family, with something left over for market. Farm life wasn’t easy, but it was manageable. In the South, farms often expanded into vast plantations, which grew rice, indigo, tobacco, and cotton. These crops were all commercial, and slaves were the cheap source of labor to produce them profitably.
The West also offered the prospect of large-scale farming, but most of the western territories and states barred slavery. Plus, the “emigrants” who settled on the western lands were culturally and morally disinclined to keep slaves. A big piece of land wasn’t worth much if you couldn’t work it.
There was worse. Typically, prairie soil was hard and clumpy. It did not yield to the plow, but clogged it, making cultivation all but impossible. Was the nation destined to cling to its east coast, leaving vast western tracts desolate and empty? As would happen time and again in American history, technology changed everything.
Cyrus McCormick
Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884) was born and raised on a Rockbridge County, Virginia, farm where his father, Robert, gave him the run of his well-equipped workshop. There, Cyrus began to redesign a mechanical reaper the elder McCormick had been tinkering with. By the time he was 22, Cyrus McCormick had come up with a practical prototype of a horse-drawn reaper. It was equipped with a cutting bar, a reel, divider, guards over reciprocating knives, and a platform on which the grain was deposited after having been cut. Everything was driven and synchronized by a gear wheel. Perfected and patented in 1834, the device was an important step toward making large-scale farming possible with a minimal labor force.
John Deere
The reaper solved only half the problem of large-scale farming on the stubborn prairies of the Midwest and West. John Deere (1804-1886) was a young man who left his native Rutland, Vermont, for Grand Detour, Illinois, in 1837 to set up as a blacksmith. While McCormick was perfecting his reaper, Deere hammered out a new kind of plow. Made of stout steel, the plow was beautifully shaped, calling to mind the prow of a graceful clipper ship. And it was sturdy, much stronger than a conventional plow. The combination of shiplike design and stout strength made the plow ideal for breaking and turning the tough prairie soil.
The McCormick reaper and John Deere plow came in the nick of time to open the West to agriculture. Each year, more and more emigrants pushed the frontier farther west.
Martyrdom at the Alamo
As the prairie voids of the northern Midwest and West began to fill in, the Southwest, still the territory of the Republic of Mexico, was being settled by an increasing number of American colonists. In 1820, Moses Austin secured a grant from the Spanish government to establish an American colony in Texas, but fell ill and died in 1821 before he could begin the project of settlement. On his deathbed, Austin asked his son, Stephen F. Austin, to carry out his plans. Mexico, in the meantime, had won independence from Spain in the revolution of 1.821. Under terms established by a special act of the new Mexican government in 1.824 (as well as additional agreements negotiated in 1825, 1827, and 1828), Austin brought more than 1,200 American families to Texas. Colonization was so successful that by 1836 the American population of Texas was 50,000, while that of the Mexicans was a mere 3,500.
Throughout the 1830s, the American majority chafed under Mexican rule—especially Mexican laws forbidding slavery. Violent conflicts between settlers and military garrisons became frequent. Feeling that his colony was not ready for a full-scale war of independence, Austin repeatedly negotiated peace with the tumultuous Mexican government. He drew up a proposed constitution to make Texas a Mexican state, and in 1833, traveled to Mexico City to seek an audience with Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the country’s new president. For five months, Austin tried in vain to see the president; at last, he gained an audience, only to have Santa Anna reject the statehood demand—although Santa Anna did agree to address a list of Texas grievances. However, as Austin was riding back to Texas, he was arrested, returned to Mexico City, and imprisoned there on a flimsy pretext for the next two years.
When Austin was finally released in 1835, he returned to Texas embittered and broken in health. He urged Texans to support a Mexican revolt against Santa Anna, and this effort triggered the Texas Revolution. Santa Anna led troops into Texas during January 1836 and reached San Antonio in February. There, against the advice of independence leader Sam Houston (1793-1863), a force of 187 Texans under militia colonel William B. Travis took a defensive stand behind the walls of a decayed Spanish mission formally called San Antonio de Valero but nicknamed “the Alamo” because it was close to a grove of cottonwoods (alamos in Spanish).
The tiny Texas band, which included such renowned frontier figures as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, held off 5,000 of Santa Anna’s troops for 10 days. The band hoped desperately that the American nation somehow would rally and rush to its aid. But that didn’t happen. On March 6, the Mexican troops breached the mission’s wall and slaughtered everyone inside.
This Mexican “victory” turned out to be a disaster for Santa Anna. Sam Houston united Texans under the battle cry “Remember the Alamo! “ and brilliantly led his ragtag army against Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. The result was decisive, and Texas became an independent republic.
Trails West
During the 1830s and well into the 1840s, before the McCormick reaper and the Deere plow had worked their act of transformation, the western plains were known as the Great Desert, and they remained largely unsettled. Instead, settlers first set their sights on the Far West. By the early 1830s, Americans were beginning to settle in California, many of them “mountain men”—fur trappers—who turned from that profession to ranching and mercantile pursuits.
These pioneers made their way into the territory by way of the southwestern deserts until 1, 833, when Joe Walker, a mountain man from Tennessee, marched due west from Missouri. Walker took the so-called South Pass through the Great Divide, went east to west across the Great Basin, climbed the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and entered California. This path became the California fork of what would be called the Overland Trail. Walker had opened California to the rest of the nation. By 1840, 117 mountain men were settled in Mexican California, bringing the American population to about 400.
Overland Trail
The mountain men and other explorers carried back to the East tales of the wondrous and potentially bountiful lands that lay toward the sunset. Through the decade of the 1830s, America’s westering dreams simmered. At last, on February 1, 1841, 58 men—settlers living in Jackson County, Missouri—met at the town of Independence to plan the first fully organized emigrant wagon train to California. Assembling across the Missouri River, at Sapling Grove, the party had grown to 69—including more than 20 women and children—under the leadership of John Bartleson. The prominent Catholic missionary Father Pierre-Jean deSmet and the mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick also joined the train of 15 wagons and four carts.
The trek consumed five months, three weeks, and four days. It was marked by a single death, a single
