ lifestyles in place of their own culture.