Who Wants to Be a Pioneer?
Designed by Rob Dent and Paula White Spring 2000

Great Plains Settlers  

Who Wants To Be a Pioneer: Wagon Train #4

Introduction | Sources | Guiding Questions | Home

Introduction

Since the 1840s, thousands of people had traveled through the Great Plains--the vast expanse of prairie between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains--on their way to Oregon and California. For nearly forty years, Americans continued to pass right over the plains, which they called the "Great American Desert," because they considered it unsuitable for settlement.

In the 1850s, the conflict over slavery in the East was brought across the Mississippi when Congress created the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. Anti-slavery men and women from the North moved into these territories, hoping to make them "free states" where slavery was illegal. Supporters of slavery also moved here, trying to make Kansas and Nebraska "slave states." These settlers, who fought with each other up to the beginning of the Civil War, were some of the first white Americans to settle in the Great Plains.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. This law provided 160 acres of western land to anyone who lived on the land for five years. In the same year, construction began on the transcontinental railroad, which would link the East and the West by 1869.

The new railroad to the West and the promise of free land lured many people to the Great Plains in the 1870s and 1880s. No longer would migrants have to take the long wagon journey to the Oregon Country, now they could take a train to the plains and stake out a farm of their own. During the 1870s and early 1880s, there was unusually heavy rainfall on the Great Plains, which led many people to believe that the land was fertile after all. They would be disappointed when the rainfall slowed down in the 1880s and the plains returned to their normally dry condition.

Between 1877 and 1887, four and a half million people moved to the West, and nearly half of them settled on the Great Plains. Life on the prarie was not easy, but for many Civil War veterans, European immigrants, and poor farmers from the East it was their only chance have their own farm. The cost of starting a new life on the unsettled plains was the remoteness of the frontier and the constant dangers of sickness, crop failure blizzards, tornados, prairie fires, and draught.

Millions of buffalo and hundreds of thousands of Native Americans lived on the Great Plains before whites began to migrate west. However, the buffalo population declined drastically as they were hunted almost into extinction. The Native American population shrank too, as the United States forced them off of their homelands and onto "reservations" in order to make room for white settlers.

Sources:

1. Images from the PBS "The West" Film Project:

• Cheyenne women dressing buffalo hides on the Great Plains
• A Lakota camp in the Dakota Territory
• Omar Yern and family (Nebraska homesteaders)
• Homesteaders in Custer County, Nebraska
• David Hilton and family (Nebraska homesteaders)
• Homestead photographer Solomon Butcher

2. Library of Congress "American Memory" Photo Collection -- look at the following sections, or search for another topic:

• Schooling
• Women
• Sod Homes

3. 19th Century Agricultural Tools -- from the Conner Prairie Site

4. Memoir of Frank Schakur, a homesteader in Nebraska and Texas -- from the University of Kansas's "Oltime Nebraska" Site

5. University of Kansas Archive on "Orphan Trains"

Guiding Questions: Great Plains Settlers

General

• Look for evidence about:
• Daily life on the Plains
• Hardships faced by homesteaders
• Differences between life on the Plains and in the East

Specific

Photo of Cheyenne women & Photo of Lakota camp

• Who lived on the Plains before white settlers came?
• Why was the buffalo so important to their existence? (In the photo: tepees. Think of other ways they might have used the buffalo.)
• What was their culture like (how was their lifestyle different from that of the white settlers? What evidence in the photos show this?)

Photos of Homesteaders & Library of Congress "American Memory" Collection

• What do the photos tell you about the life of homesteaders on the plains: home, surroundings/landscape, clothing, belongings, daily chores/routines, isolation, women's lives

19th Century Agricultural Tools

• What was the level of agricultural technology at this time? How do these tools compare with the ones used today? (think about&emdash;mechanization) Where were these tools probably made? (i.e. mass produced in a factory? hand made?)

Memories of Frank Shakur

• Where did the Shakur family originally come from? In what different places in the Plains did they live?
• How did they get to Nebraska? What was the trip like?
• How did they get from Nebraska to Texas? Who accompanied them on this journey?

Orphan Trains to Kansas

* Some primary and some secondary sources. What information can you get from each?

• From where were the orphans sent? Why were they sent to Kansas? Who sent them? Who picked them up and took them in?