MINERS, RAILROADS AND CATTLEMEN

In March 1848, a group of workmen was building a sawmill beside a stream in California for a landowner named John Sutter. One day the foreman in 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!

The foreman rushed to tell Sutter. Before long the news of his discovery was sweeping through California. 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.

By the spring of 1849, people from all over the world were rushing to California to look for gold. In 1848 its population was 15,000 people. By 1852 the population was more than 250,000. Some of the new arrivals traveled by sea to the port of San Francisco. Others traveled overland, enduring the same kind of hardships that faced settlers on the way to Oregon.

In the next twenty years gold discoveries attracted fortune-seekers to other parts of the far West. By the late 1850s they were mining in 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.

The first mining settlements were just untidy collections of tents and huts, scattered along rough tracks that were muddy in winter and dusty in summer. But some grew later into permanent communities. The present city of Denver, the capital of Colorado, began life in this way.

Thousands of miles separated these western mining settlements from the rest of the United States. Look at a 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 covered with tall grass stretched west to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Early travelers who passed through this region described it as a "sea of grass," for hardly any trees or bushes grew there. Geographers call these grasslands the Great Plains, or the Prairies, of North America.

The Great Plains are generally much drier than the lands to the east of the Mississippi. Rainfall ranges from about forty inches a year on the wetter, eastern edge, to less than eighteen inches a year in the western parts. Summer rain often pours down in fierce thunderstorms and can bring sudden and destructive floods. Droughts happen even more often than floods. These long, dry periods bring the danger of prairie fires, which race across the grasslands and burn everything in their path. In winter the Great Plains become very cold. Temperatures drop as low as -40° Fahrenheit and violent, windy snowstorms sweep across the flat, open land.

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.

Yet within twenty-five years of the end of the Civil War, practically all of the Great Plains had been divided into states and territories. Ranchers were feeding large herds of cattle on the "sea of grass," farmers were ploughing the "Great American Desert" to grow wheat, sheepherders 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.

Railroads played an important part in this "closing" of the frontier. 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 railroad workers' progress depended mainly on the land over which they had to build. On the flat Great Plains they could move forward quickly, building up to six miles of railroad in a day. Among the rocks and cliffs of the Sierra Nevada mountains their progress was slower. Sometimes it would take days of difficult and dangerous tunneling to move forward a few yards.

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.

As the railroads pushed west, cattle ranchers in Texas saw a way to make money. They could feed cattle cheaply on the grasslands between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Why not use the new railroads to transport the cattle to eastern cities where buyers were hungry for meat?

In the years after the Civil War, Texas cattle owners hired men called "drovers" or "cowboys" to drive their half-wild longhorn cattle north to the railroads. The cowboy's life was one of exhausting work, poor food and low pay. But to many young men it seemed free and exciting. Many cowboys were former Confederate soldiers who had moved west after the Civil War. Some were black ex-slaves from southern plantations. Others were boys from farms in the east who wanted a life with more adventure than farming could offer them.

The cattle traveled along regular 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. Such cities grew rich from killing western cattle and preparing their meat for eating.

Very soon meat from the Great Plains was feeding people in Europe as well as the eastern United States. 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.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 58 ff.