United States

Each new discovery of gold or silver produced an instant mining town to supply the needs and pleasures of the prospectors. If most of the ore was close to the surface, the prospectors would soon extract it and depart, leaving behind a ghost town—empty of people but a reminder of a romantic moment in the past. If the veins ran deep, organized groups with the capital to buy the needed machinery would move in to mine the subsoil wealth, and the mining town would gain some stability as the centre of a local industry. In a few instances, those towns gained permanent status as the commercial centres of agricultural areas that first developed to meet the needs of the miners but later expanded to produce a surplus that they exported to other parts of the West.

The open range

At the close of the Civil War, the price of beef in the Northern states was abnormally high. At the same time, millions of cattle grazed aimlessly on the plains of Texas. A few shrewd Texans concluded that there might be greater profits in cattle than in cotton, especially because it required little capital to enter the cattle business—only enough to employ a few cowboys to tend the cattle during the year and to drive them to market in the spring. No one owned the cattle, and they grazed without charge upon the public domain.

The one serious problem was the shipment of the cattle to market. The Kansas Pacific resolved that problem when it completed a rail line that ran as far west as Abilene, Kansas, in 1867. Abilene was 200 miles (300 kilometres) from the nearest point in Texas where the cattle grazed during the year, but Texas cattlemen almost immediately instituted the annual practice of driving that portion of their herds that was ready for market overland to Abilene in the spring. There they met representatives of Eastern packinghouses, to whom they sold their cattle.

The open-range cattle industry prospered beyond expectations and even attracted capital from conservative investors in the British Isles. By the 1880s the industry had expanded along the plains as far north as the Dakotas. In the meantime, a new menace had appeared in the form of the advancing frontier of population, but the construction of the Santa Fe Railway through Dodge City, Kansas, to La Junta, Colorado, permitted the cattlemen to move their operations westward ahead of the settlers; Dodge City replaced Abilene as the principal centre for the annual meeting of cattlemen and buyers. Despite sporadic conflicts with settlers encroaching upon the high plains, the open range survived until a series of savage blizzards struck the plains with unprecedented fury in the winter of 1886–87, killing hundreds of thousands of cattle and forcing many owners into bankruptcy. Those who still had some cattle and some capital abandoned the open range, gained title to lands farther west, where they could provide shelter for their livestock, and revived a cattle industry on land that would be immune to further advances of the frontier of settlement. Their removal to these new lands had been made possible in part by the construction of other railroads connecting the region with Chicago and the Pacific coast.

cowboy; roundupCowboys at “mess” during a roundup before a cattle drive in 1887; photo by J.C.H. Grabil.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The expansion of the railroads

In 1862 Congress authorized the construction of two railroads that together would provide the first railroad link between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific coast. One was the Union Pacific, to run westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa; the other was the Central Pacific, to run eastward from Sacramento, California. To encourage the rapid completion of those roads, Congress provided generous subsidies in the form of land grants and loans. Construction was slower than Congress had anticipated, but the two lines met, with elaborate ceremonies, on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah.

Promontory PointThe completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Copyright © 2008 by Dover Publications, Inc. Electronic image © 2008 Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.