Reasons for Moving West
This discovery brought thousands of miners to California, the Black Hills, and Colorado in the mid-1800s.
What are Gold or Silver deposits?
Some homesteaders on the prairie built these types of houses that were made of dirt and turf.
What is a sod house?
The federal government created these schools to force Native Americans to assimilate by changing their clothing and giving up their language, religion, and culture. These children became known as the “lost generation” as they did not belong to their tribe and were not accepted into mainstream white society.
What are Indigenous/Native American boarding schools?
Many farmers in the late 1800s could not pay this which resulted in banks foreclosing on their homes.
What are mortgages?
Americans nearly wiped out this sacred animal that provided Native Americans with food, shelter, clothing, and materials.
What is the Buffalo or Bison?
This outlaw was a former Confederate guerrilla who robbed numerous banks and trains in the Plains and was born in Clay County, Missouri.
Who is Jesse James?
This belief system, pushed by Jacksonian Democrats, stated that Americans were divinely ordained to expand democratic institutions across the North American continent from Atlantic to Pacific.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This ended because of overgrazing, extended bad weather, and the invention and use of barbed wire.
What is the open range?
This act provided federal land, seized from Native American nations, to states to sell for the creation of universities.
What is the Morrill Act of 1862?
This policy helped control inflation by linking paper currency to gold whereby every dollar could be exchanged for gold.
This massacre, carried out by Colonel J.M. Chivington, resulted in the deaths of 150 to 270 Chief Black Kettle's band of Cheyenne in 1864.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
This Lawman served in Dodge City, Kansas and Tombstone, Arizona, and teamed up with Doc Holliday to fight the McLaury and Clanton crime families.
Who is Wyatt Earp?
This development allowed Americans and immigrants to move from the East Coast and Midwest to the Western territories and states in as little as 6 or 7 days.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
Name two of the tensions between two groups of people who lived in the West.
What are (1) Native Americans vs. Settlers, (2) Ranchers vs. Farmers/Homesteaders, (3) Cattlemen vs. Sheep herders, (4) Native Americans vs. Ethnic Minorities (African American Buffalo Soldiers/Mexican Americans/Chinese immigrants), (5) Environmentalists vs. Big Business/Government/Buffalo Hunters, (6) Lawless of the Frontier vs. Civilizing Forces, (7) Native Americans vs. U.S. Government, (8) Native Americans vs. Railroads, and (9) Native Americans vs. Buffalo Hunters.
This act gave land to Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads in order to build the Transcontinental railroad.
What is the Pacific Railway Act of 1862?
Oliver Kelley founded this organization in 1867 as a social and lobbying group for farmers to voice their concerns about rising costs and the negative effect that railroads had on farmers.
What is "the Grange" or "the Fathers of Husbandry?"
This 1887 legislative act broke up reservations, aimed to "Americanize" Native Americans, and gave each Native American 160 acres of land to keep or sell on their own.
What is the Dawes Act?
This female sharpshooter often dressed as a man for Wild West shows.
Who is Clamity Jane?
This group of people migrated to the West looking for freedom from oppression, segregation, and restrictive Jim Crow laws, and established towns such as Nicodemus, Langston, Boley, and Liberty.
Who are the Exodusters or Black Southerners?
This tension sometimes resulted in one group killing the other group's livestock.
What is the tension between Cattlemen vs. Sheep Herders?
This legislative act enticed Americans and immigrants to move to the West with promises of 160 acres of land for very little money if they improved the land and lived there continuously for at least 5 years.
What is the Homestead Act of 1862?
Farmers had these four difficulties in the West in the late 1800s.
What are weather, cost, crop prices, and railroad charges?
This plan under which Native Americans would give up their beliefs and way of life to become part of the white culture.
What is Assimilation?
This cowboy served as a scout and a spy during the Civil War and a Marshall in Kansas and was shot during a poker hand where he held Aces and Eights (Dead Man’s Hand).
Who is "Wild Bill" Hickock?
Name two reasons why Americans moved west.
What are (1) population growth, (2) economic opportunities, (3) cheap land for farming and ranching, (4) gold and silver deposits, (5) spread religion, and (6) railroads?
This cattle route extended from Texas to Kansas, transporting tens of thousands of cattle to the railroad stations for shipping to the East.
What is the Chilsholm Trail?
This act banned future immigration from China and denied citizenship to the Chinese immigrants who lived in the United States.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?
This organization aimed to educate farmers about how to get lower interest rates on loans and the control that the government had on the banks and farm lands.
What is the Farmers' Alliance?
Sitting Bull refused to sign this 1868 treaty in which the U.S. abandoned the Bozeman Trail, recognized Sioux ownership of the Black Hills, and forced the Sioux onto a reservation by the Missouri River.
What is the Treaty of Fort Laramie?
This outlaw represented a Robin Hood-like figure who typified Southern post-Civil War resentment and defiance.
Who is Jesse James?
Over 2 million of this group moved West from 1870 to 1900.
Who are immigrants?
Farmers’ revolt against falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependence for these three reasons.
What are (1) high freight charges by railroads; (2) Excessive interest rates for loans from merchants and bankers; and (3) a reduction in the money supply by the federal government.
The federal government changed this policy towards Native Americans in the 1850s.
What is creating treaties that defined specific boundaries (reservations) for each tribe?
The Populist Party or Peoples' Party advocated for five ideas. Name at least one.
What are (1) abolition of nation banks, (2) increase in the money supply, (3) graduated income tax, (4) direct election of senators, and (5) government control of railroads and utilities?
This massacre resulted in the deaths of 250 to 300 Lakota Sioux and caused Native American tribes to end the Indian Wars.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?
He represented the quintessential frontier lawman who stood up to outlaws and the lawless and survived the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Who is Wyatt Earp?