Moving West

1
Moving West
2
Push-Pull Factors

• Led people to push (forced) or pull (attract)
  them to move west
• Southeastern farmland (expensive)
• Sheltered outlaws on the run
• Adventure, fresh start, imagination

3
Homestead Act

• Signed by Lincoln
• Small fee 160 acres of land (1/4 mile)
• Rules
• At least 21 years old or head of a family
• American citizen or immigrant filing for
  citizenship
• Build house a minimum size (12 feet by 14 feet)
• Live in house 6 months out of year
• Farm land 5 yrs in a row before ownership set

372,000 new farms - 600,000land claims 80
million acres
4
Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862)

• Congress gave millions of acres to state
  governments
• Goal was to sell land and raise money to create
  land grant colleges (agriculture and mechanical
  arts)
• States sold land to banks and land speculators
• Land speculator people who buy up land in the
  hope of selling it for profit in the future.

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6
Native American Conflict

• Great Plains area of land between Mississippi
  River and Rocky Mountains.
• Native Americans vs. New Settlers
• Deemed settlers as invaders
• Sacred land invaded
• Indians were nomads
• Move from place to placewhy?
• Food, survival, buffalo

7
Reservations

• Federal land set aside for Native Americans
• Native Americans fought back
• Sandy Creek Massacre (1864) - Colorado
• Battle of Little Big Horn (1876) Dakotas,
  Wyoming and Montana
• Battle of Wounded Knee (1890) South Dakota

8

• Assimilation
• attempt in which one society becomes a part of
  another, more dominant society by adopting its
  culture
• Dawes Act (1887)
• Divided reservations into individual plots.

9
Boomers and Sooners

• Two million unsigned acres of land of native
  americans
• Bought by Congress
• April 22, 1889
• Boomers
• legally staked claims on this land
• Sooners
• snuck passed government officials early in the
  morning hours to mark their claims.
• By sundown, 2 million acres claimed!!

10
Far and Away

• We will now watch a scene from the movie,
• Far and Away
• with
• Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.
• Westward Expansion
• Oklahoma in the late 1800s.

11
Hardships

• Lived in soddies
• Homes made of sod grass, root and dirt. (3.00)
• Livable homestead cost (1000)
• Difficulty farming for five years to claim land
• Bugs
• grasshoppers, locusts
• ate wheat, rye barley fields
• mosquitos
• Carried disease
• Drought
• Reduced land productivity

12
New Farming techniques

• Barbed wire
• Dry farming
• Steel plow
• Steel windmill
• Hybridization
• Grain Drill

13
Mining, Ranching, Farming

• GOLD RUSH
• gold everywhere you stick your shovel
• 400 million in gold and silver
• Placer mining running water over boxed dirt
  looking for gold and silver particles

14
Cowboys

• 25 million buffalo killed (1840-1889)
• Long drive
• Herding of thousands of cattle from one cattle
  ranch to another

• 1867 35,000 cattle driven
• 1881 250,000 cattle driven