To encourage people to move to the Great Plains, Abraham Lincoln passed the Homestead ActviolenceexodustersWashingtonbarbed wireSelect your answer. Settlers were given 160 acres that, for a small fee, they could live on and farm for five years. The homesteadersuncooperativeviolencebarbed wiresodSelect your answer claimed land in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota Territory.

Even though the climate was exodustersviolenceuncooperativebarbed wirehomesteadersSelect your answer and land was difficult to farm, the new settlers were determined. They used the grass roots above the soil, or Homestead ActsodWashingtonexodustersbarbed wireSelect your answer, to build their houses. New inventions, like the chilled-steel plow, sodHomestead Actuncooperativeviolencebarbed wireSelect your answer, the windmill, and a new kind of wheat that could survive the Plains, helped to make life easier.

Many African Americans in the South went to the Great Plains to escape exodusterssodWashingtonbarbed wireviolenceSelect your answer and unfair treatment. Twenty thousand African Americans from the South went to Kansas in 1879, and they became known as WashingtonHomestead ActuncooperativeexodustersSelect your answer. Other parts of California, Oregon, and barbed wiresodviolenceuncooperativeWashingtonSelect your answer were also settled by African Americans.