5. The Wild West
During the nineteenth century, more and more people went to live in the
West of the USA. The 'Wild West' that you can see on television and in films is
full of cowboys, Indians, and fighting. In fact there were very few cowboys - no
more than 40,000 - and real cowboys did not shoot each other or fight Indians very
often. They worked hard at their job, taking care of the cows, and at least a quarter
of them were black or Mexican. They took cows from Texas up to the railway
towns in Kansas and Missouri. From there the cows were sent to Chicago and
killed, and the meat was sent to the East and sold.
The cowboys almost disappeared after about thirty years because the
government gave the land to farmers and their families. From 1862 to 1900 more
than half a million farmers came to live in the West, where they made new farms
and grew food. One family that moved west was the Ingalls family, whose
daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder told the story of their journey in books like Little
House on the Prairie. Life for these farmers was very hard, particularly in winter.
The farms were very lonely, but soon the railways helped to bring people together.
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In 1869, the railway line from the east met the line from the west in Utah, so then
Americans could travel right across the USA by train.
Before the railway, from 1860 to 1861 the post was carried across the
country by the famous Pony Express. Horses and riders waited at different places;
one man rode with a bag of letters for about 120 kilometers and then gave it to the
next man. In this way, letters only took about ten days to cross the country. One
very well-known rider was Buffalo Bill Cody. He later became a soldier and a
hunter - they say I that he shot 4,280 buffalo in one year! In the 1880s, Buffalo Bill
started his Wild West Show, a kind of travelling theatre, with the famous cowgirl
Annie Oakley.
6. Native Americans
There were about two million Native Americans in North America in