Native American History
This 1868 treaty attempted to establish Sioux reservations along the Missouri River.
What is the Treaty of Fort Laramie?
This 1862 act offered 160 acres of free land to citizens who would farm it for 5 years.
What is the Homestead Act?
This rich silver mine discovered in Nevada in 1859 yielded about $500 million over 20 years.
What is the Comstock Lode?
Oliver Hudson Kelley started this organization for farmers in 1867 to fight railroads and teach cooperative organizing.
What is the Grange (or Patrons of Husbandry)?
This inventor perfected the incandescent light bulb in 1879 at his Menlo Park, NJ research laboratory.
Who is Thomas Edison?
The Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, at this location in Utah.
What is Promontory?
This Hunkpapa Sioux leader never signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie and led forces at Little Bighorn.
Who is Sitting Bull?
These African Americans migrated West from the post-Reconstruction South in the late 1870s, often settling in Kansas.
Who are Exodusters?
These Mexican ranchers were the true forerunners of cowboys and influenced western terminology.
Who are vaqueros?
This monetary system backing dollars solely with gold was favored by bankers and businessmen in the Northeast.
What is the gold standard?
This steel production process involved injecting air into molten iron and was used for 90% of U.S. steel by 1880.
What is the Bessemer Process?
This 1877 scandal involved Union Pacific stockholders forming a construction company and pocketing $23 million while bribing congressmen.
What is the Crédit Mobilier Scandal?
In this 1876 battle, Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull crushed Custer's Seventh Cavalry.
What is the Battle of Little Bighorn (or Custer's Last Stand)?
This major cattle trail ran from San Antonio, Texas, through Oklahoma to Kansas.
What is the Chisholm Trail?
This hardy, short-tempered cattle breed from southern Spain could travel long distances without much water.
What are Longhorns?
This 1893 economic crisis saw 15,000 businesses and 500 banks collapse, with 1/5 of the workforce unemployed by December 1894.
What is the Panic of 1893?
Alexander Graham Bell invented this communication device in 1876 with his assistant Thomas Watson.
What is the telephone?
This 1887 act created the Interstate Commerce Commission to make railroad rates "reasonable and just."
What is the Interstate Commerce Act?
This 1887 act broke up reservations and gave 160 acres to heads of household, but ultimately resulted in whites taking 2/3 of Native American land.
What is the Dawes Act?
These enormous single-crop farms of 15,000-50,000 acres were created by railroad companies and investors in the late 1870s.
What are bonanza farms?
About this percentage of the 55,000 cowboys who worked the plains between 1866-1885 were African American.
What is 25%?
Republican William McKinley defeated this Democratic/Populist candidate who favored bimetallism in the 1896 election.
Who is William Jennings Bryan?
This "Captain of Industry" used vertical integration to control the steel industry and later donated 90% of his wealth.
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
Samuel Gompers founded this labor organization in 1886, which focused on wages, hours, and working conditions and had 2+ million members by WWI.
What is the American Federation of Labor (AFL)?
This December 1890 massacre by the Seventh Cavalry killed as many as 300 mostly unarmed Sioux and ended the Indian wars.
What is the Battle of Wounded Knee?
Joseph McCoy built cattle shipping yards in this Kansas town in 1867, shipping 35,000 head the first year.
What is Abilene?
This treaty ended the Mexican-American War and was supposed to protect Mexican American property rights, but many lost their land.
What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
Mary Elizabeth Lease, a powerful Populist speaker, famously told farmers to "raise less corn and more" this.
What is Hell?
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled this percentage of oil refining by 1880.
What is 90%?
This May 4, 1886 event in Chicago involved a bomb killing 7 police and turned public opinion against labor unions.
What is the Haymarket Affair?
This Paiute ritual promised restoration of Native American lands and way of life, but its spread led to Sitting Bull's death.
What is the Ghost Dance?
This 1874 invention by Joseph F. Glidden allowed farmers to protect their fields and ranchers to enclose grazing lands.
What is barbed wire?
An estimated 7,500 deaths occurred during western gold rushes from these dangers: tunnel collapses, extreme heat, and this type of disaster.
What are explosions?
The Colored Farmers' National Alliance, founded in Houston in 1886, had approximately this many African American members.
What is 250,000?
This 1890 act was supposed to make trusts interfering with free trade illegal, but the Supreme Court threw out 7 of 8 cases.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
This 1892 strike at a Carnegie Steel plant resulted in at least 12 deaths and took 45 years before steel workers could reorganize.
What is the Homestead Strike?
This 1864 massacre in Colorado killed over 150 Cheyenne inhabitants, mostly women and children, under Colonel John Chivington.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
These homes made from stacked blocks of prairie turf were warm in winter but leaked when it rained and housed snakes and insects.
What are soddies (or sod homes)?
These three environmental factors between 1883-1887 wiped out whole herds and caused staggering losses to the cattle industry.
What are alternating dry summers and harsh winters?
William Jennings Bryan's famous July 8, 1896 speech was titled this, criticizing the gold standard.
What is the "Cross of Gold" speech?
In 1894, the Supreme Court ruled in this case that the Sherman Act could not enforce against manufacturing, even though the company controlled 98% of sugar refining.
What is United States v. E.C. Knight Co.?
This 1894 strike led by Eugene V. Debs was broken when President Cleveland sent federal troops.
What is the Pullman Strike?
By 1890, fewer than 1,000 of these animals remained from the 65 million that roamed the plains in 1800.
What are buffalo (or bison)?
This territory became known as the "Sooner State" after 2 million acres were claimed in less than a day in 1889.
What is Oklahoma?
During a long drive lasting about 3 months, one cowboy was needed for every this many head of cattle.
What is 250-300?
Wheat prices fell from $2.00 per bushel in 1867 to this amount in 1887, crushing farmers.
What is $0.68 per bushel?
This African American inventor improved Edison's light bulb with a carbon filament in 1881.
Who is Lewis H. Latimer?
This legendary labor organizer fought for workers' rights until age 100 and led 80 mill children to President Roosevelt's home in 1903.
Who is Mary Harris "Mother" Jones?
These spiritual leaders in Plains Indian culture had special sensitivity and healing powers.
Who are medicine men or shamans?
By 1900, African American farmers owned this many acres of land in the West.
What is 1+ million acres?
The late 1890s gold rush to this territory saw 100,000 set out but only 200 became rich.
What is Alaska (or the Klondike)?
The Populist Party's 1892 Omaha Convention called for government ownership of these two communication/transportation systems.
What are railroads and telegraph companies?
This business organization involved competing companies being controlled by trustees, which Rockefeller used effectively.
What is a trust?
On March 25, 1911, this NYC factory fire killed 146 women and led to factory reform when locked doors prevented escape.
What is the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?
Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book with this title exposed the government's broken promises to Native Americans.
What is "A Century of Dishonor"?
This Wyoming territory was the first to grant women full voting rights in 1869, 50 years before the 19th Amendment.
What is Wyoming?
This mining technique used water under high pressure to blast away dirt but caused environmental damage.
What is hydraulic mining?
These paper money notes issued during the Civil War were not backed by gold or silver and caused problems for farmers after the war.
What are greenbacks?
J.P. Morgan created this holding company in 1901, which became the world's largest business.
What is U.S. Steel?
In 1888, this many railroad workers were killed annually, with 20,000+ injured.
What is 2,000+?