The Great Empty

In 1870, a year after the transcontinental railroad opened the lines reaching from the Mississippi Valley westward, the railroads were rich in land but poor in revenue.  They needed vast sales of real estate to ranchers, farmers, and merchants whose presence would generate profitable freight trade. 

The Homestead Act of 1862 had swelled the western interior, but the vastness of the interior was still far from populous.  The two rail lines originating in Minnesota - the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific - had only 444,000 people in the state in 1870.  Kansas and Nebraska had fewer than a half million together, most in the eastern sections.  Dakota territory could boast only 14,000, Arizona fewer than 10,000 and the Pacific Northwest, just 114,000.

Two decades later in 1890, the population showed the results of emigration with Kansas and Nebraska having a million each, Minnesota 1.3 million, the Dakotas a half a million, Arizona 90,000 and the Pacific Northwest 675,000.   The great empty was empty no more!

So what caused this population "explosion" in such a vast unknown area of the United States?  The railroad certainly helped by bringing farmers to unsettled lands provided by the government's Homestead Act. Gold was discovered in 1848.  But the land offices of the railroads sprang up in major cities to recruit new families. Fighting the western interior's reputation for deathly cold temperatures, arid land difficult to farm was a problem that needed a solution.  . 

The railroad hired public relations pitchmen who worked to change these conceptions, touting places like Kansas and the Dakotas as having soil so fertile it brought "the laughter of bountiful harvests."  One Colorado newspaper reported that the increase of railroads had the effect of producing more rain!  According to the article, the rapid movement by trains displaced air and affected the electrical conditions of the atmosphere, causing more rain to fall! 

Brochures, designed by the railroads, were full of endorsements from settlers with colorful illustrations showing huge harvests on beautifully plowed fields, with temperate climates for just pennies.

It is doubtful that many of these attempts to paint the western interior as a paradise were believed in full, but the opinions were changing...

Next time...The Emigrant Trains
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On May 28, 1754,  a Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington begins the French and Indian War, it was the last and most important of a series of colonial conflicts between the British and the American colonists on the same side.