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Wild west: new frontier sawmill1/3/2024 ![]() ![]() What’s this all got to do with steamboats? Well, steamboats essentially harnassed the power of steam to move tremendous amounts of goods against the stiff current of America’s great rivers. In this passage, you can clearly see how a man who had labored his entire life valued the astonishing power of a machine. “That machine’s a great invention!” he said. We wouldn’t have got as much wheat, either, and it wouldn’t have been as clean. “It would have taken Henry and Peterson and Pa and me a couple of weeks apiece to thresh as much grain with flails as that machine threshed today. In the book Wilder remembers Pa’s reaction like this: In one example, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House in the Big Woods, she mentions how highly Pa thought of the first threshing machine he ever used. People who lived during this time probably appreciated the power of machines infinitely more than we do today. It was called a revolution for a reason and is a pretty big deal. ![]() Like I tell my students, the Industrial Revolution can be summarized as the time when we started to use machines to do work that people, animals, and forces of nature (wind and water) used to do. This of course kicked off the Industrial Revolution. If you remember your high school history class, you’ll remember learning about a guy named James Watt who learned how to effectively harness the power of steam in 1769. The story takes place in 1860, and by that time New Orleans would have been home to steady steamboat power. If you’ve been reading History of the West with Sam Payne: And the Wagons Rolledyou’ve probably gotten to the point in the story where Sam gets his first job on a steamboat in New Orleans. While the American frontier certainly was a largely unindustrialized place (not many machines), the truth is that industrialization (the use of machines) had a huge impact on the settlement of the west. Wherever you look people are of course riding horses and using horsepower to pull wagons, plows, and anything else that is heavy. Imagine the Wild West and you might conjure up images of wild horses, longhorn cattle, chuckwagons, or maybe some dusty cow town in the middle of nowhere. Steamboats in the 1800s played an integral role in shaping the American West. ![]()
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