Farmers Struggle to Keep Up 445West with much of its color and folklore. But the
stockholders of large corporations, many of whom
had never seen a mine, made off with the lion’s
share of the wealth. Those whose worship of gold
was direct and incessant, the prospectors who peo-
pled the mining towns and gave the frontier its
character, mostly died poor, still seeking a prize as
elusive if not as illusory as the pot of gold at the end
of the rainbow.
The mining of gold and silver is not essentially
different from the mining of coal and iron. To oper-
ate profitably, large capital investments were
required. Tunnels had to be blasted deep into the
earth and miniature railroads laid out to transport
the ore-bearing rock to the surface. Heavy machin-
ery had to be purchased and transported to remote
regions to extract the precious metal. To do this
work, hundreds of skilled miners (mostly “deep”
miners from Cornwall, in England) had to be
imported and paid. Henry Comstock, the prospec-
tor who gave his name to the Comstock Lode, was
luckier than most, but he sold his claims to the lode
for a pittance, disposing of what became one valu-
able mine for $40 and receiving only $10,000 for
his share of the fabulous Ophir, the richest concen-
tration of gold and silver ever found.
Though marked by violence, fraud, greed, and
lost hopes, the gold rushes had valuable results. The
most obvious was the new metal itself, which bol-
stered the financial position of the United States dur-
ing and after the Civil War. Quantities of European
goods needed for the war effort and
for postwar economic development
were paid for with the yield of the
new mines. Gold and silver also
caused a great increase of interest in
the West. A valuable literature
appeared, part imaginative, part
reportorial, describing the mining
camps and the life of the prospec-
tors. These works fascinated con-
temporaries (as they have continued
to fascinate succeeding generations
when adapted to the motion picture
and to television). Mark Twain’s
Roughing It(1872), based in part
on his experiences in the Nevada
mining country, is the most famous
example of this literature.
The mines also speeded the
political organization of the West.
Colorado and Nevada became terri-
tories in 1861, Arizona and Idaho
in 1863, and Montana in 1864.
Although Nevada was admitted
before it had 60,000 residents (in 1864, to ratify the
Thirteenth Amendment and help reelect Lincoln),
most of these territories did not become states for
decades. But because of the miners, the framework
for future development was early established.Farmers Struggle to Keep Up
While miners were extracting the mineral wealth of the
West, others were snapping up the region’s choice
farmland. Presumably the Homestead Act of 1862 was
supposed to make it easier for poor families to acquire
farms, thereby ending the reign of the speculator and
the large landholder. An early amendment to the act
even prevented husbands and wives from filing sepa-
rate claims. The West, land reformers had assumed,
would soon be dotted with 160-acre family farms.
They were doomed to disappointment. Most land-
less Americans were too poor to become farmers even
when they could obtain land without cost. The expense
of moving a family to the ever-receding frontier
exceeded the means of many, and the cost of a plow,
hoes and scythes, draft animals, a wagon, a well, fencing,
and of building the simplest house, might come to
$1,000—a formidable barrier. As for the industrial
workers for whom the free land was supposed to provide
a “safety valve,” they had neither the skills nor the incli-
nation to become farmers. Homesteaders usually came
from districts not far removed from frontier conditions.
The first settlers in western Kansas, Nebraska,
and the Dakotas took up land along the rivers andA sod house in North Dakota, 1896. Individual “bricks” of sod were hewn from the ground and
stacked in layers to build houses. The roof was made of timber packed with branches, twigs,
straw, and more sod. This house was expanded with a room made of planed lumber (right).
Sod houses were quite cool in summer and warm in winter, although excess moisture was
always a problem.