The Iron Horse (Rail)
Completed in 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, this massive transportation network connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States by train for the very first time.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This 1890 tragedy involving the slaughter of over 150 Lakota Sioux by the U.S. Cavalry is widely considered the final major armed conflict of the Plains Indian Wars.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre
Invented by Joseph Glidden, this sharp fencing material changed the West by allowing farmers to cheaply protect their crops from free-roaming cattle.
What is barbed wire?
Native American tribes of the Great Plains relied almost entirely on this massive, shaggy animal for food, clothing, tools, and shelter.
What is the buffalo? (or bison)
Born William Cody, this real-life scout and hunter created a massive traveling extravaganza that internationalized and commercialized the cowboy lifestyle.
Who is Buffalo Bill?
This immigrant group made up the vast majority of the Central Pacific Railroad's labor force, enduring hazardous conditions to blast tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Who are Chinese immigrants?
This indian spiritual movement and dance spread rapidly in 1889 based on a prophecy that white settlers would vanish, ancestors would rise, and the buffalo would return.
What is the Ghost Dance?
Because trees were so scarce on the Great Plains, pioneer families built their first houses out of blocks of dirt and this tough prairie material.
What is sod? (or grass)
Unlike white commercial hunters who shot the animals just for their hides, Native American tribes were famous for doing this with the buffalo they hunted.
What is using every part of the animal? (Accept variations like "not letting any part go to waste")
This famous sharpshooter became a headline act in the Wild West show, challenging gender norms by out-shooting male competitors on a global stage.
Who is Annie Oakley?
These were the two private railroad corporations that raced toward each other, ultimately meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869.
Who are the Union Pacific and Central Pacific?
In 1864, a Colorado militia led by John Chivington ignored white flags and flags of truce to slaughter a peaceful Cheyenne village at this location.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
This 1862 law allowed any citizen or intended citizen to claim 160 acres of public land, provided they lived on it, built a home, and farmed it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
The systematic destruction of the bison was actively supported by the U.S. military as an economic warfare strategy to force Plains tribes onto these government-controlled areas.
What are reservations?
This revered Lakota leader and holy man temporarily joined Buffalo Bill's show, earning money while performing in dignified reenactments of Native life.
Who is Sitting Bull?
This landmark 1862 federal law authorized the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and granted massive tracts of public land to railroad companies.
What is the Pacific Railroad Act?
This 1862 conflict in Minnesota erupted into violence after a white trader named Andrew Myrick callously told starving Native Americans, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass."
What is the Dakota War of 1862?
This biblical nickname was given to the thousands of African Americans who migrated from the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South to Kansas seeking land and freedom.
Who are the Exodusters?
The rapid near-extinction of the bison cleared the Great Plains geographically, allowing for the immediate rise of this massive, open-range western industry.
What is the cattle industry / ranching?
Buffalo Bill's shows repackaged this low-wage, dangerous ranching job into a global symbol of rugged American individualism and freedom.
What is the cowboy?
Railroad boosters claimed the West was a corporate enterprise, yet they heavily financed cheap, fictional books of this type to market the region as a land of rugged romance and individual adventure.
What are dime novels?
This was the nickname given to the first peacetime all-Black regiments in the regular U.S. Army, who fought extensively in the western Indian Wars.
Who are the Buffalo Soldiers?
This controversial 1887 act sought to forcefully assimilate Native Americans by breaking up tribal reservations into individual family allotments, resulting in the loss of millions of acres of tribal land.
What is the Dawes General Allotment Act?
Eastern factories drove the commercial slaughter of the bison primarily to harvest their thick hides, which were uniquely suited for making this component of steam-powered machinery.
What is industrial leather belting?
At the 1893 World's Fair, this historian delivered a famous thesis arguing that the American frontier was now closed and that its existence had uniquely shaped the American character and democracy.
Who is Frederick Jackson Turner?