Unit 7 part I miners, railroads and cattlemen
I
n
January, 1848 a group of workmen was building a sawmill beside a
stream in California for a pioneer and landowner named John Sutter.
One day
a foreman in charge of the workers James Wilson Marshall found pieces
of shiny metal. Marshall quietly brought what he found to Sutter, and
the two of them privately tested the findings. The tests showed
Marshall's particles to be gold. Sutter was dismayed by this, and
wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to
his
plans
for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold.
However, rumors soon started to spread.
By the middle of the summer a gold rush had begun. With the news of gold, many families trying their luck at Californian farming decided to go for the gold, becoming some of California’s first miners. Early gold-seekers, called "forty-niners," (as a reference to 1849) traveled to California by sailing boat and in covered wagons across the continent, often facing substantial hardships on the trip. From the East Coast, a sailing voyage around the tip of South America would take five to eight months, and cover 33,000 km. Many gold-seekers took the overland route across the continental United States, particularly along the California Trail. Each of these routes had its own deadly hazards, from shipwreck to typhoid fever and cholera.
A person could work for six months in the goldfields and find the equivalent of six years' wages back home, which attracted people of all types and ethnicities including single men and women, families, and married men. Some hoped to get rich quick and return home, and others wished to start businesses in California. It is estimated that almost 90,000 people arrived in California in 1849 – about half by land and half by sea. Of these, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 were Americans, and the rest were from other countries. By 1855, it is estimated at least 300,000 gold-seekers, merchants, and other immigrants had arrived in California from around the world. Approximately 150,000 arrived by sea while the remaining 150,000 arrived by land.
In the next 20 years gold discoveries attracted fortune-seekers to other parts of the far West. By the late 1850s they were mining in the mountains of Nevada and Colorado, by the 1860s they had moved into Montana and Wyoming and by the 1870s they were digging in the Black Hills of the Dakota country.
The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. First mining settlements were just untidy collections of tents and huts, but later some of them grew larger into permanent communities. San Francisco grew from a small settlement to a boomtown, and roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. The business of agriculture, California's next major growth field, was started on a wide scale throughout the state. A system of laws and a government were created, leading to the admission of California as a free state in 1850 (as part of the Compromise of 1850). However, the Gold Rush also had negative effects: Native Americans were attacked and pushed off traditional lands, and gold mining caused environmental harm.
T
housands
of miles separated western mining settlements from the rest of the
United States. At the end of the Civil War in 1865 settlements in the
East stopped a little to the west of the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers. Beyond these last farms, thousands of miles of flat land
covered with tall grass stretched west to the foothills of the Rocky
Mountains. Early
travelers who passed through this region described it as a “sea of
grass”, for hardly any trees or bushes grew there. Geographers call
these grasslands the Great Plains, or the Prairies, of North America.
In the 1840s and 1850s thousands of settlers crossed the Great Plains
to reach the farms of Oregon and the gold fields of California. To
them this region was not somewhere to settle and make new homes but a
place to pass through as quickly as possible. They saw it as
dangerous and unwelcoming and were happy to leave it to the
Amerindians. Yet within twenty-five years of the end of the Civil
War, practically all of the Great Plans had been divided into states
and territories. By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the
Pacific Coast and along the Mississippi River had moved together. The
frontier, that moving boundary of white settlement, had disappeared.
Settlement was stimulated by the Homestead Act of 1862 which granted free farms of 160 acres (65 hectares) to citizens who would occupy and improve the land. Any head of a family who was at least twenty one years of age and an American citizen could claim a homestead. So could immigrants who claimed to become US citizens. All that homesteaders had to do was to pay a nominal filing fee, move onto a piece of public land, live on it for five years and the land became theirs. If a family wanted to own its homestead more quickly than this it could buy the land after only six months for a very low price of $1.25 an acre. The Homestead Act led to the distribution of 80 million acres of public land by 1900.
An important part in “closing” of the frontier was played by railroads. During the Civil War Congress had become anxious to join the gold-rich settlements along the Pacific Coast more closely to the rest of the United States. In 1862 it granted land and money to the Union Pacific Railroad Company to build a railroad west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific. At the same time it gave a similar grant to the Central Pacific Railroad Company to build eastwards from California. The whole country watched with growing excitement as the two lines gradually approached one another. Both moved forward as fast as they could, for the grants of land and money that each company received from the government depended upon how many miles of railroad track it built. Finally, on May 10, 1869 the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Point in Utah. The first railroad across the North American Continent was completed. Soon it was joined by others. By 1884 four more major lines had crossed the continent to link the Mississippi Valley with the Pacific Coast. These transcontinental railroads reduced the time that it took to travel across the United States from weeks to days.
As the railroads pushed west, enterprising cattle ranchers in Texas saw a way to make money. They began to drive their longhorn cattle north across the open public land, and used the new railroads to transport them to eastern cities where buyers were hungry for meat. Feeding as they went, the cattle arrived at railway shipping points in Kansas larger and fatter than when they started. Soon, this “long drive” became a regular event, the cattle traveled along regular routes called “trails”. Cattle-raising spread into other western territories, many cities flourished as centers for the slaughter and dressing of meat. Very soon meat from the Great Plains was feeding people in Europe as well as the eastern United States. By 1881 more than 110 million pounds of American beef was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean every year. The grass of the Great Plains was earning the US as much money as the gold mines of its western mountains.
Ranching introduced a colorful mode of existence with the picturesque cowboy as its central figure. Although the reality of a cowboy life was far from romantic, its mythological hold on the American imagination has remained strong. The cowboy was hero, outlaw, gunslinger, and even poet of the plains. The man himself, the clothes he wore, and the horse he rode were all outgrowths of life on the range. The long days in the open, riding alone with the cattle, gave him self-reliance. The danger of stampeding cattle, of undependable horses, of hostile Indians, and of bitter winter blizzards demanded endurance and courage. The whole job of driving, roping, and handling cattle required expert horsemanship. The cowboy’s life was one of exhausting work, poor food and low pay. But to many young men it seemed free and exciting. Many cowboys were former Confederate soldiers who had moved west after the Civil War. Some were black ex-slaves from southern plantations. Others were boys from farms in the east who wanted a life with more adventure than farming could offer them.
DISCUSSION
When and how was gold discovered in the USA?
Why did John Sutter want to keep this news secret?
Who are “forty-niners”? Why are they called so?
The first Gold Rush took place in California. What were other territories that later attracted gold-seekers?
What were the effects of the Gold Rush? Did the discovery of gold influence the development of California?
How did the settlement of the Great Plains begin? Was it encouraged by the government?
When was the first railroad across the North American Continent built? Why did the railroad companies try to work as fast as they could?
How did the development of transportation help Texas cattle ranchers to make money?
Was American beef exported to Europe?
What do we learn about the life of American cowboys?