1. About a hundred
thousand Native Americans lived on the
2. In
the eastern section lived the
3. The Sioux were
nomadic people, and once they were on horseback, they claimed the entire Great
Plains north of the
4. The Sioux dominated
the northern
5. Sioux women labored
on the buffalo skins that the men brought back; the women did not see their
unrelenting labor as subordination to men.
6. The Sioux saw sacred
meaning in every manifestation of the natural world; the natural world embodied
a “series of powers pervading the universe.”
7. Once white traders
appeared on the upper
1. On first
encountering the
2. In 1834, Congress
formally designated the
3. In the 1840s,
settlers began moving to
4. In 1861, telegraph
lines brought
5. The federal
government awarded generous land grants, plus millions of dollars of loans to
the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads.
6. The Union Pacific
built westward from
7. Railroad tycoons
realized that rail transportation was laying the basis for the economic
exploitation of the
8. To make room for
cattle, professional buffalo hunters eliminated the buffalo; in the early 1870s,
when eastern tanneries learned how to cure buffalo hides, the herds almost
vanished within ten years.
9.
10. As soon as railroads
reached the
11. North of
12. News of easy money to
be made on cattle traveled fast; by the early 1880s the plains overflowed with
cattle.
13. After a hard winter
in 1885, followed by severe drought the next summer, cattle died by the hundreds
of thousands; ranchers dumped cattle on the market, and beef prices plunged.
14. An enduring
ecological catastrophe occurred: the destruction of native grasses caused by
relentless overgrazing during the drought cycle.
15. Open-range ranching
came to an end, and sheep raising became a major
enterprise in the sparser high country.
18 Chapter 16 The American West
1. Railroads, land
speculators, steamship lines, and the western states and territories did all they
could to encourage settlement of the
2. The government
encouraged settlers with the Homestead Act of 1862, offering 160 acres of public
land to all settlers—including widows and single women.
3. For migrants
traveling west, prescribed gender roles sometimes broke down as women
shouldered men’s work and became self-reliant in the face of danger and
hardship.
4. By the 1870s, farmers
from the older agricultural states looked westward for land.
5. “American fever”
took hold in northern Europe as Germans, Russians,Norwegians, Swedes, and Scandinavians emigrated to
the
6. The motivation for
these new European immigrants was to better themselves economically, but for
several thousand southern blacks,
7. Homesteaders’ crops
were highly susceptible to natural disasters such as fire, hail, and damage caused
by grasshoppers.
8. New technology—steel
plows, barbed wire, and strains of hard-kernel wheat—helped settlers to
overcome obstacles presented by the land.
9. From 1878 to 1886,
settlers enjoyed exceptionally wet weather, but then the dry weather typical of
the
10. By the turn of the
century, the
11. The economic capital
of the Great Plains was
12. Farming was becoming
an industry, and farmers began to understand the disadvantages they faced in
dealing with big businesses that supplied them with machinery, arranged their credit,
and marketed their products.
13. The National Grange
of the Patrons of Husbandry was formed in 1867. Local granges spread across
rural
14. The Grange encouraged
independent political parties that ran on antimonopoly platforms. Farmers believed, not always correctly, that they
were victims of manufacturers and banks, so they turned to the cooperatives and
state regulation to remedy the perceived imbalance.
15. Deflation in the
international wheat market had dire consequences for farmers in debt; falling
prices forced them to pay back in real terms more than they had borrowed.
1. Incursions by whites
into Indian lands increased from the late 1850s onward; the Indians struck
back, hoping whites would tire of the struggle.
2. A peace commission
was appointed in 1867 to end the fighting and negotiate treaties by which
Indians would cede their lands and move to reservations.
3. The southwestern
quarter of the Dakota Territory was allocated to the Teton Sioux tribes, and
4. The Indians resisted,
by fighting and by attempting to flee the army, and fighting intensified in the
mid-1870s; Congress appropriated funds for more western troops to control the Indians.
5. A crisis came on the
northern plains in 1875 when the Indian Office ordered the Sioux to vacate
their
6. On June 25, 1876,
George A. Custer and his troops were surrounded and annihilated by Chief Crazy
Horse’s Sioux and
7. Pursued relentlessly
by the army, Sioux bands gradually gave up and moved onto the reservation, only
to have part of both the Dakota and
8. During the 1870s the
Office of Indian Affairs developed a program to train Indian children for farm
work and prepare them for citizenship by sending them to reservation schools or
boarding schools.
9. The Indian Rights
Association thought that the only way Indians could fit into the white man’s
world was by radical assimilation.
10. The Dawes Act of 1887
declared that land for the Indians would be allotted in 160-acre lots to heads
of households and held in trust by the government for twenty-five years, at
which time the Indians would become
11. The federal
government announced that it had tribal approval to open the Sioux “surplus” land
to white settlement in 1890.
12. The Indians had lost
their ancestral lands, faced an alien future of farming, and were confronted by
a winter of starvation; but at the same time, news of “salvation” came from a holy
man called Wovoka, who predicted the disappearance of the whites and encouraged
the Ghost Dance as a ritual to prepare for the regeneration.
13. As the frenzy ofWovoka’s Ghost Dance swept through the Sioux encampments
in 1890, alarmed whites called for army intervention.
14. The bloody battle at
15. As whites flooded the
newly acquired land, Indians became the minority.
1. Fewer than 100,000
Euro-Americans lived in the entire Far West when it became a
2.
3. By the mid-1850s,
prospectors began to strike it rich elsewhere, including in the Sierra
4. Remote areas turned
into a mob scene of prospectors, traders, gamblers, prostitutes, and saloonkeepers;
prospectors made their own mining codes, or laws.
5. Prospecting gave way
to entrepreneurial development and large-scale mining as original claim holders
quickly sold out to generous bidders.
6. At some sites, gold
and silver proved less profitable than the more common metals for which there
was a huge demand in manufacturing.
7. Entrepreneurs raised
capital, built rail connections, devised technology for treating lowergrade copper deposits, constructed smelting facilities,
and recruited a labor force that went on to organize trade unions.
8.
9.
1. The first Europeans
to enter the Far West were Hispanics moving northward out of
2. The economy of the
Hispanic Southwest consisted primarily of cattle and sheep ranching, and the
social order was highly stratified.
3. In
4. Anglos were
incorporated into the New Mexican society through intermarriage and business partnerships,
but by the 1880s, California Hispanics had lost most of their land to Anglos.
5.
6. Driven by poverty, a
worldwide Asian migration began in the mid-nineteenth century; many Chinese
came to
7. Chinese immigrants
normally entered a powerful confederation of Chinese merchants in
8. Chinese men labored
mainly in the
9. In
10. Democrats and
Republicans in
11.
1. Location,
environment, and history all helped to set
2.
20 Chapter 16 The American West
3. In the 1880s, the
Southern Pacific Railroad was boasting of
4. A dizzying real
estate boom developed along with the frantic building of resort hotels;
5. In
1890,
Yosemite, Sequoia, and King’s Canyon—were established;
the Sierra Club was formed in 1892 as a defender of
6. In 1913,
preservationists were unable to prevent the federal government from approving the
damming of Hetch Hetchy to
serve the water needs of
7.