Railroads
These were basically long-distance mail deliverers, but they were put out of business because they were far slower than the telegraph.
What was the Pony Express?
Name for an abandoned boomtown, after the mine closed and everybody left.
What is a ghost town?
What are gold and silver?
A famous Wild West stereotype, also known as a cowhand. Seen in several cigarette commercials.
What is a cowboy?
They wanted cheap land or a new life and came over the mountains to the west for it.
What is a homesteader?
These weighed 700 pounds and there were 400 of them in a mile.
What is a rail?
Actions that were common in boomtowns, otherwise serious criminal activity.
What were robbery and murder?
The side of the United States containing more valuable minerals.
What is the West?
This land was owned by Creek and Seminole Indians, until the government allowed homesteaders to buy land there and claim 11 million acres of Indian land.
What is Oklahoma?
There wasn't enough water for the crops to grow, and they could never get enough to make money.
What were the homesteader's biggest challenge?
This was a celebratory piece driven into a newly-finished railroad.
What was the golden spike?
What is a boomtown?
This was found in California and miners came from everywhere to mine it. Also the 79th element in the periodic table.
What is gold?
A Native American movement that predicted the return of the buffalo and the disappearance of the white settlers.
What was the Ghost Dance?
Homesteaders made their houses out of this material. These materials are often found on or in the ground.
These killed the Indians and drove them away from the railroad.
What are track workers?
These people were put in boomtowns to control crime. Similar to a sheriff, but less lawful.
What is a vigilante?
This was very destructive and damaged the land, but many Americans profited from it.
What is mining?
A treaty in which many of the Plains Indians agreed to live on reservations against their will.
What was the Treaty of Medicine Lodge?
By the 1900s, 600,000 homesteaders had left the East and moved here. This is a region encompassing most of the mid-west of the United States.
What is the Great Plains?
The loser of the race to complete an American transcontinental railroad. This company only laid tracks from Sacramento to Promontory.
What was the Central Pacific Railroad Company?
A boomtown's laws were very loose and people would murder or rob other people for money; they would cause chaos and people called vigilantes formed groups to create their own law.
What was the law situation in a boomtown like?
After the miners found and collected all of this, they were too lazy to continue mining and moved on.
What is easy-to-find gold and silver?
A derogatory term for African-American soldiers, coined by the Plains Indians. Also the name of a Bob Marley song.
What is a Buffalo Soldier?
The Great Plains became somewhat farmable in this decade, due to heavy rains throughout the United States. Also the decade when the lightbulb was invented.
What happened in the 1870s?