Railroads, Homesteads, and the Cattle Frontier

For three centuries Americans mostly stayed east of the Mississippi because moving goods and people past that line was slow and expensive. The government broke that logjam by granting railroad companies land and cash for every mile of track laid, so the Union Pacific pushed west from Omaha while the Central Pacific pushed east from Sacramento, each racing to claim more mileage and more subsidy. Chinese immigrant laborers blasted through the Sierra Nevada and Irish immigrant crews crossed the plains, and the two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869.

The land grants did more than pay for construction. Railroads got alternating sections of land along the route, which they sold to settlers and used to plant towns roughly every ten miles, spaced for water and fuel stops. A depot meant a grain elevator, a store, a hotel, and suddenly isolated prairie was a market town. This is also what made the cattle frontier work: Texas longhorns could not be shipped profitably until they reached a railhead, so cowboys drove herds up trails like the Chisholm Trail to towns like Abilene, Kansas, where cattle boarded trains for Chicago slaughterhouses.

That boom did not last. Homesteaders followed the rails and fenced their claims with cheap barbed wire, patented in 1874, cutting off the open range the long drives depended on. The punishing winter of 1886 to 1887 then killed huge numbers of cattle left exposed with nowhere to graze, finishing off an industry barbed wire had already been strangling. The result across the whole period is the same: railroads and fencing enclosed a West that settlers, ranchers, and farmers now fought over, setting up the land conflicts of the rest of the unit.