Events
The rumor of free transportation to the state of _________ led many Black people to move to this state.
What is Kansas?
What animal was the major source of food and way of life for Native Americans?
What is buffalo?
The U.S. government gave land to companies to construct _________ that would connect the eastern and western United States.
What are railroads?
This 1862 law gave settlers 160 acres of free land if they agreed to farm it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
The formerly enslaved people who moved west became known as _______?
What are Exodusters?
After the Dawes Act, many Native American went from nomadic hunters and sharing the land, to having individual plots of land and becoming _______ instead.
What are farmers?
”Unassigned” land on reservations went to _____________ instead of Native American people according to the Dawes Act.
What is White settlers?
To overcome the lack of trees and wood to build fences for livestock, settlers used _______.
What is barbed wire?
Settlers headed for the Great ______ where they were given free land.
What is Plains?
The discovery of this precious metal in 1849 fueled migration and the hope of striking it rich in the West.
What is gold?
After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the U.S. broke its treaty with the Sioux, leading to this famous 1876 battle, featuring figures like Colonel George Custer and shaman Sitting Bull.
What is the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
Geronimo believed that the Apache deity, Usen, made a tribe's land _______.
What is perfect for them?
To overcome the lack of water, settlers would use ______ to draw water from wells.
What are windmills?
The ______________ made it easier to travel and ship goods between the East and West which made moving and living on the frontier easier and more profitable.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This kind of person, celebrated in legends and popular culture, symbolized freedom, adventure, and the rugged life of the frontier.
What is the cowboy?
The 7th Calvary killed 290 of Lakota people, including women and children, marking the end of the Indian Wars.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre?
To force Native Americans to abandon their languages, religions, and traditions in order to adopt white, Christian society.
What is assimilation?
These people would be sent on a religious mission to promote Christianity to Native Americans.
What are missionaries?
What is the Civil War?
Free land from the Homestead Act, the right to vote, and the chance for financial independence, this group saw the West as a place of new opportunity.
Who are single women?
“An area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States.... These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy.... In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities."
In this excerpt from “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” how does Frederick Turner say free land has shaped American democracy?
What is provided free opportunities?
This spiritual ceremony, practiced by several tribes, was believed to make Native Americans impervious to bullets and restore their original way of life.
Americans believed it was their right and duty to move west and occupy the entire width of the continent.
What is Manifest Destiny?
Treaties made to protect Native American people and their land were frequently broken by the U.S. government.
What is to abrogate?
Often for poor European immigrant settlers, the promise of owning land and building a better life in the West was seen as part of this ideal.
What is the American Dream?