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HISTORY 1855-1910] same direction. An enormous development of manufactures resulted from the diminished commerce and increased demand

for manufactured goods, the protection afforded by the tariff, the stimulus due to rising prices, and the consumption of the rapidly growing West. It was officially reported in 1869 that “within five years more cotton spindles had been put in motion, more iron furnaces erected, more iron smelted, more bars rolled, more steel made, more coal and copper mined, more lumber sawn and hewn, more houses and shops constructed, more manufactories of different kinds started, and more petroleum collected, refined and exported, than during any equal period in the history of the country.”

315. Between the Civil War and 1872 the extension of the nation’s activity to the industrial conquest of the great West, as well as the economic reorganization of the East, had a profound effect upon the development of the United States. Between 1862 and 1872 grants were made to the Union Pacific and Central

Pacific companies, and to other connecting corporations, for railways from the Missouri to the Pacific, amounting to nearly 33,000,000 acres, and in the same period large loans of funds were made by the general government for this enterprise. Construction advanced rapidly after 1866, and by 1869 an all-rail connexion had been established on the line of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways between the East and San Francisco. Various grants were made in these years to other roads, both transcontinental and Middle Western. Between 1850 and 1871 Congress granted about 155,000,000 acres for railway construction, but not all these grants were perfected. It is estimated that some $500,000,000 were invested in the construction of Western railways between 1868 and the panic of 1873, and about 30,000 m. of railway had been added.

316. The effects of this extraordinary extension of railway transportation were immediately apparent. In the Far West the railway lines rapidly made possible the extinction of the bison herds which had occupied the great plains. Divided into the northern and

southern herds by the Union Pacific railway in 1869, the southern herds were slaughtered in the period between 1871 and 1879, and the northern herds between 1880 and 1883. This opened the way for the great extension of the cattle country, following the retreat of the Indians. Upon the plains Indians the effect was revolutionary. Their domain had been penetrated by the railways, at the same time that their means of subsistence had been withdrawn. During the Civil War most of these Western tribes had engaged in hostilities against the Federal government. In 1866 and 1867 General George Crook was reducing the Indians of the South-West to submission, while other generals trained in the Civil War were fighting the Indians in the northern plains and Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma. By the Peace Commission Act of the 20th of July 1867 commissioners, including General William T. Sherman, were sent to negotiate treaties. As a result the tribes of the Indian Territory were so concentrated as to permit the transfer of other Western tribes to the same region, while the Sioux of the northern plains were given a reservation embracing the western portions of the Dakotas. Discontent with these treaties resulted, however, in hostilities following 1867. Between the close of the war and 1880 some $22,000,000 were expended in Indian wars, although the act of 1871 inaugurated the change of policy whereby the Indians were no longer dealt with by treaty, but were regarded as wards of the nation, to be concentrated on reservations and fed at the expense of the nation under the supervision of Indian agents.

317. Part of these Indian difficulties were due to the opening up of new mining areas in the Rocky Mountains, some of them within the Indians’ choicest hunting grounds. At the beginning of the Civil War a preliminary mining boom struck Colorado; the rich Comstock lode was opened in

Nevada; Arizona was the scene of mining rushes; the Idaho mines were entered; and the Montana ores were discovered; so that in the period of the Civil War itself the Territories

of Nevada, Idaho and Montana had been organized and the mountains provisionally occupied from the northern to the southern limit. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 continued the same movement. In 1860 the nation produced $156,000 worth of silver, in 1861 over $2,000,000 and in 1873 nearly $36,000,000. In the last-mentioned year the production of gold amounted also to $36,000,000, although in 1860 it had been $46,000,000. Capital in mines and quarries of the United States was over $65,000,000 in 1860, over $245,000,000 in 1870, and nearly $1,500,000,000 in 1880.

318. This revolution in the life of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains, opening the way to agriculture and to cattle raising, and preparing for the exploitation of the precious metals of that great area, was contemporaneous with the important development of the farming regions of the Middle West. Even during the Civil War the agricultural development of the northern half of the Mississippi Valley had continued. This was aided by the demand for food products to supply the armies and was made possible by the extension of railways, the taking up of the prairie lands through the operation of the Homestead Law of 1862, the marketing of the railway land grants, and the increased use of agricultural machinery in those years. Between 1860 and 1870 the population of the North Central group of states (engaged chiefly in grain raising) increased over 42%, and in the

next decade by 34%, a total addition to the population in those two decades of 8,000,000. Between 1870 and 1880 about 200,000 sq. m. were added to the farm lands of the United States, an area almost equal in extent to that of France. In the same decade the North Central states increased their improved farms from near 78,500,000 acres to over 136,800,000 acres. The product of Indian corn about doubled between 1860 and 1880, and that of wheat and oats more than doubled. The addition came chiefly from the Middle West. In 1860 the North Central states raised 95,000,000 bushels of wheat; in 1870 nearly 195,000,000; in 1880 329,000,000. In 1870 the same states produced 439,000,000 bushels of corn; in 1880 they produced over 1,285,000,000.

319. The pressing need of increased transportation facilities had led, as we have seen, to lavish land grants and to subsidies by nation, states and municipalities to the railways. The railways themselves, tempted by these opportunities, had extended their lines in some cases beyond the immediate needs of the regions entered in advance of settlement. Extravagances in construction and operation, aggravated by “construction rings” of

railway officials, who secured the contracts for themselves and their friends, and by rolling stock companies who received extravagant prices by favouritism, as well as the watering of stock in the creation of systems by absorption and consolidation of railway corporations, brought about a condition where the roads were no longer able to meet the demands of their stockholders for returns on the investment without imposing rates that the Western farmer deemed extortionate. In the competitive development of these roads and in the struggle of business corporations and localities with each other, the roads also discriminated, between persons and places. This condition chiefly accounted for the political unrest which manifested itself in the West in the so-called “Granger” movements of the ’seventies.

320. The farmers felt the pressure of the unsettled currency, taxes were very heavy, the protective tariff seemed to them to bear unduly upon the producers of crops which exceeded the home consumption and had to seek the foreign markets. The price of Indian corn, wheat and cotton in the early ’seventies tended to fall as production rose, so that the gold value of the total crop was not greatly increased during the decade after the war, in spite of the extraordinary extension of agricultural settlement and the increase of production. Dissatisfaction with his share in the prosperity of the country, and especially with the charges of middlemen and transportation companies, discontent with the backwardness of rural social conditions, and a desire for larger political influence, all aided in fostering the growth of