Existing comment:
Settling the Land
Print of a Dakota Wheat Farm showing Farmhouse, Barn, and bundles of wheat in a field.
'A Dakota Wheat Farm,' from Marvels of the New West, 1888.
The Transcontinental Railroad facilitated colonization in the western territories through human settlement. In the 1860s, the U.S. government encouraged white Americans and European immigrants to occupy the land, often by creating homesteads. Farmers claimed pieces of the prairies, fencing in lands that Native peoples relied on for free-roaming bison and other resources. Ranchers used the communal free range but their cattle (unlike bison) were personally owned and branded.
Can you identify areas that farmers might have claimed? |