Westward Expansion: Economic Development

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the way the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and the Homestead Act of 1862 set the federal legal framework that drove the post-Civil War commercial settlement of the trans-Mississippi West.
• Explain how the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit in 1869 integrated Atlantic and Pacific freight markets, and identify the role of Chinese and Irish labor in the construction of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines.
• Describe the economic geography of the late-century mining bonanzas, including the Comstock Lode silver strike in Nevada and the Black Hills gold rush in Lakota territory, and account for the conflicts each strike produced.
• Trace the open-range cattle kingdom from the Texas longhorn drives along the Chisholm Trail to the railhead towns of Abilene and Dodge City, and explain why the system collapsed in the late 1880s.
• Account for the rise of bonanza farming on the northern Plains, the role of new mechanization in falling food prices, and the way commercial wheat agriculture connected the West to global commodity markets.
• Use Skill 1.B to identify and explain a historical development, drawing on at least one of the lesson sources, and account for the environmental costs of westward economic development, including the near-extinction of the bison and the closing of the frontier announced by the 1890 census.

The economic conquest of the trans-Mississippi West was not a private accomplishment. Federal land policy and federal subsidies for transportation built the infrastructure on which private capital would then operate. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 chartered the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from Omaha and the Central Pacific Railroad to build east from Sacramento. Congress paid the two companies in cash bonds for every mile of track laid (sixteen thousand dollars across flat country, thirty-two thousand across high plains, and forty-eight thousand across the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies) and in land grants of ten alternating square-mile sections per mile of track on either side of the right of way. Subsequent acts in 1864 and 1866 doubled the land grant. By the time the network was complete in 1893, the federal government had handed the railroad corporations roughly 175 million acres, an area larger than France. The federal government built the West in the same gesture by which it gave the West to the railroads (KC-6.1.I.A, KC-6.2.II.A).

The Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862, set the terms for the population that the railroad would carry. The law offered any adult head of household (including women, formerly enslaved freedmen after 1866, and immigrants who had filed papers of intent) 160 acres of surveyed public land in exchange for a residency and improvement requirement of five years and a small filing fee. Roughly 1.6 million homestead claims were filed during the working life of the law, and the General Land Office issued patents on about 80 million acres. The smallholder vision the law embodied (a Jeffersonian republic of independent farmers) collided with the economic geography of the Plains, where 160 acres of arid grassland could not support a family without irrigation, machinery, and access to a railroad. Much of the most productive land went instead to the railroads, to speculators who used hired claimants to assemble large parcels, and to the cattle and mining companies that controlled the surrounding countryside. Even so, the Homestead Act drew settlers from the eastern United States, from Scandinavia, and from German-speaking Europe onto the Plains in numbers that no previous federal land policy had matched. By 1900 there were more wheat farms in North Dakota than there were people in the entire territory in 1870 (KC-6.2.II.A; Theme MIG).

The transcontinental rail line itself was an industrial feat without precedent. The Central Pacific drove east from Sacramento across the Sierra Nevada, where its workforce of roughly twelve thousand Chinese laborers (close to ninety percent of the line's construction crew) blasted tunnels through granite, laid track across the high country, and were paid less than the white workers they replaced and were charged for their own food. The Union Pacific drove west from Omaha across the Plains with a workforce drawn from Civil War veterans, freedmen, and Irish immigrants, and built its line at a cost that included substantial graft and corruption later exposed in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. The two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869, where Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial golden spike that telegraph operators relayed coast to coast. By 1893 four additional transcontinental lines had been completed (the Northern Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, and the Great Northern), knitting the continental interior into a single freight market and making it possible to ship a Kansas steer to a Chicago packing house in three days (KC-6.1.I.A, KC-6.2.II.A).

The mining bonanzas were the second engine of western settlement. The Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859 under Mount Davidson on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, produced nearly 400 million dollars in silver and gold across its working life and made Virginia City, Nevada, the largest interior city west of the Mississippi at its peak. Comstock silver underwrote the construction of San Francisco and helped finance the rail network that would carry its bullion east. A second wave of strikes (gold at Pikes Peak in 1858, silver at Leadville in 1877, gold at Cripple Creek in 1891) drew prospectors to Colorado; copper at Butte made Montana a corporate state; and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874 drew prospectors onto territory the federal government had guaranteed in perpetuity to the Lakota under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The federal government refused to enforce the treaty against the miners, sent the Army instead to compel the Lakota onto reservations, and lost a regiment under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in June 1876 before forcing the cession of the Black Hills the following winter. The mining frontier ran on extractive industry, federal indifference, and Indigenous dispossession, and it produced the corporate mining trusts (Anaconda Copper, the Homestake Mining Company) that would consolidate the western mineral economy into the early twentieth century (KC-6.2.II.A).

The cattle kingdom was the third engine. After the Civil War, the southern Plains held an estimated five million Texas longhorns descended from Spanish stock, worth four dollars a head in San Antonio and forty dollars a head in Chicago. The arithmetic produced the Long Drive: between roughly 1866 and 1885, cowboys herded those longhorns north along the Chisholm Trail and the Western Trail to railhead towns such as Abilene, Dodge City, and Ogallala, where the cattle were loaded onto Union Pacific and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail cars and shipped to the Chicago Union Stock Yards. Between a quarter and a third of the cowboys on the trail were African American or Mexican American, a labor history later effaced by the literary and cinematic mythology of the white cowboy. The open range that made the Long Drive possible (the unfenced public domain on which a rancher could pasture cattle for free) ended quickly. Falling beef prices in the early 1880s, the spread of barbed-wire fencing after Joseph Glidden's 1874 patent, and the catastrophic blizzards of the winter of 1886-1887 (which killed an estimated three quarters of the cattle on the northern Plains) wiped out the open-range cattle industry and forced ranching to consolidate into fenced corporate operations. The cattle kingdom lasted barely twenty years; the railroads it fed lasted a century (KC-6.2.II.A; Theme MIG).

The fourth engine was the bonanza farm. New systems of production and transportation enabled consolidation in agriculture, and improvements in mechanization helped agricultural production rise substantially while contributing to falling food prices (KC-6.1.III.A). On the northern Plains (and especially in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota), eastern investors assembled farms of three thousand to one hundred thousand acres, ran them with seasonal wage labor, and harvested them with steam-powered McCormick reapers and threshers. The Dalrymple farm in the Red River Valley reached roughly 75,000 acres and shipped its wheat through the Northern Pacific to Minneapolis flour mills owned by Cadwallader Washburn and Charles Pillsbury, then on to Liverpool. Mechanization transformed the rest of Plains agriculture even where farms remained smaller. Steel plows broke the prairie sod that wooden plows could not. The James Oliver chilled-iron plow patented in 1868, the John Deere riding cultivator of the 1870s, and the McCormick reaper put inside one farmer's hands the productive capacity of ten or twelve. American wheat output more than doubled between 1865 and 1898, and the price of a bushel of Kansas wheat in Liverpool was set by an integrated continental and Atlantic market.

That same integration was a structural problem for the smallholder. Falling commodity prices, rising freight rates set by railroad cartels, and tightening credit from eastern banks pushed many homesteaders into chronic debt. Many farmers responded by forming local and regional cooperative organizations, and farmers and other rural Americans organized politically to demand reforms in banking, currency, transportation, and political processes (KC-6.1.III.B). The Grange (formally the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867) lobbied for state-level railroad rate regulation and won the Munn v. Illinois decision in 1877. The Farmers' Alliance movement of the 1880s built cooperatives across the Plains and the South. The Populist Party that grew out of those organizations is the subject of Lesson 13; for Lesson 2 the central point is that the same economic geography that made bonanza wheat possible also made the smallholder's politics increasingly insurgent.

The environmental costs of western economic development were enormous. The American bison, which numbered roughly 60 million when Lewis and Clark crossed the Plains in 1804, was driven to near-extinction by the late 1880s. Commercial hide hunting on a continental scale, the Army's deliberate targeting of the herds as a method of forcing the Plains nations onto reservations, and the loss of grazing land to fenced ranching together reduced the herd to roughly one thousand animals by 1890. The destruction of the bison did more than break a species; it broke the food and material economy of the Plains nations. The grasslands themselves were transformed by the plow, the windmill, and the railroad, and the long-term consequences (soil exhaustion, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s) belong to a later period. The closing of the frontier announced in the 1890 census report (the line in the Superintendent's text that the frontier line of unbroken settlement could no longer be drawn on the map) was both a statistical observation and an environmental obituary.

The federal government and the corporate railroad were the two principal authors of western development between 1865 and 1898. Land policy, military force, and bond subsidies set the terms on which private capital operated, and the corporations that built the rail network, dug the silver, herded the cattle, and milled the wheat ran on rights, easements, and concessions that originated in Washington. The trans-Mississippi West that had been Indigenous country in 1865 was, by 1898, a federalized commercial zone integrated into a transcontinental industrial economy and into the Atlantic commodity market that economy fed. The story Lesson 3 takes up next is the social and cultural cost of that integration: the Plains Wars, the reservation system, the Dawes Act, and the Indigenous communities that survived the period despite the policies engineered to erase them.

Five sources curated for Topic 6.2. The first three carry the case for federal and corporate authorship of western development; the last two carry the on-the-ground experience of homesteading and mining.

1. (Causation) Identify the federal and the corporate causes of the post-1865 commercial conquest of the trans-Mississippi West. Which set of causes was more decisive, and on what grounds?
2. (Causation) The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and the Homestead Act of 1862 were both passed in the same Congress. Account for how each law shaped the other in practice between 1865 and 1898. Could either law have produced the West that emerged without the other?
3. (Comparison) Compare the labor systems of two of the four engines of western economic development described in the lesson (transcontinental railroad construction, Comstock and Black Hills mining, the Long Drive cattle kingdom, bonanza farming). What does the comparison reveal about who actually did the work of building the West and who profited from it?
4. (Causation) Account for the near-extinction of the American bison between roughly 1865 and 1890. Identify a federal cause, a commercial cause, and a military cause, and explain how the three reinforced one another. How does the bison story complicate the standard story of western economic development?
5. (Continuity and Change) The 1890 census report announced that the frontier line of unbroken settlement no longer existed. To what extent does that line mark a real economic shift, and to what extent does it mark a rhetorical one? Defend a position with evidence from the lesson and the sources.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.