With the coming of the railroads to the Great Plains in the 1860s, Texas ranchers were finally able to link their native longhorns with the markets of the East. They did so by moving their herds on thousand-mile “long drives” to railheads in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, where booming “cow towns” grew at the junction of trail and rail. In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy laid out the Chisholm Trail form San Antonio to the Kansas Pacific railhead at Abeline, Kansas, buying 250 acres there for grazing land and stockyards. The cattle trade flourished in Abeline until 1872 when opposition from area farmers finally closed it down. But the long drives continued — to other railhead towns like Ellsworth, Dodge City, Ogallala and Cheyenne, as well as to burgeoning ranches on the northern Plains. Many difficulties beset the drovers on the trail. There were danger from floods, thunderstorms, stampedes, rustlers and Indians. Cattle sometimes lost so much weight on the trek they became unsaleable. Eventually, Kansas and a number of other states, in an effort to keep out dreaded cattle diseases like Texas and splenic fever, passed restrictive quarantine laws. These restrictions, together with the use of barbed wire on the open range, brought trail-driving to an end by the 1890s.

The federal government disposed of public lands in the West a variety of ways. It sold it, often to speculators; it gave vast tracts away to states and railroads; and with the Homestead Act of 1864, it made it available free to settlers. The Act granted 160 acres of public domain to any citizen or intended citizen who occupied it for five years. The homesteader could also purchase his land after six months for $1.25 per acre. but laxity in the law’s administration led to much abuse. Many claimants were not bonafide farmers, but dummy registrants acting for speculators, cattlemen and lumber and mining interests. In addition, the 160 acres allotted, while adequate in the East, was too small a unit on which to farm successfully in the dry High Plains. In time, however, modifications were made and many thousands of farmers established homesteads in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and in the most dramatic fashion, Oklahoma. There, at noon on April 22, 1889, the government threw open two million acres of unassigned lands in Indian Territory for homesteading. When the starting guns and bugles sounded, more than 50,000 people — on foot, horses, cycles and wagons — surged across the border on a “run” to claim the best land. Similar landruns followed. But it was not only the Homestead Act that lured farmers to the Plains. The states and railroad companies were also active recruiters of settlers.

The consequences of the building of the transcontinental railroad were many and varied — but on no one was the impact greater than the Plains Indians, who lost both their food supply and their land. Though the buffalo was extinct east of the Mississippi by 1860, there were still two great herds on the Plains, totaling perhaps 15 million. With the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, white hunters began supplying buffalo meat to railroad construction gangs. Beginning in the 1870s, buffalo were also killed for their tongues, prized as a delicacy, and shot for sport from trains. After a market developed for buffalo hides, hunters engaged in systematic and wholesale slaughter. By 1883 the southern herd had been exterminated and a scientific expedition could find only 200 survivors of the northern herd.

The railroads, having contributed inadvertently to the buffalo’s demise, played a more deliberate role in colonizing the Great Plains. Having millions of acres for sale and seeing in settlement the means of generating rail traffic, the railroad companies spent lavishly on attempts to attract settlers from the eastern states and Europe. As well as distributing millions of items of promotional literature, they held out such inducements as credit sales, free “land-exploring” tickets and even temporary accommodations — all of which were remarkably effective.

The idea of a transcontinental railroad attracted increasing public enthusiasm after the California gold rush of 1849. But sectional rivalries prevented any action until 1862, when Congress made lavish land grants to two railroad companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to enable them respectively to build westward across the Great Plains from Omaha, and eastward over the Rockies from Sacramento. The Act was a tremendous spur to construction, but there were daunting logistical problems to be overcome. Everything required — ties, stone, rails, rolling-stock, machinery — had to be hauled over long distances. Equally serious was the shortage of labor. Union Pacific construction crews consisted chiefly of Irish immigrants, who sometimes had to exchange their picks for rifles in order to fight off Indian attacks. The Central Pacific relied mainly on imported Chinese laborers who had to blast tunnels through the High Sierras using recently developed nitro-glycerine, which killed many of them. Tracklaying in rugged terrain and extremes of weather averaged only 2-1/2 miles a day, but on May 10, 1869 the two lines met at Promontory Point, Utah, where a final symbolic golden spike was driven into place. Both tracks had soon to be extensively reconstructed, but the completion of the first transcontinental railroad was a remarkable feat, news of which triggered celebrations across the nation.