Settling the West
At first, ranchers saw this as a threat because it kept their herds from roaming freely.
Barbed Wire
A term borrowed from card games to describe a mining town when the mines close.
Bust
Native Americans who roamed vast distances were considered:
Nomads
Vast area of grassland owned by the federal government where ranchers could graze their herds free of charge and unrestricted by private property.
Open Range
Rapid growth in population of a town that appears to spring up overnight around newly found mines.
Boomtowns
Before the Sand Creek Massacre, the Cheyenne had come to Fort Lyon to:
Surrender
On the Great Plains, this was the dominant crop that was grown.
Wheat
Spanish word for "Cowboy"
Vaqueros
After the Battle of the Little Bighorn Sitting Bull did what?
Fled with his followers to Canada.
Area that began at the eastern edge of the Great Plains and covered much of the Dakotas and parts of Nebraska and Kansas
Wheat Belt
The current of a river is diverted into trenches. Water is directed to a box with metal "riffle" bars that caused heavier minerals to settle to the bottom of the box. A screen keeps the minerals from escaping.
Sluice Mining
Proposed creating two large reservations in 1867, one for the Sioux and another for the southern Plains Indians.
Indian Peace Commission
To enforce law and order, many boomtowns formed
Vigilance Committees
Used to remove large quantities of earth and process it for minerals. Usually high-pressured water is sprayed against the hill or mountain to wash away dirt, rock, or gravel.
Hydraulic Mining
George Custer attacked a large group of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors at:
The Little Bighorn River