Which americans migrated to the west

While women often performed housework that allowed mining families to subsist in often difficult conditions, a significant portion of the mining workforce were single men without families dependent on service industries in nearby towns and cities.

There, working-class women worked in shops, saloons, boarding houses, and brothels. It was often these ancillary operations that profited from the mining boom: as failed prospectors often found, the rush itself often generated more wealth than the mines.

Others came to the Plains to extract the hides of the great bison herds. Millions of animals had roamed the Plains, but their tough leather supplied industrial belting in eastern factories and raw material for the booming clothing industry. Specialized teams took down and skinned the herds. The infamous American bison slaughter peaked in the early s. The number of American bison plummeted from over 10 million at mid-century to only a few hundred by the early s.

The expansion of the railroads would allow ranching to replace the bison with cattle on the American grasslands. This s photograph illustrates the massive number of bison killed for these and other reasons including sport in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Photograph of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer, s. It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West.

Think about how this quotation resonated with different groups of Americans at the time. At the time, however, many settlers felt they were at the pinnacle of democracy, and that with no aristocracy or ancient history, America was a new world where anyone could succeed. To assist the settlers in their move westward and transform the migration from a trickle into a steady flow, Congress passed two significant pieces of legislation in the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act.

The Homestead Act allowed any head of household, or individual over the age of twenty-one—including unmarried women—to receive a parcel of acres for only a nominal filing fee. The standards for improvement were minimal: Owners could clear a few acres, build small houses or barns, or maintain livestock.

Under this act, the government transferred over million acres of public domain land to private citizens. The Pacific Railway Act was pivotal in helping settlers move west more quickly, as well as move their farm products, and later cattle and mining deposits, back east. The first of many railway initiatives, this act commissioned the Union Pacific Railroad to build new track west from Omaha, Nebraska, while the Central Pacific Railroad moved east from Sacramento, California.

The law provided each company with ownership of all public lands within two hundred feet on either side of the track laid, as well as additional land grants and payment through load bonds, prorated on the difficulty of the terrain it crossed. Because of these provisions, both companies made a significant profit, whether they were crossing hundreds of miles of open plains, or working their way through the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

Other tracks, including lines radiating from this original one, subsequently created a network that linked all corners of the nation. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad dramatically changed the tenor of travel in the country, as people were able to complete in a week a route that had previously taken months.

In addition to legislation designed to facilitate western settlement, the U. Forts such as Fort Laramie in Wyoming built in and Fort Apache in Arizona served as protection from nearby Indians as well as maintained peace between potential warring tribes. Others located throughout Colorado and Wyoming became important trading posts for miners and fur trappers. Those built in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas served primarily to provide relief for farmers during times of drought or related hardships.

Forts constructed along the California coastline provided protection in the wake of the Mexican-American War as well as during the American Civil War. These locations subsequently serviced the U. Navy and provided important support for growing Pacific trade routes. Whether as army posts constructed for the protection of white settlers and to maintain peace among Indian tribes, or as trading posts to further facilitate the development of the region, such forts proved to be vital contributions to westward migration.

In the nineteenth century, as today, it took money to relocate and start a new life. Due to the initial cost of relocation, land, and supplies, as well as months of preparing the soil, planting, and subsequent harvesting before any produce was ready for market, the original wave of western settlers along the Oregon Trail in the s and s consisted of moderately prosperous, white, native-born farming families of the East.

But the passage of the Homestead Act and completion of the first transcontinental railroad meant that, by , the possibility of western migration was opened to Americans of more modest means. What started as a trickle became a steady flow of migration that would last until the end of the century. Nearly , settlers had made the trek westward by the height of the movement in The vast majority were men, although families also migrated, despite incredible hardships for women with young children.

More recent immigrants also migrated west, with the largest numbers coming from Northern Europe and Canada. Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish were among the most common. These ethnic groups tended to settle close together, creating strong rural communities that mirrored the way of life they had left behind.

According to U. Census Bureau records, the number of Scandinavians living in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century exploded, from barely 18, in to over 1. During that same time period, the German-born population in the United States grew from , to nearly 2. As they moved westward, several thousand immigrants established homesteads in the Midwest, primarily in Minnesota and Wisconsin, where, as of , over one-third of the population was foreign-born, and in North Dakota, whose immigrant population stood at 45 percent at the turn of the century.

This project explores a number of consequential migrations--Great Migrations--that helped reshape culture, politics, or economic structures. It has five units see menu top , each with detailed information and interactive maps, charts, and data: 1 the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South ; the reverse migration to the South ; state by state Black migration histories 2 the enormously consequential migrations of Latinx Americans , both from Latin America and inside the US ; 3 the diaspora of whites from the South to northern and western states; 4 the Dust Bowl migration to California from Oklahoma and neighboring states in the s.

This site is based on published and unpublished work by James Gregory, Professor of History, University of Washington. African American Great Migration Upwards of 7 million African Americans left the South during the 20th century, settling mostly in the big cities of the North and West. In doing so they transformed more than their own lives. This Great Migration transformed cities and set the foundations for reconstructions of race, politics, and even the regional balances of the nation.

This section includes interactive maps and charts tracking the exodus from the South; another set detailing the "reverse migration" to the South since ; a third with state-by-state Black migration histories More than 20 million whites left the South during the 20th century, vastly outnumbering the African Americans who left. They were joined by nearly 1 million Latinx, mostly Tejanos, who moved west to California and north into the Midwest. This section shows migration patterns and explores the impacts of the southern diaspora.

This section includes six interactive maps and tables as well interpretative essays. The relocation to California of close to , Oklahomans, Texans, Arkansans, and Missourians during the Great Depression was the most publicized mass migration of that decade.

Many faced unexpected difficulties, especially those who headed for California's Central Valley. Their plight caught the attention of journalists, photographers, and became the subject of one of the most celebrated American novels of the century, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Here are three interactive maps as well as detailed accounts and primary sources. Here are interactive graphics and maps that allow us to track the changing population decade-by-decade since Select a state and see where people were born, both other countries and other states. California's history is keyed to migration. The most populous state in the union became so because so many people from other states and other lands have moved there.

It was not until that the number of native-born Californians surpassed the number who had migrated from somewhere else.

And still today most adults are from another state or another country. Migration predated the period of US control notably when Spain sent soldiers and missionaries into the area they named California. It accelerated after the United States seized the Mexican province and immediately profited from the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills.