menu : site index

 

map: The poorest part of America (Economist, Dec. 10, 2005)

Back 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.

table: The poorest part of America (Economist, Dec. 10, 2005)

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.

 
 

 
2005-12-18
2005-12-11
2005-12-04
2005-11-27
2005-11-20
2005-11-13
2005-11-06
2005-10-30
2005-10-23
2005-10-16
2005-10-09
2005-10-02
2005-09-25
2005-09-18
2005-09-11
2005-09-04
2005-08-28
2005-08-21
2005-08-14
2005-08-07
2005-07-31
2005-07-24
2005-07-17
2005-07-10
2005-07-03
2005-06-26
2005-06-19
2005-06-12
2005-06-05
2005-05-29
2005-05-22
2005-05-15
2005-05-08
2005-05-01
  
previous
 

WEBSITE  EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić