East meets West. The cattle boom. Homesteading on the Great Plains

East meets West. The swarm of miners into the West showed the need for better transportation. Thousands of new settlers ran short of supplies. Prospectors could mine gold with pick, shovel, and pan, but silver-mining companies needed heavy machinery to dig the ore, and some means of shipping it to smelters. Such needs encouraged companies to build transcontinental railroad networks. Two companies began the first of these railroad systems in the early 1860's. Starting from the east was the Union Pacific, with Irish laborers who established such towns as Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyo.

The Central Pacific line, coming from the west, had thousands of Chinese in its road gangs. The two sets of tracks met at Promontory, near Ogden, Utah, in 1869. Other lines soon followed, including the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. See Railroad (History; picture: The meeting of two railroads).

Railroads helped tame the West. The train below ran out of Virginia City, Nev., on the Virginia & Truckee line

With the railroads to supply them, settlers had little fear of waterless deserts or hostile Indians. The growth of railroads almost led to the extermination of the bison, or American buffalo. Millions of these animals had roamed throughout the West, but hunters soon killed most of them. The hunters killed for buffalo hides, but seldom for meat.

The cattle boom. With the railroads came the period of "the cattle kingdom" on the Great Plains. Ranching started in southern Texas, where farmers raised long-horn cattle from Mexico. The ranchers branded the cattle to show ownership, and guarded them on horseback as they roamed the range. By the end of the Civil War, the number of cattle had increased, and people in the North had money to buy beef.

The era of the long drive, or trail drive, began when the ranchers saw that they could sell cattle in the East if they could get the animals to the railroads. A favorite route led along the Chisholm Trail, which ran from southern Texas to Abilene, Kan. Farther west, the Western Trail led to Dodge City, Kan. Millions of cattle plodded along these trails, sometimes as many as 4,000 in a single herd.

The open range did not last long. By 1885, overstocking had ruined many ranchers. They had more cattle than the land could support. Fierce blizzards in the winter of 1886-1887 spelled the end for many more. In a series of range wars, ranchers tried to keep out nesters, or permanent settlers. But the open range had disappeared, and the cattle boom came to an end.

Homesteading on the Great Plains had attracted few settlers before the Civil War. This was the land that novelist Hamlin Garland brought to life in his books and short stories. It is often called "the land of the straddlebug." In the 1840's and 1850's, locators, or land sales agents, picked the best farms on the grassy plains. They marked their claims with straddlebugs, three boards fastened together like tepee poles.

However, when homesteaders, or farmers, arrived later with their families, they often found themselves in trouble. They had little protection against the Plains Indians. When they rode horses, they could not use the long rifles they had carried in the woods back East. Also, water and trees were scarce in this region. When spring and late summer rains were scanty, crops withered and died. Farmers had difficulty finding wood for shelter, fuel, and fences.

New developments in the 1870's made it possible for eager settlers to farm the grasslands. Barbed wire, patented in 1873, provided the first cheap substitute for wood fences. Windmills solved the problem of bringing up water that lay far underground. Agricultural experts worked out methods of farming that would work in the dry climate (see Dry farming).

With improved machinery, farmers could cultivate large areas. The railroads offered cheap land to homesteaders. Thousands of settlers moved into Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The government opened a large section of Indian Territory in 1889, and the Oklahoma Territory was born (see Indian Territory). So much of the Far West had filled up by 1890 that the Census Bureau declared in a report that a definite frontier no longer existed.