This Land Is My Land… It Isn’t Your Land… Farmers Do What They Want Chapter 5, Section 2 Notes

Acres…Get Your Acres… Homestead Act (1862) The U.S. Gov’t offered 160 acres of free land to any citizen or intended citizen who was the head of household What’s an example of an intended citizen? Hint: Look at the date of the Homestead Act Answer: A soon-to-be-freed slave 600,000 families went west from 1862-1900 Exodusters were African Americans who moved from the post-Reconstruction South to Kansas Several thousand exodusters took the Homestead Act’s offer

Hardships…Get Your Hardships… What hardships did frontier settlers face? Droughts, fires, floods, blizzards, raids by outlaws and Indians, locust plagues, Adam and Eve’s betrayal (okay, I made the last one up) Even though it was tough to make it, people still went—free land, make $! The number of people living west of the Mississippi River grew from 1% in 1850 to 30% in 1900!

Prairies…Get your…Okay, this intro just isn’t working anymore… How do you live on the prairie? You do everything for yourself Women and men worked the land together, made clothes, and ate only what they grew or killed

Matthew Lesko’s Favorite Slide This is why inventions helped so much Barbed wire: keep animals in Reaper: save crops from dying by speeding up the harvest Steel Plow: made planting more efficient (less crops died because the earth was better prepared for farming) Steel Windmill: Brought up underground water for irrigation, preventing crop dehydration (Matthew Lesko was that guy…and on late night infomercials in the 1990s and early 2000s talking about FREE MONEY you could find from the government)

Farms Are Good…We Like Farms Morrill Act (1862, 1890) Gave federal land to the states to help finance agricultural colleges Hatch Act (1887) Established agricultural experiment stations to inform farmers of new developments for better farming

Farmers Problems Bonanza Farms Large single-crop spreads of 15,000-50,000 acres of land created by the railroad companies and investors Machinery was expensive When prices fell, farmers couldn’t afford to pay their farm’s mortgage because their crops weren’t making enough $$ In order to bring in more money, they had to sell more crops How could they do that? Buy more land…that’s why the bonanza farms were created It was a short-term fix but a long-term problem Why?

Farmers Problems Answer: When prices fell again, farmers wouldn’t be able to pay again…what do they do? Buy more land or lose their land? That’s a no-win situation If farmers couldn’t pay their loans, the banks foreclosed the farms and took control of them to be resold in bankruptcy This happened to many bonanza farms