Update time!
Part Sixty-Five: The Western Frontier
Cowboy Dutch:
Life on the Great Plains during the 1870s was rough and rural. Most of the people who migrated wewst across the Mississippi went into farming or ranching, or worked in the smaller towns scattered across Calhoun, Houston, and other states in the Great Plains. Many of the largest ranches were owned by the early Dutch immigrants to Calhoun or Spanish vaqueros who lived in the region for decades, who had gained the land from various federal land grant acts in the 1840s. While most of the ranches were populated by cattle for livestock, a few like the Vanderhof Ranch in Calhoun kept herds of the native bison which roamed the Great Plains prior to the European colonization of North America. As more and more of the land in the Great Plains was parceled out into farms and ranches and the region became more populated, the natural habitat range of the bison dwindled, but these ranches helped to keep the bison alive as a species while they were nearly hunted to extinction in the wild.
The growth of cattle ranching in the Great Plains also spurred growth in cities on the Mississippi River as well as cities where the railroads snakes west across the plains. In the 1870s, Saint Louis, Cairo, Memphis, and New Orleans grew largely due to the development of the meat packing industry in those cities[1]. The invention of refrigerated railway cars allowed the beef cattle to be processed in large factories in those cities and then shipped north to the cities along the Great Lakes or east to the East Coast. Saint Louis became the prime location for the meat packing industry and developed into a major population center and transport hub. Several of the factories employed the unskilled Irish immigrants who came to the United States during the latter 19th century, and continued to attract immigrants well into the 1900s.
New Pioneers:
The 1870s was also a time of greater exploration of the western United States and of a greater understanding of the area. Several expeditions were made into the Rocky Mountains by a new generation of exploers. Future president Theodore Roosevelt was part of a grand surveying expedition that sought to map out the entire country. The United States Topological Survey was authorized in 1874 by President Lee and lasted four years. Roosevelt, along with other explorers including William Cody and John Wesley Powell were sent on expeditions throughout the western United States. The various ranges of the Rockies and the Cascades were mapped out. Several peaks were summitted for the first time by Europeans, including the 1877 expedition by Cody and Powell to climb Mount Jefferson[2] in Colorado, the nation's highest peak.
Part of the reason for the rush to map the nation was the growth of mining claims throughout the remote mountain regions of the country. Along with the increase in mining of the Rocky Mountains, a number of people migrated and staked claims in the Cascades in Oregon and Columbia Territories after the discovery of gold despoits along the Fraser River. The city of Gilpin at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers became a major mining town and boomed to a population of 25,000 by 1880. The region along the lower reaches of the Fraser River saw a large amount of growth as well and prompted the Union Pacific Railroad to extend its line on the Pacific coast up to Langley in Oregon Territory. The rush also prompted some migration in British North America as well as miners searched for gold in the upper Fraser. The influx of people to the regions helped revive the economy of Fort Simpson and Northcote[3] and led to the creation of the separate district of New Caledonia covering the British possessions west of the Rockies.
[1] Cow towns between the ranches and the major meat packing cities also grew during this period. Examples are Laramie, Pahsapa, Crockett, Houston, and Stuyvesant, Calhoun.
[2] OTL Mount Elbert, Colorado. This should give you some clue about my plans for future territorial growth of the US.
[3] Formerly Fort McLoughlin, named after HBC governor Sir Stafford Northcote.
