Transcript 7.3 Miners Ranchers Farmers

Miners
Ranchers
Farmers
chapter 7, section 3
Miners
The Klondike Gold Rush
• 1896-1899
• Actually in Canada
• Last great American Gold Rush
Finding Gold
• Individual prospectors look for
traces of gold in mountain streams
(placer mining)
Boom Towns
• Rich strikes created boom towns
saloons, dance-hall girls, vigilantes
• Many became ghost towns just a
few years later.
• Other towns that served the
mines became important
commercial centers.
– San Francisco, Sacramento, Denver
Mining Towns
• Similar to industrial cities
• Workers were also from Europe,
Latin America, and China.
• ½ the population was often
foreign born
• Greatly increased Western
population
Foreign Backlash
• Resentment among whites
• Miner’s Tax ($20 / month) in CA
• Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
prohibited further Chinese immigration
Ranchers
Ranching
• Civil War – TX is cut off from CSA
5 million heads of cattle roam freely
• TX cattle business – easy to enter
FREE CATTLE!
• Ranchers Kill off the buffalo
Railroads
• RR starts in Kansas
(Cow towns) RR goes to KC, St.
Louis, Chicago
• Steers bought for $5 / head
and sold for up to $80 / head
• Refrigerated railcars made it even
cheaper.
Cattle Drives
• RR didn’t go into TX
Cowboys drove cattle to Kansas
• 1 cowboy per 300-500 cattle
up to 1,500 miles to Kansas
$30 per month, paid in 1 lump
sum
End of Cattle Drives
• 1880s
overgrazing destroyed the grass
• 1885-1886
blizzard and drought
(90% of cattle die)
Farmers
Farming
• Homestead Act of 1862
160 acres is yours after 5 years
• 500,000 Homestead families
2.5 million families had to buy land
from the RR
Housing
• Made of sod
strips of grass with thick roots and
earth attached
• No trees to make houses
No trees to make fences
Hard Times
• Many discover that 160 acres is
not enough to survive.
2 of 3 farms fail by 1900
The Family
• Everyone had to work in order
to survive
–Men did heavy manual labor
–Children collected wood & carried water
–Women did chores around the house,
managed the money, raised the
children, provided food (crops, butter,
chickens, milk)
Bonanza Farms
• Run like big
business
• High volume
• Drove down
prices
• Squeezed out the
small farmers
Dry Farming
• The only way to farm
successfully in the GP
–Crops that don’t require much water
–Keeping fields free of weeds
Frontier Myths
Not as wild as you thought…
The Closing of the Frontier
• The move westward began in the 1860’s
• In 1890, the Department of the Interior
declared that the frontier was settled.
• Government begins to reserve land.
• The West opened and closed in a
generation…