AMSCO 6.2 Westward Expansion: Economic Development

Overview

AMSCO Topic 6.2, "Westward Expansion: Economic Development," covers how industrialization transformed the West after 1865: transcontinental railroads, the mining and cattle frontiers, the Homestead Act and farming on the Great Plains, and the farmer organizations (the Grange and farmers' alliances) that fought back against railroads, banks, and middlemen. This sits in Period 6 (1865-1898), and the big takeaway is that government subsidies, railroads, and mineral discoveries created new markets and new communities while pushing farmers into a commercialized economy that often worked against them.

If you want the bigger Period 6 picture first, start with AMSCO 6.1 Contextualizing Period 6.

Transcontinental Railroads

Railroads are the engine of everything in this chapter. They promoted settlement on the Great Plains and linked West to East, creating one national market.

The first transcontinental route

• During the Civil War, Congress authorized land grants and loans to build the first transcontinental railroad connecting California to the rest of the Union. That's federal subsidy, and it matters: government policy, not just private enterprise, opened the West.
• The Union Pacific built westward from Omaha, Nebraska, using thousands of war veterans and Irish immigrants under General Grenville Dodge.
• The Central Pacific built eastward from Sacramento, California, led by Charles Crocker. As many as 20,000 Chinese immigrants did the most dangerous work, blasting tunnels through the Sierra Nevada.
• The two lines met on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, where a golden spike marked the linking of the Atlantic and Pacific states.

Four more transcontinental routes

• 1883: the Southern Pacific (New Orleans to Los Angeles), the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (Kansas City to Los Angeles), and the Northern Pacific (Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle) were all completed.
• 1893: the Great Northern finished the fifth route, St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle.
• Many shortline and narrow-gauge railroads opened the western interior to miners, ranchers, farmers, and business owners, spawning new towns and cities.

Negative effects

Progress came with real costs. Many western railroads were built where there were few customers and failed as businesses. The rush for natural resources damaged the environment and nearly exterminated the buffalo. Most significantly, American Indians paid a high human and cultural price (covered more in AMSCO 6.3).

Settlement of the Last West

Before 1860, the land between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast was called the "Great American Desert." Pioneers passed through it on the way to Oregon's valleys or California's goldfields. West of the 100th meridian, the plains had few trees and usually got less than 15 inches of rain a year, supposedly too dry to farm. Blizzards and hot, dry summers scared settlers off.

After 1865, that changed fast. By 1900:

• The great buffalo herds had been wiped out.
• Open land was fenced by homesteads and ranches and crisscrossed by steel rails.
• Ten new western states had entered the Union. Only Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma were still territories at century's end.

The Mining Frontier

The California Gold Rush of 1849 set the pattern: individual prospectors arrived first using placer mining (washing pans and shovels in mountain streams), then mining companies followed with deep-shaft mining that required expensive equipment and wealthy investors. Companies hired experienced miners from Europe, Latin America, and China.

Key strikes and effects:

• Gold and silver strikes hit what became South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona, drawing prospectors into the 1890s.
• The 1859 gold discovery near Pike's Peak, Colorado, brought nearly 100,000 miners.
• The Comstock Lode (over $340 million in gold and silver by 1890) got Nevada into the Union in 1864. Idaho and Montana also gained early statehood thanks to mining booms.
• Rich strikes created boomtowns known for saloons and vigilante justice. Many became ghost towns once the ore ran out.
• Towns that lasted looked more like industrial cities than movie-Western frontier towns. Virginia City, Nevada, added theaters, churches, newspapers, schools, libraries, railroads, and police. Mark Twain started his writing career on a Virginia City newspaper. San Francisco, Sacramento, and Denver grew into major cities serving the mines.

The Cattle Frontier

The open grasslands stretching from Texas to Canada became big business after the Civil War. The traditions came from Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros, including the hardy Texas longhorn cattle. By the 1860s, about 5 million wild cattle roamed the Texas grasslands, and since both the cattle and the grass were free, the business was easy to enter.

Railroads make cattle profitable

• Railroads built into Kansas opened eastern markets. Joseph G. McCoy built the first stockyards in the region at Abilene, Kansas.
• Cattle sold in Chicago for $30 to $50 per head, so cattle drives up the Chisholm, Goodnight-Loving, and other trails moved millions of cattle out of Texas in the 1860s and 1870s.
• Dodge City and other cow towns sprang up along the rail lines.
• Cowboys, many of them African American or Mexican, earned about a dollar a day for dangerous work.

Why the cattle drives ended

The long drives collapsed in the 1880s for three reasons:

1. Overgrazing destroyed the grass.
2. The winter blizzard and drought of 1885-1886 killed off 90 percent of the cattle.
3. Homesteaders fenced the open range with barbed wire.

Wealthy cattle owners shifted to huge ranches and scientific ranching, breeding cattle fed on hay and grains for more tender beef. By the 1890s the "Wild West" was largely tamed, but the era changed American eating habits from pork to beef and created the legend of the self-reliant cowboy.

The Farming Frontier

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land free to any family that settled it for five years. Combined with railroad and land-speculator promotions, it drew hundreds of thousands of native-born and immigrant families to the Plains between 1870 and 1900. About 500,000 families used the Homestead Act, but five times that number had to buy land because railroads and speculators had grabbed the best public lands.

Problems and solutions

• "Sodbusters" built homes from sod bricks on the treeless plains. They faced weather extremes, grasshopper plagues, and isolation.
• Joseph Glidden's invention of barbed wire in 1874 let farmers fence land without lumber.
• Mail-order windmills drilled deep wells for water.
• Even so, 160 acres often wasn't enough for Plains farming. Severe weather, falling crop prices, and machinery costs caused two-thirds of homesteaders' farms to fail by 1900. Western Kansas lost half its population between 1888 and 1892.

Who succeeded

Survivors adopted dry farming and deep-plowing techniques, planted hardy strains of Russian wheat, and eventually benefited from government dams and irrigation systems that reshaped western rivers to supply water for agriculture.

Farmers Organize

Here's the irony of the chapter: farms more than doubled between 1865 and 1900, but farmers fell from 60 percent of the working population in 1860 to less than 37 percent in 1900, and they were getting squeezed from every direction.

Why farmers were struggling

• Commercialization and specialization. Farmers concentrated on single cash crops like corn or wheat for national and international markets, bought food in town and goods from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck catalogs, and depended on expensive machines (steam engines, seeders, reaper-thresher combines). Large farms ran like factories; small farms couldn't compete.
• Falling prices. Increased production in the U.S., Argentina, Russia, and Canada drove world prices down. The money supply grew slower than the economy, causing deflation. Farmers with mortgages faced high interest rates, grew more to pay debts, and thereby pushed prices even lower. The result: more debt, foreclosures, and farmers forced into tenancy and sharecropping.
• Rising costs. Trusts kept manufactured-goods prices high, middlemen took their cut, and railroads, warehouses, and elevators charged high or discriminatory rates (often more for short hauls on noncompetitive lines than long hauls on competitive ones). Property taxes hit land hard while stock and bond income went untaxed, and protective tariffs felt like one more tax on farmers for industrialists' benefit.

The Grange

The National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry, organized in 1868 by Oliver H. Kelley, began as a social and educational organization but moved into economics and politics. Grangers:

• Created cooperatives, farmer-owned businesses that cut out middlemen.
• Lobbied Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to pass Granger laws regulating railroad and elevator rates and banning pools and rebates.
• Won the landmark case Munn v. Illinois (1877), in which the Supreme Court upheld a state's right to regulate businesses of a public nature, such as railroads. This case shows up constantly on the exam as an early example of government regulating business.

Farmers' alliances and the Ocala Platform

Farmers' alliances were state and regional groups that, unlike the Grange, always aimed at economic and political action. By 1890, about 1 million farmers had joined, including both poor White and Black farmers in the South.

In 1890 the National Alliance met in Ocala, Florida, and produced the Ocala Platform, attacking both major parties as servants of Wall Street. It demanded:

• Direct election of U.S. senators (the original Constitution had state legislatures select them)
• Lower tariff rates
• A graduated income tax (higher incomes pay higher rates)
• A new federally regulated banking system
• Treasury notes and silver to expand the money supply, creating inflation to raise crop prices
• Federal crop storage and federal loans to free farmers from middlemen and creditors

The alliances stopped short of forming a political party, but their ideas fed directly into the Populist movement that shook the two-party system in 1892 and 1896. Keep this in your back pocket; it's the setup for later Period 6 and 7 politics.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

Pair these notes with the Topic 6.2 course study guide for the College Board framing, then continue to AMSCO 6.3 on the social and cultural side of westward expansion, which covers what these developments meant for American Indians and western communities. The full set of AMSCO APUSH notes covers every Period 6 topic.

To check yourself, run guided multiple-choice practice on Period 6 questions, or try a practice FRQ with instant scoring. Topics like Munn v. Illinois and the causes of farmer discontent are classic short-answer material.