The people living in the west during this time were hard working and invented many new things to make their life easier.  In the Great Plains the cattle kept getting away and it was hard to keep them together.  The cattle would destroy crops.  So farmers tried to plant bushes to keep the cattle together, but the cattle stomped them down. In 1874 Joseph Glidden invented barbed wire. If you were a farmer during this time what would be the positives to having barbed wire? What would the negatives be  Why?  Water was scarce in the Great Plains.  Water was important to farmers because they needed it for their crops to grow.  Therefore, farmers began dry farming. This is where you farm with little water.  You make a little ditch and collect water when it rains. The last problem farmers had to deal with was the rock-hard soil because a wooden plow would not work.   John Deere invented the steel- bladed plow instead. Would you use the steel-bladed plow instead of the wood plow? Explain.

  By 1893, there were five transcontinental railroads, which opened a door to a frontier.  Now there were nine new states added to the Union. Railroads also created many new jobs such as, building the railroads and mining in the west. Would you like to build railroads? Why or why not?

There were many different reasons why the west was opened.  Abilene, Kansas became the ‘‘Cattle Town’’.   More and more cattle were transferred out of Abilene to the east.  At Comstock Lode, in Nevada,  three men found blue rocks that had bits of silver in the them but they did not know it.  They sold the land to some Californians for a couple thousand dollars but they were cheated.  The land ended up being worth millions of dollars. In Promontory Point, Utah a golden spike was driven into the ground to mark the completion of the first transcontinental railroad which crosses of the country. What would it have been like to be the person who got to drive in the golden spike?  Explain.