Lesson 3: Farming Moves West

Lesson Focus

The Great Plains once seemed impossible to farm. This lesson explores how new technology, expanding railroads, and immigration transformed this 'Great American Desert' into America's agricultural heartland, overcoming immense environmental challenges.

People to Know

Joseph Glidden, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland

Learning Objectives

• Identify the three key factors—technology, railroads, and immigration—that opened the Great Plains to farming.
• Describe the major environmental and economic challenges that Plains farmers encountered, from harsh weather to financial dependency.

To encourage settlement, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862, offering 160-acre farms for a small fee and a five-year commitment.

However, the act was not as successful as planned.

Speculators used fraud to claim land meant for settlers, and railroad companies already controlled much of the best land near their tracks. This meant that many genuine homesteaders found it difficult to acquire good, farmable land through the act.

The Great Plains environment, which lacked trees and had scarce, deep water, initially discouraged farmers.

To overcome this, farmers used new technology from the Industrial Revolution. They used drilled wells and windmills to tap into deep aquifers and Joseph Glidden’s barbed-wire (1874) to build fences without wood.

Note that these innovations were essential for making the dry, treeless plains farmable and conquering the geography of the “Great American Desert.”

Railroad companies needed settlers to make their lines profitable, so they became the most important promoters of western settlement.

They created “Bureaus of Immigration” in Europe, sold their own land grants cheaply, and advertised the West as a paradise, even creating the myth that “Rain follows the plow.”

This aggressive marketing successfully triggered a massive population boom in the 1880s, rapidly filling states like the Dakotas with new farmers.

The reality of life on the plains was far harsher than the advertisements suggested.

Settlers faced extreme weather, blizzards, prairie fires, grasshopper plagues, and devastating drought. They also became economically vulnerable, depending on railroads for shipping and banks for loans to buy machinery.

As a result, many farmers fell deep into debt, and by 1900, about one-third of them had lost their farms and become tenants.

Despite the constant struggles, farm families adapted and built new lives.

They replaced sod huts with homes made of lumber brought by railroads and established schools and churches. The Morrill Act helped create universities that were open to women, granting them new equality.

However, as cities grew, farmers lost social status. Power and admiration shifted from the hardworking farmer to the wealthy urban industrialists, who were seen as the new leaders of the nation.

The difficult experience of homesteaders inspired a new, realistic form of literature.

Unlike romantic tales of the “Wild West,” authors such as Hamlin Garland and O.E. Rölvaag wrote about the grim, unglamorous reality of farm life. Their stories focused on the endless toil, isolation, and environmental disasters that defined the settlers' struggle.

This literature provided a powerful and truthful account of the human cost of settling the Great Plains.