Settlers moved to the Great Plains
Great Plains
The Great Plains is a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland, located in North America. It lies west of the Mississippi River tallgrass prairie in the United States and east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada.
Why did people who settled in the Great Plains dig in?
People who settled in the Great Plains Soddy Home dug in the side of the hill because lack of trees Bonanza farm Huge one crop farm. The Morrill Land Grant Act
What events led to the settlement of the Great Plains?
1862 Homestead Act grants fee land to settlers 1st important event of settling in Great Plains 1869 First Transcontinential railroad finished 2nd important event of settling in Great Plains 1872 Yellowstone National Park 3nd important event of settling in Great Plains 1889 Oklahoma offered a major land give-a-way
How did railroads affect the settlement of the Great Plains?
The railroads opened up the Great Plains for settlement, making it possible to ship wheat and other crops at low cost to the urban markets in the East and overseas. Homestead land was free for American settlers.
Why did farmers leave the Great Plains in the 1930s?
Settlement came in years of good rains, so the Great Plains were overpopulated in the first rush. A heavy emigration followed the twin blows of drought and economic depression in the 1930s. Many grain farmers left because their farms were too small and more vulnerable to drought than the cattle ranches.
What was the settlement of the Great Plains?
The Great Plains were sparsely populated until about 1600. Spanish colonists from Mexico had begun occupying the southern plains in the 16th century and had brought with them horses and cattle. The introduction of the horse subsequently gave rise to a flourishing Plains Indian culture.
How did settlers change the Great Plains?
Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were almost wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market.
What made settlement on the Great Plains difficult?
A Harsh and Isolating Environment Nature was unkind in many parts of the Great Plains. Blistering summers and cruel winters were commonplace. Frequent drought spells made farming even more difficult.
When did people move to the Great Plains?
Starting around A.D. 1200, tribes from the north, east, and southeast regions of what's now the United States and the Canadian prairies moved to this area to hunt bison for food, shelter, tools, and clothing.
What factors pushed people to move to the Great Plains to farm?
European immigrants flooded onto the Great Plains, seeking political or religious freedom, or simply to escape poverty in their own country. Younger sons from the eastern seaboard - where the population was growing and land was becoming more expensive - went because it was a chance to own their own land.
What were the 5 reasons for westward expansion?
What were 5 reasons for westward expansion?free land railroad gold and silver adventure and opportunity cattleWhat were some challenges the cowboys faced on the long drive?Violent storms, wind, rain, moving rivers, stampedes, rustlers, hot sun, discrimination, and 15 hours on the saddle38 more rows
What challenges did settlers on the Great Plains face?
As settlers and homesteaders moved westward to improve the land given to them through the Homestead Act, they faced a difficult and often insurmountable challenge. The land was difficult to farm, there were few building materials, and harsh weather, insects, and inexperience led to frequent setbacks.
What were some of the challenges for settlers in the Great Plains?
The frontier settlers faced extreme hardships—droughts, floods, fires, blizzards, locust plagues, and occasional raids by outlaws and Native Americans.
What law made people move to the Great Plains?
The Homestead Act proved one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the American West, as hundreds of thousands of people moved to the Great Plains in an effort to take advantage of the free land.
Who lived in the Great Plains?
These include the Arapaho, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Lakota, Lipan, Plains Apache (or Kiowa Apache), Plains Cree, Plains Ojibwe, Sarsi, Nakoda (Stoney), and Tonkawa.
Why is the Great Plains important?
Today, the plains serve as a major producer of livestock and crops. The Native American tribes and herds of bison that originally inhabited the plains were displaced in the nineteenth century through a concerted effort by the United States to settle the Great Plains and expand the nation's agriculture.
How did settlers on the Great Plains overcome those challenges?
How did people adapt to life on the Great Plains? They lived in sod houses (packed dirt), used steel plows to cut through thick sod and grew new strains of wheat with dry-farming techniques and windmill-powered pumps; they used barbed wire fences to protect their fields from grazing cattle.
How did settlers in the Great Plains survive the geographic conditions?
The Great Plains originally were covered with tall prairie grass. Today areas that are not planted with farm crops like wheat are usually covered with a variety of low growing grassy plants. The Great Plains once supported enormous wild buffalo herds, which could survive in the dry conditions.
How did the population of the American Plains change?
The Great Plains population has grown steadily in recent decades and more than doubled from 4.9 million people in 1950 to 9.9 mil- lion people in 2007 (Figure 1). During this period, the rate of population growth in the Great Plains was similar to that of the United States, 102 percent com- pared with 99 percent.
What challenges did settlers on the Great Plains face?
As settlers and homesteaders moved westward to improve the land given to them through the Homestead Act, they faced a difficult and often insurmountable challenge. The land was difficult to farm, there were few building materials, and harsh weather, insects, and inexperience led to frequent setbacks.
What was the main settlement of the Great Plains?
European Settlement of the Great Plains. The main settlement of the Great Plains occurred after the 1840 migrations to Oregon and the 1849 Gold Rush to California. Environmental historian William Cronon has interpreted the history of the Great Plains in terms of narrative. The grand narrative of America, Cronon argues, is a story of progress.
What were the two factors that led to the development of the Great Plains?
Historian Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (1931) builds on Turner's progressive narrative, describing the rancher's and farmer's fron tiers on the Plains in terms of two formative factors — environment and technology . Webb states: "New inventions and discoveries had to be made before the pioneer farmer could go into the Great Plains and establish himself."12 Technologies allowed settlers to subdue a forbidding environment that had three main characteristics not found in the eastern United States. First, as pioneers moved west of the 100th meridian, the environment of the Plains became increasingly arid, lacking the minimum twenty inches of rainfall per year that would support agriculture reliably. Second, the Plains were treeless, and therefore did not provide the timber for fuel and building materials readily available in the East. Third, the Trans-Mississippi Plains were level, rising only gradually westward, which meant that rivers were shallow and lacked the power to operate mills or float ships.
What was the fourth technology that subdued the Plains?
The fourth technology that subdued the Plains was the John Deere plow. Like the mill, the plow was one of the important pieces of technology that changed Western history. The earliest plows of southern Europe, pulled by oxen, successfully scratched the dry shallow soils of the Mediterranean region.
What are the two formsative accounts of the Great Plains?
Two formative accounts reveal the environmental history of the Great Plains as a progressive narrative: Frederick Jackson Turner's "Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893); and Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (1931) . The opposite, or declensionist narrative, according to Cronon, relates history as environmental decline.
What is the story of the Dust Bowl?
Donald Worster's The Dust Bowl (1979) illustrates the ecological decline of the Plains that came about through capitalist agriculture and ranching and resulted in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl. These two story lines, however, are both linear — the first uphill, the second downhill, masking nuances and irregularities.
What technology did Webb use to control the Plains?
Following the Colt six-shooter (1835), which had subdued the Plains Indians, the second piece of technology that, from Webb's perspective, transformed the Plains was barbed wire.
What is the grand narrative of the Great Plains?
The grand narrative of America, Cronon argues, is a story of progress. The frontier narrative depicts that formative story and, as such, is the master narrative of American culture. A hostile environment, initially conceptualized as ...
Who were the first people to settle on the Great Plains?
The first Peoples ( Paleo-Indians) arrived on the Great Plains thousands of years ago. Historically, the Great Plains were the range of the Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and others. Eastern portions of the Great Plains were inhabited by tribes who lived at Etzanoa and in semi-permanent villages of earth lodges, such as the Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee, and Wichita. The introduction of corn around 800 CE allowed the development of the mound-building Mississippian Culture along rivers that crossed the Great Plains and that included trade networks west to the Rocky Mountains. Mississippians settled the Great Plains at sites now in Oklahoma and South Dakota .
When was the Great Plains first used?
The term "Great Plains", for the region west of about the 96th and east of the Rocky Mountains, was not generally used before the early 20th century. Nevin Fenneman's 1916 study Physiographic Subdivision of the United States brought the term Great Plains into more widespread usage.
How did the fur trade affect the Great Plains?
The fur trade brought thousands of colonial settlers into the Great Plains over the next 100 years. Fur trappers made their way across much of the region, making regular contacts with Indians. The United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and conducted the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804–1806, and more information became available concerning the Plains, and various pioneers entered the areas. Fur trading posts were often the basis of later settlements. Through the 19th century, more settlers migrated to the Great Plains as part of a vast westward expansion of population, and new settlements became dotted across the Great Plains.
How far is the Great Plains from the Rocky Mountains?
The Great Plains consist of a broad stretch of country underlain by nearly horizontal strata extends westward from the 97th meridian west to the base of the Rocky Mountains, a distance of from 300 to 500 miles (480 to 800 km). It extends northward from the Mexican boundary far into Canada.
What is the High Plains?
Before that the region was almost invariably called the High Plains, in contrast to the lower Prairie Plains of the Midwestern states. Today the term " High Plains " is used for a subregion of the Great Plains. The term still remains little-used in Canada compared to the more common, "prairie".
Why are the Great Plains so productive?
From the 1950s on, many areas of the Great Plains have become productive crop-growing areas because of extensive irrigation on large land-holdings. The United States is a major exporter of agricultural products. The southern portion of the Great Plains lies over the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground layer of water-bearing strata. Center pivot irrigation is used extensively in drier sections of the Great Plains, resulting in aquifer depletion at a rate that is greater than the ground's ability to recharge.
What is the region that overlaps the Great Plains?
Not to be confused with a southwestern portion of the Great Plains, the Llano Estacado, or another geographic region that overlaps the Great Plains, the Midwest.
How did the railroads affect the Plains?
The initial village pattern consisted of service centers at critical stream fords and at the intersections of wagon and horse trails. As railroad expansion spread a vast web of iron rails across the Plains, new sites emerged, since steam locomotives required water every eight to ten miles. These watering spots became the nuclei from which permanent villages, towns, or cities emerged. Here sprouted railroad depots, water towers, grain elevators, stockyards, stores, schools, and churches– facilities to enable the dispersed homestead farmers to obtain their supplies, market their products, and provide for their basic living needs. Early communities vied with each other for the right to be the county seat, and occasionally heated battles occurred. Such a role was perceived as essential if a place was to become dominant in the future urban hierarchy.
What were the changes in the settlement pattern?
As the twentieth century progressed, depression and dust bowl conditions modified the settlement pattern, initiating significant changes that continue to the present. Rural free mail delivery led to the discontinuance of many of the open-country post offices. Farm consolidation led to the abandonment of many section-line roads, and operations that were originally farms became ranches. Removal of much of the rural population led to the consolidation of rural schools and churches. The advent of larger railroad steam engines, and then of diesel engines, decreased the need for water-tower villages–only the grain elevator survives in many diminished places. Additionally, improved highways and the use of trucks doomed many of the branch railroads and the villages they served.
What are some places where post-consolidation patterns offer some semblance of a European-style settlement?
In the German Russian Hutterite colonies of the Dakotas and Montana, large blocks of land were purchased and central residential areas for communal living were constructed . Vagaries of the Great Plains climate and the quest for profit led some large-scale operators to develop "suitcase" and "sidewalk" farming operations. In suitcase farming, the operator has widely spread grain operations necessitating overnight trips for farming. In sidewalk farming, more localized dispersion makes living in a town feasible but still permits scattered fields, so that at least some will escape localized drought and hail hazards. Both types of operations have led to the semblance of a compact farming-village settlement pattern.
How did the pioneers divide the grasslands of North America?
The pioneer settlement process divided the grasslands of North America into a vast checkerboard where squares were separated by section lines, which became roads, field divisions, county lines, and even state lines. The artificially imposed matrix of the U.S. Public Land Survey System, originating with the Ordinance of 1785, obliterated the natural landscapes known to the Native Americans. Six-mile-square townships were divided into thirty-six one-mile-square sections of 640 acres. European-style strassendorf villages or earlier New England–style village commons were virtually unknown, since the Homestead Law of 1862 required that homesteaders live on the land they claimed.
What are the Plains people?
The original Plains peoples, the Native Americans, remain an important and rapidly growing component of the region's population, especially on the Northern Plains and in Oklahoma. On the reservations, residential villages of Native American s are interspersed with farms, often occupied by European Americans, which were homesteaded as "surplus" lands or purchased as allotments in the decades following the Dawes Act of 1887. On some reservations, for example the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, more than three-quarters of the land is owned by non-Natives.
Who wrote the Great Plains in transition?
Kraenzel, Carl F. The Great Plains in Transition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
What ethnicity did the Oklahoma land rush reflect?
In Oklahoma, the land rush produced an ethnic pattern that reflected Native American, Confederate refugee, and European origin s. On the Texas Plains the pattern was initially dominated by people of southern U.S. and Mexican origin: in the Texas Panhandle in 1880, for example, about two-thirds of the population had origins in ...
Why did grain farmers leave the Great Plains?
Many grain farmers left because their farms were too small and more vulnerable to drought than the cattle ranches.
Who settled the prairies?
The Prairie Provinces were settled by British, German Russians (many of them Mennonites ), Ukrainians, and Scandinavians. Buffalo Hunt, Chase, painting by George Catlin, 1844. Many of the immigrants were religious, thrifty, hardworking people who developed a strong attachment to the land.
What are the crops grown in the Great Plains?
Thus, the Great Plains have remained basically an agricultural area producing wheat, cotton, corn (maize), sorghum, and hay and raising cattle and sheep.
What did the Spanish bring to the Plains?
Spanish colonists from Mexico had begun occupying the southern plains in the 16th century and had brought with them horses and cattle. The introduction of the horse subsequently gave rise to a flourishing Plains Indian culture. In the mid-19th century, settlers from the eastern United States began to supplant the Indians, ...
When did cattle replace buffalo?
Indians on horseback exploited the buffalo herds for some two and a half centuries; but in the 1870s cattle replaced the buffalo, and cowboys replaced the Indians. In the 1880s and ’90s farmers began to crowd the ranchers, and wheat began to replace cattle. Settlement came in years of good rains, so the Great Plains were overpopulated in ...
How did the Great Plains change?
Life on the Great Plains changed dramatically following the arrival of Europeans. The introduction of the horse from Europe forever changed Native American ways of life. Bison hunting, for example, could now be done on horseback by a single man. Once Europeans began to settle the region, they sought to push out the old inhabitants to make room for agriculture and a more 'civilized' way of life.
Who were the first people to live on the Great Plains?
History. The first humans to inhabit the Great Plains were Native Americans, who likely settled the region well over 10,000 years ago. One of the most important sources of food for early inhabitants were bison.
Why is the Ogallala Aquifer important?
As one of the world's largest aquifers, the Ogallala Aquifer helps farmers to cheaply and easily water their vast farmlands. However, overuse has threatened to deplete the aquifer entirely. The climate of the plains fluctuates between extremes, with cold, blustery winters and long, hot summers.
Why is the plains called Tornado Alley?
So many tornadoes touch down across the plains each year that the region is often referred to as Tornado Alley.
What did Native Americans do before the horse?
Prior to the introduction of the horse, Native Americans tribes would work in teams to herd wild bison into pens or corrals for slaughter. Bison provided both food and hides for those that hunted them. Life on the Great Plains changed dramatically following the arrival of Europeans.
What animals live in the Great Plains?
While the flat and expansive landscape of the Great Plains may appear to be rather boring and without much life, the plains have, in fact, been home to thundering herds of roaming bison, Native American wars and violent tornadoes.
What are the features of the Plains?
The flat landscape, hot summers and fertile prairie grasslands make the region ideal for large-scale farming and ranching. Perhaps one of the most unique ecological features of the plains sits underground. For decades plains farmers have been tapping into a subterranean freshwater deposit called the Ogallala Aquifer.
Why was the home dug in the side of the hill?
Home dug in the side of the hill because lack of trees
When did Oklahoma give a land grant?
1889 Oklahoma offered a major land give-a-way
Overview
History
The first Peoples (Paleo-Indians) arrived on the Great Plains thousands of years ago. Historically, the Great Plains were the range of the Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and others. Eastern portions of the Great Plains were inhabited by tribes who lived at Etzanoa and in semi-permanent villages of earth lodges, such as the Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee, and Wichita. The introductio…
Usage
The term "Great Plains" is used in the United States to describe a sub-section of the even more vast Interior Plains physiographic division, which covers much of the interior of North America. It also has currency as a region of human geography, referring to the Plains Indians or the Plains states.
In Canada the term is rarely used; Natural Resources Canada, the government department respo…
Extent
The region is about 500 mi (800 km) east to west and 2,000 mi (3,200 km) north to south. Much of the region was home to American bison herds until they were hunted to near extinction during the mid/late-19th century. It has an area of approximately 500,000 sq mi (1,300,000 km ). Current thinking regarding the geographic boundaries of the Great Plains is shown by this map at the Center f…
Geography
The Great Plains are the westernmost portion of the vast North American Interior Plains, which extend east to the Appalachian Plateau. The United States Geological Survey divides the Great Plains in the United States into ten physiographic subdivisions:
• Missouri Coteau or Missouri Plateau (which also extends into Canada), glaciat…
Natural history
In general, the Great Plains have a wide range of weather, with very cold and harsh winters and very hot and humid summers. Wind speeds are often very high, especially in winter.
The 100th meridian roughly corresponds with the line that divides the Great Plains into an area that receives 20 in (510 mm) or more of rainfall per year an…
Wind power
The Great Plains contributes substantially to wind power in the United States. T. Boone Pickens developed wind farms after a career as a petroleum executive, and he called for the U.S. to invest $1 trillion to build an additional 200,000 MW of wind power in the Plains as part of his Pickens Plan. He cited Sweetwater, Texas, as an example of economic revitalization driven by wind power development.
See also
• 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic
• Bison hunting
• Conservation of American bison
• Dust Bowl
• Great American Desert