|
In March 1848 a Californian landowner first discovered gold in a stream. Before long the news of this discovery was sweeping through California. By the middle of the summer a gold rush had begun and by the spring of 1849 people from all over the world were rushing to California to look for gold. In 1848 its population was 15.000 people, by 1852 the population was more than 250.000. In the next twenty years gold discoveries attracted fortune-seekers also to other parts of the far West.
The first mining settlements were just untidy collections of tents and huts, scattered along rough tracks that were muddy in winter an dusty in summer. But some grew later into permanent communities. The present city of Denver (the capital of Colorado) began life in this way.
Thousands of miles separated these western mining settlements from the rest of the United States, thousands of miles of flat or gently rolling land covered with tall grass. Early travellers who passed through this region described it as a "sea of grass", for hardly any trees or bushes grew there. Geographers call these grasslands the Great Plains of North America.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the Great Plains were the home of wandering Amerindian hunters such as the Sioux. The herds of buffalo that grazed on the sea of grass provided them with everything they needed.
Yet within twenty-five years of the end of the Civil War, practically all of the Great Plains had been divided into states and territories. Ranchers were feeding large herds of cattle on the "sea of grass" and farmers were ploughing the "Great American Desert" to grow wheat. By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the Pacific Coast and along the Mississippi River had moved together.
Railroads played an important part in this time. During the Civil War, Congress had become anxious to join the gold-rich settlements along the Pacific Coast more closely to the rest of the United states. In 1862 the Union Pacific Railroad Company began to build a railroad west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific and at the same time the Central Pacific Railroad Company began to build eastwards from California. The whole country watched with growing excitement as the two lines gradually approached one another. Finally, on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Point in Utah. The first railroad across the North American continent was completed.
Now the cattle ranchers in Texas saw a way to make money. They could feed cattle cheaply on the grasslands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains and then use the new railroads to transport the cattle to eastern cities. After the Civil War Texas cattle owners hired men called "drovers" or "cowboys" to drive their cattle north to the railroads.
Very soon meat from the Great Plains was feeding people in Europe as well as the eastern United states.
|
