Daily Life in the American West by Jason E. Pierce

Author:Jason E. Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

NORTHERNERS AND THE SHAPING OF THE WEST

For decades, the South and North had debated the future of the West, each hoping to impose their vision on the region, and a stalemate had resulted. Southern secession ended that stalemate and allowed the North to impose its vision on the West. It is unsurprising, then, that the Civil War years saw the passage of several landmark bills that shaped the future of the West. Three bills in particular would leave an indelible impression on the region. One would attract free settlers in search of a better life, another would plan for the future of the region, and the last would unify the continent.

The Republicans in Congress made 1862 a banner year for the future of the West by passing the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act, and the Pacific Railway Act. These three acts articulated a vision for the future of the region. Land would be given to small independent landowners to build productive farms and communities, with the railroads tying these communities to the larger nation and the world, and land grants would be used to support a public education system for the betterment of these fledgling towns and future states. Liberated from the shadow of slavery, the West would blossom under the hard work of these landholders. The famous newspaper editor Horace Greeley declared the Homestead Act to be “one of the most beneficent and vital reforms ever attempted in any age or clime—a reform calculated to diminish sensibly the number of paupers and idlers and increase the proportion of working, independent, self-subsisting farmers in the land evermore” (quoted in White 1991, 143). Together, these bills offered a radical, almost utopian vision for the West, but utopian dreams rarely work out the way their visionaries imagine.

The Homestead Act provided 160 acres (a quarter section) from the public domain to any settlers (including immigrants) for a small filing fee if they resided on and improved the land in five years, a process called “proving up” their claim. Alternatively, would-be settlers with greater financial means could purchase the land outright for $1.25 an acre. The plan harkened back to older ideas, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785 and his agrarian dream of creating a nation of farmers, and thus the law’s framers hoped to draw a new generation of Americans back to the land and away from cities to be farmers, not factory workers.

A century of economic development, however, had changed the United States into an industrial nation. Some would come in search of land and opportunity, but not enough to turn back time to an earlier age. Worse, 160 acres might have been enough land in Ohio to start up a small farm, but in much of the arid West, 160 acres, especially without irrigation water, would neither support a farm nor a ranching operation. Nevertheless, between 1862 and 1890, settlers filed some 372,659 claims, bringing over 2 million people into the West, especially to the Great Plains. It was

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