Westward Expanision
This term describes the movement of settlers and the United States into lands farther west.
What is westward expansion?
This transportation system connected the eastern and western United States and made travel and trade across the country easier.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
Under the Homestead Act, qualifying settlers could claim this much land.
What is 160 acres?
This term describes the growth of factories, machines, businesses, and large-scale production.
What is industrialization?
Name ONE Indigenous nation from the Great Plains that we studied.
Sioux/Lakota, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Arapaho, Osage, or Wichita
This 1862 law encouraged people to settle the West by offering 160 acres of public land to qualifying settlers.
What is the Homestead Act?
This 1862 law provided federal support for the construction of a railroad connecting the country from east to west.
What is the Pacific Railroad Act?
A person who received land under the Homestead Act was expected to live on and do this to the land.
What is farm/cultivate it?
Workers sometimes joined together to demand better wages and working conditions. These organizations were called this.
What are labor unions?
This 1868 treaty recognized Lakota control of the Black Hills.
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868?
One major reason people moved West was to find this resource that could be used for farming, ranching, and settlement.
What is land?
Many workers who helped build the western portion of the railroad came from this country.
What is China?
Homesteaders sometimes built homes out of this material because trees were scarce on parts of the Great Plains.
What is sod?
Why did many workers form labor unions?
A. To eliminate all factories
B. To work together to demand better conditions
C. To stop immigration completely
D. To encourage people to move West
B. To work together to demand better conditions
In 1874, the discovery of this valuable resource in the Black Hills brought miners onto land that the Lakota had been promised.
What is gold?
The federal government supported westward expansion partly because it wanted to increase settlement and connect the country through this transportation system.
What is the railroad?
Chinese railroad workers often faced dangerous working conditions, low pay, and this unfair treatment based on their ethnicity.
What is discrimination?
Which of these was a challenge faced by many Great Plains homesteaders?
A. Too many forests
B. Lack of water and trees
C. Too many factories
D. Lack of railroad workers
B. Lack of water and trees
A group of workers stops working to pressure an employer to improve wages or working conditions. What is this action called?
What is a strike?
The U.S. government gave Native peoples a deadline of January 31, 1876, to report to designated areas. This increased tensions that contributed to this conflict.
What is the conflict surrounding the Battle of Little Bighorn?
Although westward expansion created opportunities for many settlers, it also resulted in the loss of traditional lands and ways of life for these people.
Who are Indigenous peoples/Native Americans?
The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad helped increase migration, trade, and settlement in the West, but it also contributed to the disruption of Indigenous communities by making this easier.
What is further westward expansion/settlement?
A student says, “The Homestead Act only helped settlers and had no effect on Native Americans.” What important historical evidence challenges this claim?
The settlement of western lands under the Homestead Act contributed to the displacement and loss of traditional lands of Indigenous peoples.
Industrialization created new jobs and increased production, but workers could also experience low wages, long hours, and dangerous conditions. This demonstrates that industrialization had both these types of effects.
What are positive and negative effects?
A historian comparing a government account of Little Bighorn with an eyewitness account by Kate Bighead might notice that different sources can describe the same event differently because of this.
What is perspective?