Moving West

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Moving West
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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

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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
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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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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

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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

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• 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.

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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!!

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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.

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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

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New Farming techniques

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

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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

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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

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Gilded Age Populism

• Populists Peoples Party
• New national political party (1891)
• Created by farming groups
• Platform
• Increase circulation of money by
• Unlimited minting of silver
• Silver was plentiful
• What does this cause?
• INFLATION
• OPPOSED BY THOSE THAT SUPPORTED
• Gold Standard
• Backs ever dollar in circulation with a certain
  amount of gold.
• Gold is limited protects value of money, keeps
  prices down

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The Gilded Age

• Term coined by Mark Twain
• Post-Reconstruction era
• Gilded means, covered with a thin layer of gold
• What was this saying about the time period?
• Laissez-faire
• allow to be / let it be
• French phrase government should have a very
  limited role in business.

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Factors that made the Gilded Age

• Currency deflation
• Speculation in stocks/industry/land
• Loose business
• Loose political morals
• Ostentatious displays of wealth
• Growing gap between rich and poor

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URBANIZATION
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Urbanization

• Growth and expansion of cities.
• New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, New
  Orleans.
• 1880-1920 11 million moved from farms to cities
• WHY??

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What would lead people to leave farms for the
cities? Benefits to living in the city

• Pros

• Cons

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Chicago, 1871
Chicago, 1916
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Sidewalks of New York
Music Lyrics byJames W. Blake and Charles E.
Lawlor
East Side, West Side, all around the townThe
kids sang "ring around rosie", "London Bridge is
falling down"Boys and girls together, me and
Mamie O'RourkeWe tripped the light fantastic on
the sidewalks of New York . . . . East Side,
West Side, riding through the parksWe started
swinging at Jilly's then we split to
P.J.Clark'sOn to Chuck's Composite, then a drink
at The StorkWe won't get home until morning
'cause we're going to take a walkOn the
sidewalks of New York
KIDiddles Song Lyrics - The Sidewalks of New York
(East Side, West Side)
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City outward expansion

• Suburbs
• residential communities surrounding the city.
• Electric trolleys/cable cars
• Virginia and San Francisco replaced carriages
• Subways
• Transportation on a rail that went into the
  suburbs
• Automobile
• guaranteed the expansion of cities.

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City Upward Expansion

• Pre-civil War no building was taller than five
  stories.
• Why was there a need to build upward in the
  cities?
• Skyscrapers
• 1st Chicagos Home Insurance Company Building
  (1885)
• Ten stories high
• Elisha Graves Otis American inventor of the
  elevator.

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Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1890)
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Mulberry Street Bend, 1889
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5-Cent Lodgings
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Mens Lodgings
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Womens Lodgings
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Immigrant Family Lodgings
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Dumbbell Tenement Plan
Tenement House Act of 1879, NYC
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Blind Beggar, 1888
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Italian Rag-Picker
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1890s Morgue Basement Saloon
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Black Tan Saloon
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The Street Was Their Playground
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Lower East Side Immigrant Family
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A Struggling Immigrant Family
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Another Struggling Immigrant Family
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• American society dominated by GREED

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1880 Presidential Election
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1881 Garfield Assassinated!
Charles GuiteauI Am a Stalwart, and Arthur is
President now!
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1884 Presidential Election
Grover Cleveland James Blaine
(DEM) (REP)
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1884 Presidential Election
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1888 Presidential Election
Grover Cleveland Benjamin Harrison
(DEM) (REP)
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1888 Presidential Election
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Disposing the Surplus
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1892 Presidential Election
Grover Cleveland Benjamin Harrison again!
(DEM) (REP)
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1892 Presidential Election