1 gen 1879 anni - Exoduster migration of black communities from Mississippi and Louisiana to Kansas

Descrizione:

Antebellum Background:
-ppl thought Great Plains were dry. Republicans wanted ppl out there. Railroads, land speculators, transatlantic steamship lines, and western states/territories advertised about it.
Postwar Background:
-Newcomers found deep, fertile soil. There was rain, which ppl interpreted as a sign they were meant to be there and that "rain follows the plow"
-Many immigrants (Norweignas, Swedes, Germans) left in "American fever" in 1882 during the European depression for GreatPlains like Minnesota and the Dakotas.
-Union vets settled Kansas and other plains states.
-unlike Iowa or Orgeon, the palins had big new machines (sold on credit) for plowing/harvesting. Wheat moved from Rail to rail with grain elevators to be sold on world markets.
-Many wanted to sell acres to get as much money as they would from selling crops (some even went into debt in boom times to get more land/equipment)
-Basically, big enthusiasm for cash crops, land speculation, borrowed money, and new technology
-lots of challenges: grasshoppers, prairie fire, hailstorms, tornadoes, blizzards, hard to find lumber/water, had to make dugouts in hillsides at first.
-homesteaders realized grasslands couldn't do wheat/grains w/ dry rainfall. Many fled. Others came up with new farming techniques. 160-acre homesteads didn't work, so they tried smaller or bigger ones w/ dry farming (deep planting to bring subsoil moisture to the roots and quick harrowing after rainfalls to slow evaporation, mostly in hige corporate farms in teh Red River Valley of North Dakota).
-Families struggled with low crop prices and unpredictable climates, calling themselves "nature's conquerors"
-destroying biodiversity (farming the plains)->exotic, destructive pests/weeds
-removing native grassed->erosion
-Lots of cattle/sheep/crops like wheat from great plains, but that was not sustainable in drier regions.

During:
Specifically For African Americans:
-plains=land of freedom
-1879, black communities (6,000 ppl) left Miss and Louisiana to escape poverty_white violence with little clothing. and called themselves Exodusters
Exodusters: African Americans who walked or rode out of the Deep South following the Civil War, many settling on farms in Kansas in hopes of finding peace and prosperity.
-The 1880 census reported 40,000 black ppl in Kansas, by far the largest African American concentration in the West aside from Texas, where the expanding cotton frontier attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants.

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