THE WEST

The west, I wouldn’t live there, but during this time a lot of people did.  In the west there were three different frontiers, which are farming, ranching, and mining. Two of the frontiers, ranching and farming, needed the railroads to be opened.  Railroads allowed for cattle and crops to be shipped from the west to the east.  Goods such as furniture, stoves, and better tools came to the west from the east.  If you lived during this time would you rather stay and live in the east or move to the west?  Explain.  

In the farming frontier people could get 160 free acres under the Homestead Act of 1862.  To get this land they had to stay on the land and farm it for five years.  If they didn’t do this they would lose the land.   In the ranching frontier, cowboys no longer had to go on long cattle drives because of the railroads.  They could graze the cattle in the west and ship them east.  The final frontier was mining.  The majority of  miners went to California but some went to Colorado too.  It started when James Marshall found gold in Sutter’s Mill.  If you lived during this time would you rather be a miner, farmer, or rancher?  Explain.  

There were two kinds of houses that settlers living in the Great Plains could build, a dugout and a soddie. A soddie is a house made of a layer of grass covered dirt called sod.  Settlers could find sod almost anywhere.  A dugout is a hole dug into the side of a hillside. When you want to build a dugout you have to find a place that has lots of hills. Unfortunately, there are not many hills in the Great Plains. What would you rather live in a dugout or a soddie? Why?

In the late 1860s the United States government forced many Native Americans to live on a reservations.  Reservations are piece of land that Native Americans were forced to live on.   Native Americans didn’t like reservations because they were on dry, barren land and they had to leave their sacred burial grounds.  However, the majority of Native Americans will end up on reservations.