Stephen Aron

Whereas the Oregon migrations had been made up by family farmers, farmers and their families looking for land, looking to replicate the lives of their parents and grandparents.

in these new lands.

By contrast, California, often younger, single men heading to California, looking to strike it rich, to escape from the lifetime of drudgery and hard labor that farm work required.

And a complete new American dream gets born in California goldfields.

But the Oregon one still holds a great place in the American imagination because it is so

central to an american ideal that through hard work and determination through your grit and you can make it and at least in this more limited way that oregon opens up and that sort of becomes i think foundational to the way in which the american dream continues to be understood well into the 20th century long after most americans no longer worked on farms or lived on farms

Well, I think the key one you've just mentioned, people continue to go west across the country in great, great numbers, but the railroad makes it a lot easier and a lot quicker to move across hundreds and thousands of miles.

than going overland and walking your way across the continent or moving a caravan.

So the railroad is the principle.

But it's not that people don't continue to move to new lands, but instead of going all the way to California and Oregon, they discover that maybe the Great American Desert isn't so much a desert after all, that maybe the Great Plains can be homesteading.

And indeed, the Homestead Act of 1862 and subsequent land acts does create new encouragements for people to try to settle on the Great Plains first,

It's ranchers who are looking to use the grasslands for forage lands, for free forage, free places to feed their cattle.

And then later, farmers try to make a go of it on the Great Plains, oftentimes failing, however, because they do discover that, in fact, rainfall is not sufficient on the Great Plains, absent significant irrigation.

to make it a go.

Certainly on the Great Plains, as you've said it earlier, as long as you're getting through and getting out,

resentments are, there's tensions, but they're limited in general.

And they're mitigated by trade relations.

But when Americans start, first of all, to cross in even greater numbers, when it's a matter of thousands of people crossing your territory, that's a concern.

When it's a matter of tens of thousands of people crossing your territory every year, that becomes far worse.

Because then those people are using up vital resources.