AP United States History

## Learning Outcomes

- Explain why many migrants moved West seeking landownership and independence after **1865**
- Identify how the **Homestead Act (1862)** encouraged western settlement
- Understand why the ideal of the self-sufficient homesteader was attractive but often difficult to achieve
- Recall the significance of **Exodusters**, **bonanza farms**, and the **Oklahoma Land Rush (1889)**
- Analyze how federal policy, railroads, technology, and climate shaped western life
- Evaluate how opportunity for settlers depended on Native dispossession and the breakup of tribal lands

## AP United States History Syllabus

For the AP United States History, you are expected to understand how migrants sought western self-sufficiency in Period 6, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that the **Homestead Act (1862)** offered **160 acres** to settlers who lived on and improved land for five years
- Identify why the West appealed to migrants as a place of landownership, autonomy, and escape from wage labor or tenancy
- Explain how **Exodusters** moved mainly to **Kansas** in the late **1870s**, seeking safety and economic independence after Reconstruction
- Understand how Great Plains settlers adapted through **sod houses**, **dry farming**, **windmills**, and **barbed wire**
- Distinguish between the ideal of the independent family farmer and the reality of **bonanza farms**, debt, and railroad dependence
- Explain how the **Dawes Act (1887)** and the **Oklahoma Land Rush (1889)** opened Native land to non-Native settlement
- Understand the significance of **Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893)** as an interpretation of frontier identity, not a direct description of every settler’s experience

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. Why did the West attract migrants seeking self-sufficiency after the Civil War?
2. What did the **Homestead Act** promise, and why did that promise not always lead to success?
3. Who were the **Exodusters**, and why did many move to Kansas?
4. How did technologies such as **barbed wire** and **windmills** help Great Plains settlement?
5. Why is it misleading to describe western settlement as simply a story of individual freedom?

## Introduction

In Period 6, many Americans imagined the West as a place where ordinary people could gain land, support a household, and escape dependence on landlords, bosses, or the racial oppression of the post-Reconstruction South. This was not a new dream. It echoed the older **yeoman farmer** ideal associated with Jeffersonian America. What changed after the Civil War was the scale of migration and the degree to which the federal government actively promoted it.

At the same time, APUSH expects you to move beyond the myth. Western self-sufficiency was a powerful goal, but most settlers depended heavily on federal land laws, railroad access, new technology, and national markets. Their opportunity also came at a huge cost to Native peoples whose land was seized, divided, or opened to settlement.

> **Key Term: western self-sufficiency**
> The goal of gaining land, supporting oneself or one’s family, and living with greater economic independence, especially through farming in the West.

### Why the West seemed to offer independence

For many migrants, the East and South offered too little control over life. In the South, sharecropping trapped many families in debt after the end of slavery. In the East, wage labor in factories or crowded cities offered limited independence. The West seemed different because landownership promised autonomy. If a family could own land, raise crops, and provide much of what it needed, it might escape dependence on landlords, employers, or local political elites.

The federal government strengthened this dream through land policy. The key law was the **Homestead Act (1862)**. It offered **160 acres** of public land to settlers who would live on it, build a home, and improve it for five years. That mattered because it turned a cultural ideal into a legal possibility. The government was effectively saying that ordinary people, not just speculators or wealthy planters, could become landowners.

> **Key Term: Homestead Act**
> A federal law passed in **1862** that granted **160 acres** of public land to settlers who lived on and improved it for five years.

This idea had broad appeal. Veterans, immigrants, poor farmers, and families starting over could all imagine the Plains as a route to self-rule. The transcontinental railroad, completed in **1869** at **Promontory Summit, Utah**, made this vision more realistic by moving people west faster and linking western producers to eastern markets.

But here is the first big APUSH distinction: migrants seeking self-sufficiency were not all the same. **Homesteaders** usually aimed for family farming and long-term settlement. Miners often chased quick wealth. Ranchers could seek profit through cattle rather than household farming. Railroad workers built the infrastructure that made migration possible but were not themselves pursuing independent farming in the same way.

> **Key Term: homesteaders**
> Settlers who claimed land, especially under the Homestead Act, and tried to establish farms and households in the West.

The dream also had a strong emotional appeal. The frontier represented a “new start.” A person who had little status elsewhere could gain property and social standing in the West. That is why the subtopic is social and cultural, not just economic. Western migration shaped ideas about freedom, masculinity, family labor, and American identity.

> **Test Tip:** In an SAQ or LEQ, do not just say migrants moved West “for opportunity.” Specify the kind of opportunity: landownership, escape from tenancy, freedom from Southern oppression, or household independence.

### Homesteaders, Exodusters, and life on the Great Plains

The Great Plains were attractive because they contained huge stretches of land, but settlement there was hard. Rainfall was unreliable, timber was scarce, winters were harsh, and grasshopper plagues could destroy crops. So the western self-sufficiency ideal depended on adaptation.

Settlers used **sod houses** because lumber was limited. They adopted **dry farming** methods to conserve moisture in areas with low rainfall. **Windmills** helped pump underground water. **Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire**, patented in **1874**, allowed farmers to fence land cheaply, protect crops, and define property. These details matter because they show that “self-reliance” was not simply toughness. It was practical adaptation to a specific environment.

> **Key Term: dry farming**
> A method of farming in low-rainfall areas that conserves soil moisture through deep plowing and fallow periods.

Life on the Plains also changed family roles. Because survival required constant labor, women worked both inside and outside the home: cooking, preserving food, raising children, caring for animals, and often helping with planting or harvesting. Some women gained greater economic responsibility than many women in the East. This did not erase inequality, but it did make frontier households more dependent on the labor of every family member.

A major example of migrants seeking self-sufficiency is the **Exodusters**. These were African Americans, especially in **1879**, who left the post-Reconstruction South for **Kansas** and other western areas. Their motives were both economic and social. They wanted landownership and freedom from sharecropping debt, but they also wanted safety from white violence and political repression.

> **Key Term: Exodusters**
> African American migrants, especially in the late **1870s**, who moved from the South to Kansas and other western areas seeking land, safety, and independence.

The Exoduster movement shows why this topic is more than a story of white homesteaders. For Black migrants, self-sufficiency meant control over labor and life after emancipation had failed to bring true equality. A community such as **Nicodemus, Kansas**, symbolized this hope. Yet these migrants often faced the same harsh environment, lack of capital, and isolation as white settlers. Freedom from the South did not automatically mean prosperity in the West.

The government passed other laws that revealed the limits of the original Homestead model. The **Timber Culture Act (1873)** offered more land to settlers who planted trees. The **Desert Land Act (1877)** allowed the purchase of arid land if it was irrigated. These laws suggest that **160 acres** was often not enough on dry Plains land. In wetter eastern areas, that amount could support a family. In parts of the West, it often could not.

This is a classic APUSH reasoning move: the federal government promoted the yeoman ideal, but western geography made that ideal harder to achieve. The environment forced policy adjustments, and those adjustments often benefited larger investors more than struggling families.

### Myth versus reality: dependence, markets, and collective action

Students often remember the West as the home of rugged individualism. That image is partly real, but it is incomplete. Settlers wanted independence, yet they depended on systems far bigger than themselves.

First, they depended on the federal government. Without land laws, military enforcement, and railroad subsidies, settlement would have moved more slowly. Second, they depended on railroads. Farmers needed transportation to sell wheat or corn in national markets. If the railroad charged high rates, the farmer’s supposed independence shrank quickly. Third, they depended on credit. Seed, tools, livestock, and machinery cost money, and many settlers had to borrow.

This is where the ideal of the independent family farmer ran into the realities of industrial capitalism. The Plains did not become a world of isolated self-sustaining households. They became tied to national markets, banks, and transport companies.

A strong example is the rise of **bonanza farms** in the Dakotas and other parts of the Great Plains. These were huge commercial wheat farms using machinery and hired labor. They looked less like the old yeoman ideal and more like agribusiness.

> **Key Term: bonanza farms**
> Large commercial farms in the Great Plains, especially wheat farms, operated with machinery and hired labor rather than the labor of a single family.

Bonanza farms matter because they challenge the romantic image of the West. If the West were simply a place of small, self-sufficient families, these giant operations would not fit. Their existence shows that the West was shaped by capital investment and large-scale production as well as household farming.

The limits of self-sufficiency also explain the rise of cooperative politics among farmers. If settlers were truly independent in practice, they would not need to organize. But many did. They joined groups such as the **Farmers’ Alliances** to push back against railroad monopolies, low crop prices, and debt burdens.

> **Key Term: Farmers’ Alliances**
> Farmer organizations in the late nineteenth century that promoted cooperative action against low prices, debt, and railroad abuses.

This creates an important analytical point for APUSH essays: frontier individualism remained a powerful cultural value, but actual western life often pushed settlers toward collective action. In other words, the myth was individual; the reality was often cooperative.

> **Test Tip:** For LEQs, strong analysis comes from tension. A good line of argument is: “Many migrants sought independence through landownership, but their success depended on federal policy, railroad access, and market conditions.”

### Native dispossession and the meaning of the frontier

Any strong answer on western self-sufficiency must include Native Americans. The West was not empty land waiting for settlers. Native peoples already lived there, farmed, hunted, traded, and governed their own communities. Western opportunity for migrants existed because the federal government broke Native resistance and transferred Native land to others.

The **Dawes Act (1887)** was central to this process. It divided tribal land into individual allotments, usually **160 acres** for heads of households, and opened so-called “surplus” land to non-Native settlement. The act was presented as a policy of assimilation. In practice, it undermined tribal landholding and made more land available for white settlers.

> **Key Term: Dawes Act**
> A federal law passed in **1887** that divided tribal lands into individual allotments, weakened tribal landholding, and opened remaining land to non-Native settlers.

The similarity between the Dawes Act and the Homestead Act is not accidental. Both used individual allotments to promote a vision of farming households. But for homesteaders, this was opportunity. For Native communities, it meant dispossession and cultural destruction.

The **Oklahoma Land Rush (1889)** made this visible. Former Indigenous lands were opened suddenly to white settlement, and thousands rushed in to claim plots. To many Americans, it symbolized the excitement of western opportunity. To Native peoples, it symbolized the seizure of their land.

> **Key Term: Oklahoma Land Rush**
> The rapid settlement in **1889** of lands in present-day Oklahoma opened to non-Native settlers after federal policies weakened Native control.

The frontier also became an idea about national character. In **1893**, historian **Frederick Jackson Turner** argued in his **Frontier Thesis** that free land and frontier experience had shaped American democracy, mobility, and self-reliance.

> **Key Term: Frontier Thesis**
> Frederick Jackson Turner’s **1893** argument that the frontier shaped American individualism, democracy, and national character.

Turner is important for APUSH because he explains how Americans thought about the West. But use him carefully. He was interpreting the meaning of the frontier, not proving that every migrant actually became self-sufficient. His thesis fits the cultural myth of western independence much better than the daily realities of debt, drought, and dispossession.

By the **1890 Census**, the frontier line was declared essentially closed. That mattered because it suggested the end of one phase of American development. For many Americans, this made the frontier seem even more important in memory: the place where freedom, mobility, and reinvention had supposedly been made.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- Many migrants moved West after **1865** seeking landownership, autonomy, and freedom from wage labor or sharecropping
- The **Homestead Act (1862)** offered **160 acres** to settlers who lived on and improved land for five years
- The ideal of western self-sufficiency continued the older yeoman farmer ideal
- Great Plains settlement was difficult because of drought, isolation, harsh winters, and scarce timber
- Settlers adapted through **sod houses**, **dry farming**, **windmills**, and **barbed wire**
- **Exodusters** were African American migrants who moved mainly to Kansas in the late **1870s** seeking land, safety, and independence
- Western self-sufficiency was limited by dependence on federal policy, railroads, credit, and national markets
- **Bonanza farms** challenged the image of the West as a land of only small independent family farms
- **Farmers’ Alliances** showed that settlers often needed collective action, not just individual effort
- The **Dawes Act (1887)** broke up tribal lands and opened more land to non-Native settlers
- The **Oklahoma Land Rush (1889)** showed how western opportunity for settlers depended on Native dispossession
- **Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893)** interpreted the frontier as shaping American individualism, but it should not be treated as a full description of actual western life

## Key Terms and Concepts

- western self-sufficiency
- Homestead Act
- homesteaders
- dry farming
- Exodusters
- bonanza farms
- Farmers’ Alliances
- Dawes Act
- Oklahoma Land Rush
- Frontier Thesis


Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development - Migrants seek western self-sufficiency