Most of the participants in the final opening of new land came from places that only a few years before had been the object of settlement. People who moved into Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and, later, Montana and Colorado more often than not traveled only short distances to get there. Some had settled previously in Missouri or Iowa, Minnesota or Wisconsin, Indiana or Illinois; others were sons and daughters of the pioneers of a previous generation. It was not uncommon for settlers to move from place to place within one of the new states. No matter how bitter previous pioneer experiences or how monotonous and unrewarding the life on virgin land, the hope persisted of better times if only new soil could be broken farther west.
Table 15.1 shows the total number of farms and farm acres by decade from 1860 to 1920. The decades of sharpest advance were the 1870s and 1890s. The addition of land input in these decades was extraordinary: Total land under cultivation more than doubled between 1870 and 1900.77 This was made possible by a policy of rapidly transferring ownership of land to farmers and other users—by rapidly “privatizing” government land, to use modern jargon. (Several Economic Reasoning Propositions apply here; see Economic Insight 1.1 on page 9.)
World History
