Question

Discuss Westward Expansion. How was the west transformed socially and economically during this period? How did it affect Indigenous people and their lands?

Answer 1

During the Gilded Age, land, mining, and improved rail transport brought settlers to the US West.
New agricultural machinery enabled farmers to increase crop yields with less labour, but falling prices and increasing spending left them in debt.
Farmers began organizing to promote their interests in local and regional cooperatives such as the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance.

The vision of independent farms existed after the Civil War but the truth was more complicated. Just as big business came to control the eastern city factories, so were powerful corporate interests beginning to elbow out the independent farmers, miners, and cowboys who had created the Western reputation as the land of opportunity for the rough individual.

Even the discovery of precious metals and minerals attracted people westward. In several west states, miners discovered gold, silver , and copper. The discovery of silver in Nevada's Comstock Lode in 1858 sparked the largest rush of prospectors since a decade earlier the California gold rush. Hordes of miners trying to strike it rich produced short-lived "boomtowns" that soon developed into deserted "ghost towns" when the residents depleted the resources that were easy to find. By the 1880s, only large mining firms had the capital and equipment required to perform the hard work of extracting gold from deep within the earth.

In the late 1870s, an even larger organization, the Farmers’ Alliance, spread among southern and western farmers. The Farmers' Alliance has created "exchanges" that would offer loans to farmers and sell their crops, and has suggested that the federal government lend money at low interest rates to farmers and build warehouses that store their crops. By 1890, it had more than three million participants of the Farmers' Alliance. The Alliance was strictly white and did not include African American farmers in its ranks. They created a separate Colored Farmers’ Alliance with more than one million members.

1. Farming and Improved Farming
2. More Land
3. Small farmers oriented to domestic and international markets, and large agricultural companies
4. Cowboys symbolize free living
5. Encouraged innovations from Eastern and European companies
6. Technology advanced Transcontinental Railway North, South, Midwest, and West
7. Declining population of bison; no more buffalo
8. Indians of the Dawes Act were citizens if they lived on land for 25 + years and 160 hectares of land.