The continued settlement of the west

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X should be 'live on the land and farm it for five years'. The government included this condition so that the land would go to genuine settlers who would farm it and build communities, rather than to speculators who wanted to buy land cheaply and sell it for a profit.

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Interpretation A presents the Great Plains as a place of opportunity for women, while Interpretation B presents it as a place of hardship and loneliness. A says women had 'chances they would never have had in the East': single women and widows could claim 160 acres in their own name, wives ran farms and made decisions as equals, and women founded the schools and churches that created communities. B, by contrast, describes a mother who was 'always working' - cooking over cow chips, carrying water and nursing sick children with no doctor for forty miles - in a sod house that leaked mud. While A stresses women's independence and community, B says the mother came west only to please her husband and was so isolated that she did not see another woman for months, so that the loneliness 'never left her'.

Model answer

Interpretation A is convincing in stressing the attraction of owning land. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of free land to anyone who farmed it for five years, and hundreds of thousands of people filed claims. Owning land was a powerful American ideal, and many Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, the idea that the USA was meant to spread across the continent. Many Plains settlers were Americans from the Midwest and East, including Union veterans, who chose to move further west for a better life. However, A presents every settler as a free and courageous volunteer and ignores the hardship that drove many to leave and the advertising that persuaded them.

Interpretation B is convincing about these other factors. In Europe, land shortages and poverty pushed people out of Scandinavia and Germany - Sweden suffered crop failures and famine in the late 1860s - and Mennonites left Russia from 1874 when they lost their exemption from military service. Railroad companies, which had huge land grants to sell, and western states did send agents and pamphlets across Europe, and the Santa Fe helped the Mennonites settle in Kansas. The claim that 'rain follows the plough' was promoted during wet years in the late 1870s and early 1880s and proved false when drought struck from 1887, which supports B's view that hopes were 'manufactured'. But B focuses on European emigrants, who were only part of the story.

Overall, Interpretation B is more convincing. It recognises the pull of land that A describes but explains it more fully, showing that people were both pushed by real hardship and pulled by deliberate advertising. A's idea that settlers simply 'chose' ignores the pressures and persuasion that shaped their choices, and it fits only some American-born settlers.

Model answer

The actions of the federal government were an important reason why the Great Plains had been settled by 1890. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of free land, and later laws such as the Timber Culture Act (1873) and the Desert Land Act (1877) offered more. Government surveyors divided the land into townships and quarter-sections so that it could be claimed. Through the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 the government gave the land and loans that paid for the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, and later lines also received land grants. Above all, the government used the army to force the Plains Indians onto reservations, through treaties such as Medicine Lodge (1867) and Fort Laramie (1868) and wars such as the Red River War of 1874-75 and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which cleared land for settlement and made it seem safe.

However, the settlers themselves did the actual work of settling the Plains, often in spite of the government. Its 160-acre plots were too small for the dry climate, and fraud by speculators meant many settlers ended up with poorer land. Homesteaders built sod houses, burned buffalo and cow chips for fuel, broke the tough sod and dug deep wells. They adapted their farming: Mennonite immigrants brought Turkey Red wheat in 1874, and farmers learned dry-farming methods to save moisture. When disasters such as the grasshopper plague of 1874 struck, neighbours and churches helped each other, and from 1867 the Grange brought farmers together. The inventions that solved Plains problems, such as Joseph Glidden's barbed wire of 1874, came from private individuals, not the government.

Overall, the actions of the federal government were the more important reason, because they created the conditions for everything else. The settlers' hard work and ingenuity were essential to make individual farms survive, but there would have been no free land to claim, no railroad to bring settlers and supplies, and no protection from Native American resistance without the government's laws, land grants and army. Many hard-working settlers still failed, which shows that effort alone was not enough. The settlers did the work, but the government decided that the Plains would be opened up and made settlement possible.