Guided Reading 13-2

Guided Reading 13-2

1) Effects of land grants given to railroad companies: Two railroad companies, Central Pacific and Union Pacific started a race to lay tracks. It was grueling work, and the Union Pacific company would drill through mountains and lay up to 8 miles of tracks a day. Both of the companies reached Utah by 1869. 15 years later, there were 5 transcontinental railroads, and the East and West were linked. Railroad companies would sell their land to settlers for 2 to 10 dollars an acre, and the companies would even send salesmen to Europe to find buyers, and so many of the settlers in the western lands were immigrants.

2) The Effects of the Homestead Act and other related laws passed in the 1870’s: To encourage land settlement in the West, the govt. started giving away land for free, and over 600,000 settlers took advantage of this. However, companies such as the railroads and ranchers also took this land for their own use and only about 10% of the land was used by the families for whom it was intended. More laws were passed to give away land in what is now Oklahoma, which attracted thousands of settlers. Settlers took about 2 million acres of land in less than a day, and some claimed land before the government declared the land open.

3) Effects of inventions and improvement in farm equipment: Many advancements in technology were made; John Deere invented the steel plow, and a reaping machine was invented. These didn’t reach the mass market until the late 1800’s. By 1890 there were more than 900 farm equipment manufacturers. It took only about 183 minutes to reap a bushel of grain in the 1830’s, and by and by 1900, it took only about 10. This made grain more available for a wider market.

4) Effects of the Morrill Land Grants Acts and Hatch Act: The Morrill Act gave federal land to the states to help finance agricultural colleges, and the Hatch Act established agricultural experiment stations to inform farmers of new developments. Researchers developed grains for dry soil and techniques for dry farming. These helped farming in the West to flourish, and resulted in it becoming “the breadbasket of the nation”.

Hardships of the Farmers:

- Elaborate machinery was expensive, and to compete, farmers had to borrow money to buy it. They could pay the money back when wheat prices were high, but when they fell they would have to raise more crops.

- Bonanza farming became popular when the prices for machinery went up, and many farmers had to mortgage their land in order to pay for the extra land, and as farms got bigger, so did their debts. When the plains experienced a drought, and large single-crop operations couldn’t compete with smaller farms which were more flexible with their crops, and the bonanza farms went bankrupt.

- The cost of shipping grain was high, and Western farmers were charged more than Eastern farmers by the railroad companies. Railroad companies sometimes charged more for short hauls, for which there was no competing for of transportation, than long hauls.

-Many farmers were growing as much grain as they possibly could on as much land as they could possibly grow, which led to them going further into debt.