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An excerpt from "A Lady Grows Old in Texas" from Land of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home

Edited by Theodore C. Blegen

Published in 1955

Although many ventured into the West for one reason or another, those who settled and began to "civilize" the frontier truly tamed the continent. Asserts Roger Barr in The American Frontier, "As in earlier American frontiers, it was farmers, the last in the line of frontiersmen, who truly conquered the West. Dissatisfied by the conditions at home, lured by the promise of free land, and aided by new technology, they came by the thousands to the Great Plains beginning in the 1850s." Farmers had to learn new methods of farming; technological advances, such as John Deere's 1837 invention of the steel plow, made their work easier. Another invention, barbed wire (1874), allowed farmers to fence off their land to keep the growing numbers of...