Come Quickly, Leave Quickly

The thing is, people didn't move to the West, the pioneers moved "in" the West.  The Westward movement was made of people who were often vague and unsure of their purpose, sometimes ambitious, but more uncertain of where that ambition should be rooted.  Americans were a new kind of migrants.  They didn't have a set destination. They valued the freedom to move, always looking to discover their purpose, to seek something new.  Going West wasn't a destination, it was a journey.

Communities moved for many reasons - the lack of rain, lost opportunities,  Indian attacks, railroad tracks that never came, restlessness and exhausted mines.  Many of the ghost towns were just played out resources.  The farming towns moved on more gradually.  When the soil was too dry, or too wet, when they had to struggle too hard to grow crops, they moved on.  These towns were quickly settled and quickly abandoned like the mining towns.  The difference is the miners left everything behind to find a rich new resource.  The farming communities took it with them.  Both left the shell of a community behind them and took the spirit with them.

Ghost towns like those encountered in the Great Plains were of another sort entirely.  They gradually declined until they completely disappeared.  Sometimes they would remain partially inhabited as crossroad settlements or small villages for a period of time before disappearing entirely.  The abandoned buildings would be dismantled for the lumber which was scarce and worth too much money and labor to leave behind, 

When the town of Nininger, Minnesota went into decline, much of the town was physically dismantled and moved to another location.  The machinery of the sawmill itself was sold in pieces in 1860.  The Handyside Home, a hotel for 50 guests, was taken to the neighboring town of Hastings.  The Masonic Lodge purchased Tremont Hill and moved it to Cottage Grove.   Then the town of Cottage Grove, which had went from a population of 500 in 1837 to 1000 in 1858, would decline in just eight years to 469 by the 1860s.  By  1869 none of the original buildings remained,  the entire village had disappeared.  

Many towns like Newport, Wisconsin on the banks of the Wisconsin River began to decline for nothing more than the railroad was built on the other side of the river. The town had expected to be a railroad hub but a change in location meant that the last log house was taken down the river in 1880 long after the town itself lay abandoned.  

These "Bedouins of America" survived any number of trans-plantings.  Could they have survived if they had stayed in the exhausted mining towns, on the drought-ridden farms, the towns the railroad forgot?  We don't know,  but we do know they didn't want to just survive, they wanted to prosper.  It wasn't enough to move if they didn't see it being prosperous.  The West had a pattern - come quickly, and if it wasn't what was expected - to leave just as quickly.

Next time...Getting around the West

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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 24,  1873, William Henry Jackson became the first person to photograph Colorado's Mount of the Holy Cross, providing proof that it existed. It had been rumored that a natural cross of snow lay hidden in the mountains of Colorado.  Jackson had photographed Yellowstone and many wagon trains earlier in his career.  His photo, with the early morning sun shining over it became one of his most famous photos.