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

_____________________________

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.  

Ghost Towns

The Western landscape by nature reflected the moving on spirit. The remains of wagon train settlements were abandoned by those looking for a fresh start. A nearly empty continent with fast moving families  left behind the abandoned places we know as ghost towns - places left before they were used up.

in Iowa, for example a list from 1930 of towns, villages, even post offices that had been abandoned since 1838 were 2,205 ghost towns.   This list did not count towns and villages that become parts of other places, nor name changes. or those never built up.  These were actually abandoned places where people had once lived. Mail was delivered there.   Houses were built.   Hopes and dreams were lived out before the people moved on. The time frame for this list only concerned places abandoned between 1852-1912 -  a period of 60 years.  A comparable list of Kansas abandoned towns is over 2,500 considered ghost towns.

The western settlers moved on because they had more need, more temptation and more opportunity to do so. They had no roots and no time to make roots. The uncertain America from as far back as the first
settlement of Jamestown was one of the first ghost towns. Founded in 1607, it had the first legislative assembly in 1619 and was actually the capital of Virginia until 1698. By 1722 a visitor noted that
"nothing but abundance of brick rubble and three or four inhabited homes" remained of Jamestown.

Like the West, our capital was mobile and the eastern states capitals as well. By 1812 eight of the original 13 states had different capital cities than they had in 1776.  Most of these new capitals were moved once the new capitals had gained enough population.  Many were were settled for that specific purpose. New Hampshire's capital moved from Portsmouth to Concord (1808). New York City to Albany (1797), Princeton, New Jersey to Trenton (1790) with Pennsylvania, Delaware,  North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia all following suit. These were the signs of rapid population growth in America's early days

 

Unlike the western territories, these capitals did not become ghost towns, just cities of lesser importance.  The western territories however went about their capitals a bit differently…

Next time- The Western Capitals

___________________________________

Today in Pioneer History: "On August 17, 1862, Minnesota erupts in violence as desperate Dakota Indians attack white settlements along the Minnesota River. The Dakota were eventually overwhelmed by the U.S. military six weeks later. The Dakota Indians were more commonly referred to as the Sioux, a derogatory name derived from part of a French word meaning “little snake.”