ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on agrarian changes in the Northwest during the critical period, when regional abundance of land gave way to scarcity and wage labor suffered a reverse process. The emigrants were not only members of landless households, but also the sons and daughters of families with sufficient property to merit a probate inventory, which at the time is essential for the transmission of land from one generation to the next. The descendants of north-western settlers were attracts by opportunities to establish independent farms on the frontier beyond the Central Valley. Imported pastures and a regional context of agricultural intensification suggest that livestock raising is somewhat more intensive within the Central Valley than in the late–nineteenth–century settlement frontiers. The agricultural statistics provide no district–level data, can only assume that for ecological reasons, among others, maize, like cattle, had accompanied the new generation of settlers, while coffee is largely confined to the Central Valley despite experiments in its cultivation.
