• 200 years Native Americans promised entreaties that if they moved just one more time they’ll be left alone
  • first pushed across the appellation Mountains then to Mississippi and now they’re asked to move off the good land left in the West
  • 30 years after the Civil War Indian wars in the West against the US Army
  • German artist Rudolf Ludwig Cronau painted 1880s scenes in Oregon and Utah on a land rush poster about Indians turning over land to settlers
  • people heard Native Americans were not civilized and blood thirsty savages
  • 1873 economic depression in the East farms failed thousands out of work so they move West
  • American plains stretch from Texas to Canada it’s a savanna grassland rich with Paul grasses
  • people from New England farms were unprepared because there were no trees
  • is either very hot or very cold
  • the soil started out wonderful rich and fertile
  • some people went crazy because it was so lonely and quiet in the open plain

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  • the Homestead act in 1862 said that $10 could buy you hundred and 60 acres of public land that included women or anyone who would file papers to become a citizen
  • never in human history has authority gone to such lengths to help common people become landowners
  • a quarter of 1 million widows and single women were among them
  • many homesteaders are immigrants German Swedish or Norwegian towns filled up
  • there’s very little rain so you had to dig wells and use wind
  • John Deere’s plow invention that could dig up soil and changed agriculture
  • Cyrus McCormick’s reaper cuts and harvests grain
  • people used to use a scythe which took forever but now they could use a reaper
  • MacCormick changed how people did business he guaranteed his reaper machines, if they broke down he would prepare them, he trained experts to show farmers had he used them, he started installment buying paying a little bit at a time
  • barbed wire invented by Joseph Glidden fenced in farms cheaply and it made ranchers mad because now they couldn’t take their livestock in a direct route they had to go around fences
  • American farmers were wasteful in farming because the land seemed endless and by the end of the 19th century there isn’t any front tier left
  • poor farming methods destroyed 100,000,000 acres and made land barren
  • small farming disappeared and they left back for cities to take jobs in manufacturing
  • by 1900 farms were part of huge systems that sold wheat cotton beef and wall around the world
  • there was now an industrial revolution and farm life