A History of the American People

the federal government a 400-foot right of way, ten alternate sections of land for each mile of
track, and first-mortgage loans of $16,000 per mile in flat country, $32,000 in foothills, and
$48,000 per mile in the mountains-an enormous federal subsidy, in effect, which would only
have passed over Southern dead bodies. In the event, the subsidy did not prove enough for this
giant undertaking and was increased by a further Act of Congress in 1864, the Southerners still
being absent.
In fact the North and West got their revenge, during the Civil War, for the many defeats they
had suffered at the hands of Southern legislators in the thirty-two years 1829-60. By 1850 the
Southern plantation interests had come to see the cheap-land policy in the West as a threat to
slavery. Their senators killed the Homestead Bill of 1852, and in 1860, after Southerners made
unavailing efforts to kill a similar Bill, President Buchanan vetoed it. Thus a Homestead Bill
became an important part of Lincoln's platform and in 1861 it marched triumphantly through
Congress. This offered an enterprising farmer 160 acres of public land, already surveyed, for a
nominal sum. He got complete ownership at the end of six months on paying $1.50 an acre, or
for nothing after five years' residence. This eventually proved one of the most important laws in
American history, the consequences of which we will examine shortly. The removal of Southern
resistance also speeded up the constitutional development of the West. Kansas entered the Union
as a free state in 1861, Nevada in 1864, and Nebraska soon after the end of the war in 1867.
Meanwhile the administration extended the territorial system over the remaining inchoate
regions beyond the Mississippi. The Dakotas, Colorado, and Nevada territories were organized
in 1861, Arizona and Idaho in 1863, and by 1870 Wyoming and Montana had also become
formal territories on the way to statehood.
Out west, then, they just got on with it, and made money. The mining boom, which had cost
the South any chance of California becoming a slave state, continued and intensified, thus
pouring specie into Washington's war-coffers. The classic boomtown, Virginia City, emerged
7,000 feet up the mountains of Nevada, and was immortalized by Mark Twain. The gold and
silver were embedded in quartz, and elaborate crushing machinery-and huge amounts of capital-
were needed for the big-pay mines, the Ophir, Central, Mexican, Gould, and Curry. Experienced
men from Cornwall, Wales, and the German mountains poured in. The Comstock Lode became
the great mineralogical phenomenon of the age. It went straight through Virginia City, from
north to south, and laboring men earned the amazing wages of $6 a day, working in three shifts,
round the clock. So, as Twain wrote, even if you did not own a piece' of a mine-and few did not- everyone was happy;Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce intensity
in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the
high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plentiful as dust; every individual
considered himself wealthy and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.'
Any shots fired in these parts had nothing to do with the Civil War but reflected the normal
human appetites of greed, lust, anger, and envy. And, as Mark Twain put it, the thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera glass, either.' The miners, most of whom were heavily armed, chased away any Indians who stood between them and possible bullion, ignoring treaties. Gold was found in 1860 on the Nez Perce Indians' reservation at the junction of the Snake and Clearwater rivers. The superintendent of Indian affairs reported:To attempt to restrain these miners would be like attempting to restrain
the whirlwind.' With Washington's attention on the war, protection of reservations had a low