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The United States government gave the companies a subsidy of $16,000 per mile of track on the prairie and $48,000 per mile in the mountains. The two tracks met at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869. In the first 2 decades of operation, freight rates were lowered 500% and travel time reduced by 900%. By 1890 the rail network was larger than in all Europe, including the British Isles and Russia. (Ref. 175 , 62 , 39 , 8 )

In 1867 at the end of a spur railroad line, Joseph McCoy bought the town of Abilene, Kansas for $5 an acre and then spent $5,000 for various kinds of promotions to get cattle there from Texas for shipment east. The result was the Chisholm Trail, beginning in south Texas near the Gulf and going through Oklahoma to Abilene. At the end of the Civil War, herds of 2,000 to 3,000 head of long-horned cattle moved regularly up this trail, from the matrix of some 3,000,000 of those cattle in Texas. Their ancestors had been brought over in the second voyage of Columbus. A good drive to Kansas was completed in three months. In the first 4 years McCoy shipped over 2,000,000 cattle out of his stock yards, greatly exceeding even his own boasts and it is probable that this was the origin of the expression "the real McCoy". In the 1860s and 1870s there were multiple cowtowns with cowboys, claim jumpers, fugitives, prostitutes and the natural enemies - cattlemen and sheep men. The death rate in those cow towns was proportionately 10 or 20 times as high as New York City today. Some of the mining towns were even worse. But the Great Plains, finally cleared of Indians and buffalo, were open for cattle. Between 1860 and 1880 even Kansas increased its cattle herds 16 fold and Nebraska by 30 times. In 1886 Wyoming had 9,000,000 cattle, although many owners went broke in the financial panic of 1885-87) (Ref. 39 , 211 )

In 1840 it took 233 man-hours of work to grow 100 bushels of wheat, but in 1920 it took only 80 man-hours. Part of that was due to the great increase in the number of draft horses, rising from 6,200,000 in 1850 to over 15,500,000 by 1900. American grain sent to Europe was cheaper than that grown locally and European agriculture was disrupted.

One result of that was Norwegian emigration to America. Social changes were in part related to various immigration patterns. The proportion of British Isle immigrants fell from 45% in 1861-1870 to 18% in 1891-1900 while that of - Russians and southern Europeans rose from 0.1% to 50% in the same period. Most of the newcomers went to the northeast so that in 1900 86% of the foreign-born were in states north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.

The first significant labor organization was the "Knights of Labor", founded in 1869 and winning the first railroad strike in 1884. Marxists and anarchists started other unions, with the latter fanning the infamous Haymarket Square riot in 1886, as part of a Chicago strike. In 1886 Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor, which gradually succeeded the Knights as the spearhead of the American Labor movement. (Ref. 211 , 151 )

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Source:  OpenStax, A comprehensive outline of world history. OpenStax CNX. Nov 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10595/1.3
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