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From: Macago <>
Subject: Why people moved
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 09:25:57 EDT

Hi everyone,
I thought this was a timely article about why people moved. Thought I'd
forward it so everyone could read it.
Mary

In a message dated 98-04-07 20:52:56 EDT, Ancestry HomeTown Daily writes:
<< What Made Great-Grandpa Move?
A List of Some Economic Factors by Jill Martin

In researching my post-Civil War relatives, I discovered that several
families shared a pattern of western movement. Movement seemed to be a
common condition of life after the Civil War. For example, in the
Illinois Adjutant General's Report, the author of the "History of the
33th Illinois Volunteers" reported that in 1886 a roster of 500 of their
surviving troops showed men in twenty different States and Territories,
with 1/3 of them living west of the Mississippi. No doubt, getting off
the farm and seeing other areas of the country during the war led those
veterans to try to better their lot by moving on.

Quite probably personal motives were responsible for some of the moves.
A family moved after a marriage, or the death of a member, to be nearer
other relatives, or to try to put sorrow behind by distance. However, I
also saw a correspondence between my family's moves and those of the
Laura Ingles Wilder family. Several of the Wilder's moves were
explained in a Wilder biography as of an economic nature. So I looked
into the economy of the nineteenth century from an explanation of the
frequent moves of these restless settlers.

I've composed a preliminary list of events that may have influenced
settler movement with an emphasis on those important to settlers from
Illinois. Match these dates with those of major moves by your relatives
and you may be surprised, as I was, at the number of correspondences.

1825 - Erie Canal completion (followed by other canals opening up in
Indiana and Illinois to settlement)

1848 - Gold discovered in California

1857 - Gold discovered at Pike's Peak, Colorado (Illinois men go)

1857 - Panic of 1857 - economic disaster, recall of mortgages, low pay
for crops

1860-65 - Civil War

1863-65 - Steep incline in prices; low crop prices; high rail costs to
transport crops (good for manufacturers, hard on farmers)

1866 - Depression following the Civil War

1868 - Ads begun in newspapers to attract emigrants west

1873 - Railroad Panic - another economic downfall

1874 - Gold discovered in Black Hills of the Dakotas (a means to get the
public interested in a topic other than the depression and corruption of
the Railroad Panic)

1874 - World wide depression

1875 - Grasshoppers on the plains of Dakota Territory and Kansas

1875-79 - Poor crop years on the prairies

1879 - Economic Hard Times - another depression

1881 - Peak of emigrant trains to that time

1887 - Dawes Act (breaking up communal Indian lands; opened land to
white settlement)

1889-1901 - subsequent Land Runs in Oklahoma

1896 - Gold discovered in the Alaskan Klondike

*****
Originally published in WGGS Quarterly, September 1997
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