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in 1820, Major Stephen Harriman Long had led an exploring party
across the Great Plains region of Nebraska and Colorado to the
Rockies and pronounced all of it unfit for white people:
"uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture" and
useful to the United States in the future only as "a barrier
against too great an expansion of our population westwards".
Mapmakers called it "the Great American Desert", and for
forty-odd years pioneers had carefully avoided settling on it.
But
the Homestead Act of 1862 began to change all that. It promised 160
acres of public land to any person who filed a claim, paid
ten-dollar fee, and agreed to work the property for five years. As
it happened, the 1870s and early 1880s were unusually wet years in
the West, and the prairies, plowed and planted for the first time,
yielded bumper crops. Promoters made the most of it. The Plains
might once have been desertlike, they admitted, but no longer.
G.C.
Ward: The West, An illustrated history, Little, Brown &
Co., Boston, 1996.
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Even
after the fertile ground had been snapped up, the settlers still
kept coming... They endured the hardships of Job. Most were driven
away, but the obstinate stayed. And, alas, they have struggled ever
since.
No
place so demonstrates the shaky economic state of rural America as
the northern Rockies and western Great Plains. Virtually all of the
20 poorest countries in America, in terms of wages, are on the
eastern flank of the Rockies or on the western Great Plains.
The
poorest part of America, Not here, surely?, Economist, December
10th-16th 2005.
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