One day the foreman ill charge of the workers saw golden
specks glittering in the water. Picking up a handful of black gravel from the bed
of the stream. he looked more closely, It was gold! By the middle of the summer
a gold rush had begun. The governor of California reported to Washington that
"mills are lying idle, fields of
wheat are open to cattle and horses, houses vacant and farms going to
waste" as men and women from all over the territory hurried to the gold
fields to make themselves rich. In the next twenty years gold discoveries attracted
fortune-seekers to other parts of the far West. By the late 1850s they were
milling all the mountains of Nevada and Colorado. By the 1860s they had moved into
Montana and Wyoming and by the 1870s they were digging in the Black Hills of the
Dakota country. Thousands of miles separated these western mining settlements
from the rest of the United States. Look at the map of the country at the end
of the Civil War in 1865. You will see that white settlement in the East stops
a little to the west of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Beyond these last
farms. Thousands of miles of flat or gently rolling land cove red with tall grass
stretched west to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains The Great Plains are
generally much drier than the lands to the east of the Mississippi. Rain fall
ranges from about forty inches a year on the wetter, eastern edge, to less than
eighteen inches a year in the western pans. Summer rain often pours down in fierce
thunderstorms an d can bring sudden and destructive floods. Droughts happen
even more often than floods. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Great Plains
were the home of wandering Amerindian hunters such as the Sioux. The lives of
these people depended upon the vast herds of buffalo that grazed on the sea of grass.
The buffalo provided the Amerindians with everything they needed. They ate its
meat, they made clothes from its skin, they also stretched its skin over poles
to make the tepees they lived in. They shaped its bones into knives, tools, and
ornaments.
In the 1840s and 1850s thousands of white people crossed
the Great Plains to reach the farms of Oregon and the gold fields of California.
To them the region was not somewhere to settle and make new homes but a place
to pass through as quickly as possible. They saw it as unwelcoming and
dangerous and were happy to leave it to the Amerindians. They agreed with the
mapmakers of the time, who wrote the name "Great American Desert "
across the whole area. Ranchers were feeding large herds of cattle on the
"sea of grass," farmers were ploughing the "Great American Desert"
to grow wheat, sheep herders were grazing their flocks on the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains. By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the Pacific Coast
and along the Mississippi River had moved together. The frontier, that moving
boundary of white settlement that had been one of the most important factors in
American life ever since the time of the Pilgrims had disappeared. During the
Civil War, Congress had become anxious to join the gold-rich settlements along
the Pacific Coast more closely to the rest of the United States. In 1862 it
granted land and money to the Union Pacific Railroad Company to build a railroad
west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific. At the same time it gave a
similar grant to the Central Pacific Railroad Company to build eastwards from
California.
Throughout the 1860s gangs of workmen labored with
picks, shovels and gunpowder to build the two lines. Most of the workers on the
Union Pacific were Irishmen or other recent immigrants from Europe. The Central
Pacific workers were mainly Chinese who had been brought to America under contract
especially to do the job. The whole country watched with growing excitement as
the two lines gradually approached one another. Both moved forward as fast as
they could, for the grants of land and money that each company received from
the government depended upon how many miles of railroad track it built. Finally,
on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines met at
Promontory Point in Utah. A golden spike fixed the- last rail into position.
The first railroad across the North American continent was completed. The new
railroad was quickly joined by others. By 1884 four more major lines had
crossed the continent to link the Mississippi valley with the Pacific Coast. These
transcontinental railroads reduced the time that it took to travel across the
United States from weeks to days. The cattle traveled along reg lar routes
called "trails." At the start of a trail drive the- cowboys moved the
herds quickly. But as they came closer to the railroad they slowed down, traveling
only about twelve miles a day. This was to give the cattle plenty of time to
graze, so that they would be as heavy as possible when they were sold. New
towns grew up where cattle trails met the railroads. The first of these
"cattle towns" was Abilene, in Kansas. In 1867 cowboys drove 36,000 cattle
there along the Chisholm Trail from Texas. As the railroad moved west, other
cattle towns were built. The best known was Dodge City which reached the height of its fame between
1875 and 1885. In this period of ten years a quarter of a million Texas cattle
traveled the trail to Dodge City. From there they went by rail to the slaughter
houses of Chicago and Kansas City. By
1881 more than 110 million pounds of American beef was being shipped across the
Atlantic Ocean every year. The grass of the Great Plains was earning the United
States as much money as the gold mines of its western mountains.
Bibliography:
1. The
Norton Anthology of American Literature.
2. A
History of American Literature, A. Grey
3. An
Outline of American History.
4. An
Illustrated History of the USA.
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