A School History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

CHAPTER XXXIII

GROWTH OF THE NORTHWEST

%520. Results of the War.%—The Civil War was fought by the North for the preservation of the Union and by the South for the destruction of the Union. But we who, after more than thirty years, look back on the results of that struggle, can see that they did not stop with the preservation of the Union. Both in the North and in the South the war produced a great industrial revolution.

%521. Effect on the South.%—In the South, in the first place, it changed the system of labor from slave to free. While the South was a slave-owning country free labor would not come in. Without free labor there could be no mills, no factories, no mechanical industries. The South raised cotton, tobacco, sugar, and left her great resources undeveloped. After slavery was abolished, the South was on the same footing as the North, and her splendid resources began at once to be developed.

It was found that her rich deposits of iron ore were second to none in the world. It was found that beneath her soil lay an unbroken coal field, 39,000 square miles in extent. It was found that cotton, instead of being raised in less quantity under a system of free labor, was more widely cultivated than ever. In 1860, 4,670,000 bales were grown; but in 1894 the number produced was 9,500,000. The result has been the rise of a New South, and the growth of such manufacturing centers as Birmingham in Alabama and Chattanooga in Tennessee, and of that center of commerce, Atlanta, in Georgia.

%522. Rise of New Industries in the North.%—Much the same industrial revolution has taken place in the North. The list of industries well known to us, but unknown in 1860, is a long one. The production of petroleum for commercial purposes began in 1859, when Mr. Drake drilled his well near Titusville, in Pennsylvania. In 1860 the daily yield of all the wells in existence was not 200 barrels. But by 1891 this industry had so developed that 54,300,000 barrels were produced in that year, or 14,900 a day.

[Illustration: Scene in the oil regions of Pennsylvania]

The last thirty years have seen the rise of cheese making as a distinctive factory industry; of the manufacture of oleo-margarine, wire nails, Bessemer steel, cotton-seed oil, coke, canned goods; of the immense mills of Minneapolis, where 10,000,000 barrels of flour are made annually, and of the meat dressing and packing business for which Chicago and Kansas City are famous.

%523. The New Northwest.%—When the census was taken in 1860, so few people were living in what are now Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho that they were not counted. In Dakota there were less than 5000 inhabitants. The discovery of gold and silver did for these territories what it had done for Colorado. It brought into them so many miners that in 1870 the population of these four territories amounted to 59,000. Between Lake Superior (where in the midst of a vast wilderness Duluth had just been laid out on the lake shore) and the mining camps in the mountains of Montana, there was not a town nor a hamlet. (There were indeed a few forts and Indian agencies and a few trading posts.) Northern Minnesota was a forest, into which even the lumbermen had not gone. The region from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains was the hunting ground of the Sioux, and was roamed over by enormous herds of buffalo.

%524. The Northern Pacific Railroad.%—But this great wilderness was soon to be crossed by one of the civilizers of the age. After years of vain effort, the promoters of the Northern Pacific began the building of their road in 1870, and pushed it across the plains till Duluth and St. Paul were joined with Puget Sound. As it went further and further westward, emigrants followed it, towns sprang up, and cities grew with astonishing rapidity.

%525. The New States.%—Idaho, which had no white inhabitants in 1860, had 32,000 in 1880; Montana had 39,000 in 1880, as against none in 1860. Kansas in twenty years increased her population four fold, and Nebraska eight fold. This was extraordinary; but it was surpassed by Dakota, whose population increased nearly ten fold in ten years (1870-1880), and in 1889 was half a million. The time had now come to form a state government. But as most of the people lived in the south end of the territory, it was cut in two, and North and South Dakota were admitted into the Union as states on the same day (November 2, 1889); Montana followed within a fortnight, and Idaho and Wyoming within a year (July, 1890). The four territories, in which in 1860 there were but 5000 white settlers, had thus by 1890 become the five states of North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, with a population of 790,000.[1]

[Footnote 1: Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876, Washington in 1889 (November 11); and Utah, the forty-fifth state, in 1896, under a constitution forever prohibiting polygamy.]

%526. Wheat Farms and Cattle Ranches.%—Such a rush of people completely transformed the country. The "Great American Desert" was made productive. The buffaloes were almost exterminated, and one now is as great a curiosity in the West as in the East. More than 7,000,000 were slaughtered in 1871-1872. In lieu of them countless herds of cattle and sheep, and fields of wheat and corn, cover the plains and hills of the Northwest. In 1896 Montana contained 3,000,000 sheep, and Wyoming and Idaho each over 1,000,000. In the two Dakotas 60,000,000 bushels of wheat and 30,000,000 of corn were harvested. Many of the farms are of enormous size. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand acre farms are not unknown. One contains 75,000 acres.

[Illustration: A typical prairie sod house]

Over this region, the Dakotas, Montana, Kansas, and Nebraska, wander herds of cattle, the slaughtering and packing of which have founded new branches of industry. The stockyards at Chicago make a city.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read "Dakota Wheat-Fields," Harper's Magazine, March, 1880. Also a series of papers in _Harper's Magazine _for 1888.]

%527. Oklahoma.%—The eagerness of the "cattle kings" to get more land for these herds to graze over had much to do with the opening of Oklahoma for settlement. Originally it was part of Indian Territory, and was sold by the Seminole Indians with the express condition that none but Indians and freedmen should settle there. But the cattle kings, in defiance of the government, went in and inclosed immense tracts. Many were driven out, only to come in again. Their expulsion, with that of small proprietors called "boomers," caused much agitation. Congress bought a release from the condition, and in 1889 opened Oklahoma to settlement.

%528. The Boom Towns.%—A proclamation that a part of Oklahoma would be opened April 22, caused a wild rush from every part of the West, till five times as many settlers as could possibly obtain land were lined up on the borders waiting for the signal to cross. Precisely at noon on April 22, a bugle sounded, a wild yell answered, a cloud of dust filled the air, and an army of men on foot, on horseback, in wagons, rushed into the promised land. That morning Guthrie was a piece of prairie land. That night it was a city of 10,000 souls. Before the end of the year 60,000 people were in Oklahoma, building towns and cities of no mean character.

Within fifteen years Oklahoma had a population of over half a million; and Congress provided (1906) for the admission, in 1907, of a new forty-sixth state, including both Oklahoma and what was left of the old Indian Territory.