Building the frontier. The search for gold and silver

For many years, the land on the western side of the Mississippi River formed the frontier of American settlement. Only a few thousand settlers had moved to Texas and California in the early 1800's. Land was still plentiful in the East, and treaties with the Indians forbade white settlements in many areas of the West. But, after 1850, many causes led to westward expansion.

During the Civil War (1861-1865), the Union government encouraged mining, because the valuable ores helped pay for the war. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided cheap farm land for new settlers, as did gifts of huge tracts of land to the railroads. At the same time, thousands of Europeans wanted to come to America. Revolutionary movements had failed in many countries. Poor harvests caused famines in Ireland. The Scandinavian nations had become overpopulated. Government agents increased their persecution of the Jews in Russia, Poland, and other areas of central Europe.

The land between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast forms two great belts, running roughly north and south. The grasslands of the Great Plains stretch west from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. Beyond the plains, from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, lies a belt of land with many mountain ranges and several valleys. Because the Far West had many land regions and climates, it developed on several frontiers.

The rush to the west affected both belts of land, but it touched the Far West first. Settlers began moving to the Oregon region in large numbers in the early 1840's. In 1848, the Oregon Territory was established. California boomed with the discovery of gold at Sutter's mill in 1848, and it became a state in 1850. Washington also was settled before the Civil War. Congress created the Washington Territory in 1853.

The search for gold and silver attracted thousands of miners to the western mountains following the rush to California in 1849. At first, they mined in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of Sacramento. However, gold in this area became difficult to mine by the middle 1850's. So the prospectors moved eastward looking for strikes, or discoveries.

Several areas became important mining centers during the period from 1856 to 1875. The first was southern Arizona, where silver was found south of Tucson. Other silver discoveries were made there in the following years, including the giant strike in 1877 at Tombstone.

The next strike came in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. It drew a great rush of fortune seekers, who vowed to reach Pikes Peak or Bust." Central City and Leadville grew up almost overnight in Colorado. A third area centered on Virginia City in western Nevada, and encouraged further discoveries in the desert valleys and mountains. Both these areas began as gold fields. But black sand in Colorado and blue clay in Nevada clogged the machines the early miners used. The mines did not become profitable until mining companies found that the sands and clays had rich silver deposits.

Another mining region, in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, led to the settlement of such towns as Lewiston, Ida.; Helena, Mont.; and Walla Walla, Wash. The last great gold rush in the United States took place in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874 and 1875. Dead-wood, founded in 1876, gained fame as one of the last frontier mining camps.