Transcontinental Railroads & Western Settlement
This major 1869 event at Promontory Point, Utah, symbolically linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
What is the driving of the Golden Spike?
This 1849 event dramatically increased migration to California, creating one of the first major Western mining frontiers.
What is the California Gold Rush?
The U.S. Census Bureau declared in 1890 that this major feature of American settlement no longer existed.
What is the frontier line?
The reservation system began when the U.S. assigned tribes fixed boundaries; two major Southern Plains tribes affected were the Comanche and this allied group.
Who are the Apache?
This vital trail linked New Mexico with Missouri, expanding trade and cultural contact after 1821.
What is the Santa Fe Trail?
This railroad line, built largely by Chinese immigrants, blasted through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
What is the Central Pacific Railroad?
Cattle from Texas were driven north to railheads in Kansas along this famous trail.
What is the Chisholm Trail?
This historian argued that the frontier shaped American democracy, individualism, and innovation.
Who is Frederick Jackson Turner?
This 1864 attack on peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho communities symbolized the brutality of the Indian Wars.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
Mexican Americans in California and the Southwest were guaranteed property rights after the Mexican-American War by this treaty.
What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
Railroads encouraged the settlement of the Great Plains by providing this fast-growing economic incentive, connecting farms to markets and towns.
What is access to national markets?
The 1862 law offering 160 acres of land to settlers who improved it for five years encouraged widespread farming on the Plains.
What is the Homestead Act?
Turner's famous 1893 argument presenting the frontier as a driving force in shaping American identity is known as this.
What is the Frontier Thesis?
The 1890 confrontation in which more than 200 Sioux men, women, and children were killed marked the final major Indian resistance on the Plains.
What is the Battle (Massacre) of Wounded Knee?
The overgrazing and depletion of western landscapes helped inspire this late-19th-century environmental movement.
What is the conservation movement?
This northern transcontinental line, built by James J. Hill without federal land grants, helped develop Minnesota and Washington state.
What is the Great Northern Railroad?
This invention by Joseph Glidden revolutionized Western ranching by limiting the open range and ending long-distance cattle drives.
What is barbed wire?
These individuals, often newspaper writers or promoters, exaggerated frontier advantages to draw settlers westward.
Who were boosters?
This 1887 federal law divided tribal lands into individual family allotments in an effort to force assimilation.
What is the Dawes Act?
This founder of the Sierra Club advocated for preserving natural areas from human interference and influenced national forestry policy.
Who is John Muir?
Name one major negative consequence of railroad expansion for Western development between 1877–1898.
What is environmental damage, destruction of the buffalo, or exploitation of Native Americans?
These organizations, beginning with the Grange in 1867, sought to protect farmers from railroads, middlemen, and monopolistic practices.
What are the farmers' alliances (or the Grange and the Farmers' Alliances)?
Some historians critique Turner by emphasizing this factor instead of the frontier as the real driver of American development.
What is urban growth / industrialization (the rise of towns and cities)?
This reform movement criticized forced assimilation and highlighted Native perspectives, with Helen Hunt Jackson as a leading voice.
What is the humanitarian / reform movement (associated with A Century of Dishonor)?
This major federal law of 1891 allowed the president to set aside forest reserves from the public domain, strengthening conservation efforts.
What is the Forest Reserve Act (1891)?