When American farmers began their move after the Civil War, the Far West was virtually unsettled. A few thousand Americans called California their home, but between the Pacific Coast and the Missouri River, only isolated pockets of settlement in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and other distant spots challenged nature's monopoly. When the farmers' march slowed at the end of the century, the entire West was occupied, except for the mountain and desert country that still repulsed mankind's advances. In the three decades after 1870, more land was settled and placed under cultivation by farmers than in all the prior history of the continent.

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