Question

How did westward expansion facilitate the massive growth in American cities at the end of the 19th century?

Answer 1

In the late nineteenth century , a number of factors enticed American settlers and immigrants to move west. The chief among these was the availability for planting, fishing, and ranching of cheap land. Hundreds of thousands of people purchased land through the Homestead Act: through it, more than 270 million acres of public land were transferred into private hands by the US government.

Even the discovery of precious metals and minerals attracted people westward. In several west states, miners found gold, silver , and copper. The 1858 discovery of silver at the Comstock Lode in Nevada sparked the largest rush of prospectors since the gold rush in California a decade earlier. Hordes of miners trying to strike it rich produced short-lived "boomtowns" that rapidly developed into deserted "ghost towns" when the residents depleted the resources that were easy to find. By the 1880s, only major mining firms had the capital and equipment required to perform the hard work of extracting gold from deep within the earth.

But railroad was the biggest contributor to Western growth. Federal, state , and local governments are keen to facilitate trade and transportation and have given land to railway companies. Around 1860 and 1880 the companies used the land to increase the miles of railroad track in the United States, all while making a tidy profit selling surplus land to farmers and speculators. The railroads opened up the West not just for colonization but also for the world market , allowing meat and vegetables to be transported to distant cities and even oceans. To do so, the railways also changed time itself: in 1883, by splitting the United States into four time zones, which are still the norm today, the railroad companies arranged their schedules.

They were the victims of their own success to some extent: the more they made, the less it's worth it. But farmers still had to deal with adverse government policies and unregulated corporate monopolies. Strong protective tariffs for industry and a deflationary monetary policy were enforced by the US government, both putting farmers at a financial disadvantage. Railroad monopolies charged shipping rates so high that in some cases it was cheaper for farmers to burn their crops for fuel than to ship them to market. Farm machinery and fertilizer underwent steep markups as well. These factors all combined to drive farmers into debt and bankruptcy