Today Molly continued her presentation from yesterday:
Support for Settlement:
- In 1862 the Homestead Act was passed. The act stated that 160 acres would be given to a family if they would move out west
- From 1862 to 1900, 600,000 families took advantage of the offer
- Only about 10 percent of the land wa actually settled by the families for whom it was intended
- Although 160 acres could provide a decent living in the fertile soil of Iowa or Minnesota, settlers on drier Western land required larger plots to make farming worthwhile
The Frontier
- Henry D. Washburn and explorer Nathaniel Langford asked Congress to help protect the wilderness from settlement
- In1872, the government created Yellowstone National Park
- Department of the Interior forced railroads to give up their claim to Western landholdings that were equal in the Eastern Coast
- The Census Bureau declared that the country no longer had a continuous frontier line because the frontier no longer existed. To many, the frontier was what had made America unique.
Then Jena gave her presentation called Settling on the Great Plains:
Challenges of the Great Plains:
- The Great Plains were a vast grassland region with farming
- Many hardships were faced when people started moving west including drought, floods, fires, blizzards, and locust plagues
Dugouts and Soddies:
- There were many trees in the Great Plains, so people built their houses into sides of hills and ravines
- They also made them from blocks of prairie
Women's Work:
- The women would work with the men in the fields
- Were able to plow adn harvest wheat
- Sheared the sheep and made clothes for their family from the wool
- Made candles and soap
- Canned fruits and veggies
- Became doctors and sponsored schools and churches
Technical Support for Farmers
- Farming the prairie every year was a task that got quite overwhelming
- In 1837 John Deere invented the steel plow
- In 1847 Cyrus McCormick mass produced the reaping machine
- More new and improved devices included spring-tooth harow to prepare soil, a grain drill to plant seed, barbed wire to fence in the land, and a corn binder
- In 1890 more than 900 manufacturers of farm equipment
- In 1830 producing a bushel of grain took 183 minutes and only 10 minutes by 1900
Agricultural Education:
- The federal government financed the agricultural education
- The Morill Act of 1862 and 1890 gave federal land to the states. That helped finance agricultural colleges
Farmers in Debt:
- The new farming equipment was expensive so they had to borrow money to buy it
- When wheat prices went up, farmers could repay their loans. When wheat prices went down, famers had to make more crops to raise enough money
- Bonanza farms were created
- From 1885-1890 there wa a period of drought
- Shipping grain became more expensive and the west had to pay more than ever
- Short hauls were more expensive than long
- Kept getting further into debt
Then Leah and Chelsea presented their powerpoint called the Expansion of Industry
First Oil in Texas:
- Pattillo Higgins was the first to find oil in the U.S.
- He found it near Spindle Top which is a hill near Beaumont, Texas
- If it was oil, an industrial city could form around it
- As a lumber merchant, he couldn't convince people of what he had found, but he never gave up
Continued:
- Captian Anthony Lucas believed Higgins and became the first investor and many more followed
- In the fall of 1900 they began to drill for oil
- After many months of difficult work on the morning of January 10th, 1901 oil gushed out of the well, starting the Texas oil boom
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