The Frontier

In the 1800’s, an amazing and critical thing happened in American history.   People, more than ever before, moved out to the west, the frontier.   Many souls wished to escape the captivity of the cities and factories and to become their own self-made man.   They wanted to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.   For most, this meant becoming a self-sufficient farmer, and with the opportunities that the Homestead Act and other events brought, it seemed to become more possible than ever.   It was theorized that the frontier had become a “safety valve” for those in the cities who needed a livelihood.   Even though Turner’s thesis of the “safety valve” was somewhat accurate, many farmers had to travel back to the cities to survive, however some farmers were able to succeed because of things such as the Interstate Commerce and Homestead Act.

Numerous men could not survive in the frontier as “self-sufficient farmers” because they lived in a time of social Darwinism and monopoly.   Whenever the farmers needed to buy anything, they had to buy from the monopolies.   And because of the idea of social Darwinism and laissez-faire, everything was overpriced to the downfall of the farmers.   There were monopolies on almost everything the farmers needed to have to farm such as transportation, steel, and windmills.   The railroad monopoly was a serious inhibitor by using fraudulent tactics.   One example of this is a thing called the long and short haul.   The railroad would make the farmers pay more to transport their grain short distances to a silo than to a silo miles farther away that was owned by or in an agreement with the railroad company.   By doing this, the railroad controlled where the farmers would pay for their grain to be transported, therefore controlling the prices and making a huge profit while financially ruining the farmers.   Because of this and many other examples of fraud, many farmers ran out of money and had to move back to the cities, which was probably the real...