Farming out in the West came one of the important ways of life because some of the produce that the East couldn’t make, which made many industries …show more content…
dependent on them. The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged families from the North and newly freed slaves to move out there to begin a new life with over 160 acres of free land, which made them stay there for over 5 years. Even though water was limited and the weather seasons were long and dry, the families out there found ways to work with everything that was thrown at them and even the invention of barbed wire was created by Joseph Glidden to help preserve the usage of wood. “Together with families prices for their crops and the cost of new machinery, caused the failure of two-thirds of the homesteaders’ farms on the Great Plans by 1900.” Places like Kansas lost almost half of their population because of issues like these but people looked to international planting to save their ways of making money. The Russian wheat was one of the ways that farming families turned to when they thought there was nothing left from them to make profit on. With families having ways to make money out in the new Western states of the United States gave the government a great relief to know that they didn’t need to put too much pressure on the farmers to produce goods for the rest of the country.
The Gold and Silver rushes out in California and Nevada began to fill out all the land out in the West and gave families a chance at a new chance a new beginning at life, if they came from a place where they had nothing.
States like Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona and South Dakota came to be during the beginning rushes and gave a dream to young people that they could have a chance at wealth if they went out there. At the beginning, they used placer mining, where they used simpler tools like shovels and washing pans to look for gold until they turned to deep shaft mining in the Western Mountains. Boomtowns grew overnight, which contained shops like saloons, dance-halls and vigilante justice and an example of a boomtown is Virginia City created by Comstock Lode. Over in California, one-third of the miners were Chinese immigrants and the Native-born Americans placed a $20 Miners’ Tax on those people, which became monthly but then noticed that wasn’t an enough to do to the foreign-born people. So Congress came up with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited further immigration to the United States from China. This became the first major Act that Congress placed on immigrants on the basis of race and nationality. The value of gold and silver backed currency, “which became a leading political issue for both westerners and the nation in the 1880s and 1890s.” Native Americans around those areas lost their homes because of the white people who came
to the West with the dream of riches. Mining becoming a major way for people to find a job, the people from everywhere in the nation went over in pursuit of finding those riches and hoped that they might help the government get the nation together and back on track after the Civil War.
Transportation from West to East and vise verse helped move all of the finished products of the West to the other side of the nation, refrigerated and fresh for people to buy right away. Refrigerated cars were created to carry goods swiftly across the country, to keep fresh and sold into the market for a price that would help those farmers over the nation to make money. On May 10th 1869 in Utah, a railroad was created from California across the Great Plains to the East Coast, which marked with a golden spike and showed the unity of the West and East coast. The Interstate Commerce Act was also created during this period of time by Congress to prevent any state to regulate the transportation in the region or state they were in, after the Grange Movement. From the Interstate Commerce Act, the ICC or the Interstate Commerce Commission was created that had the power to investigate and prosecute pools, rebels and other discriminatory. Having an excellent way of transporting goods and products back and forth from the coasts, the nation managed to get them off to a start where it helped the nation and themselves back home.
Transportation, mining and farming helped the growth and development of many industries in the future, which helped economy even more when they hit many panics coming up in later years. Each of those groups helped bring in money to many people in the West with the mining and farming and the transportation transported all those goods that they created for the other people on the other side of the nation. Having farming, mining and transportation in the nation, helped the economy in the West grow along with the development of the federal government out there to protect them too.