Western Movement

Closing the Frontier1865-1890

• Many Americans had to rebuild their lives after the Civil War and moved west to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave free public land in the western territories to settlers who would live on and farm the land.

The settlement of the Trans-Mississippi

• At the beginning of the Civil War - the first tier of states west of the Mississippi.

• Beyond lay an unoccupied domain of plains, mountains, and deserts, broken only by islands of settlements in California, Oregon, Utah, Texas, and a few other spots.

• This whole region was peopled before 1890, when the direction of the census announced that an unbroken frontier no longer existed.

• Between 1870 and 1900 more land was settled than in all the previous history of the US.

• This affected every phase of life during these years and into the twentieth century.

Population Shift 1861-1900

• The frontier advanced in a series of well-defined waves.

The Homesteaders• As early as the 1830s, various groups competed

for the free distribution of the vast public lands• In 1848, the Free-Soil party organized to oppose

the extension of slavery into the territories newly acquired

• Party failed to carry a single state in the presidential election that year, but it did give a unified voice.

• The party’s idea of regulating federal distribution of public lands was one means of stopping the spread of slavery into the territories.

• When the Republican Party was founded was founded in 1854, most of the “Free-Soilers” joined the new one, which adopted distribution of federal lands as a plank of its 1860 platform.

• Fanned the flames of Southern secession; the slave states were always opposed to any policy that would bring more free states into the Union.

Homestead Act

• May 20, 1862, President Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres of public land in the West as a homestead to “any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of 21 years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such.”

• No free gift. • pay a modest filing fee, live on the land for

five years and make certain improvements – mainly a dwelling.

• After these conditions were satisfied, the homesteader received clear title to the land.

• Opened the West to hundreds of thousands. • The new settlers were different from the first

waves of westerners. • The solitary trapper and mountain man, the

bachelor soldier, and the grizzled prospector now made way for the farmer and the family, and with the family came stable, permanent communities.