Movin' on West
The belief that the United States must or should spread its government, ideals, religion, and country westward.
Manifest Destiny
Name for homes built into the earth, made of turf and mud.
Soddies (sod homes)
This law divided Native American lands for private ownership and forced Natives into a life apart from their tribes.
Dawes Act
These large, single-crop farms led to massive overproduction and dramatic drop in crop prices.
Bonanza farms
Efficient way of turning large amounts of iron into steel cheaply and efficiently, created in the late 19th century.
Bessemer Process
This law created "land-grant" state universities to teach agricultural sciences.
The Morill Act
Cattle-drivers that herded longhorns and other livestock to the trains go by this more popular name.
Cowboys
This battle of 1876 gave the Lakota tribes hope as they saw Chiefs Gall and Crazy Horse defeat General Custer's forces
Battle of Little Bighorn
This social and educational group, started by Oliver Hudson Kelly, was meant to break the isolation of western farmers.
Grange
The process by which a business acquires all levels of production and distribution of their product.
Vertical Integration
This new line allowed goods and people to cross the continent in only six days.
The transcontinental railroad.
This invention closed the western frontier by dividing the land into private plots to keep cattle in or out.
Barbed Wire.
The destruction of this giant mammal by white hunters forever changed the way of life for the Sioux and other native tribes.
Buffalo.
Bimetallism.
If Vanderbilt was the "Colossus of Railroads," then this man was the Man of Steel during the industrial age.
Andrew Carnegie
The government was so desperate for western farmers, it passed this law giving 160 acres away to anyone willing to farm in the Plains.
Homestead Act
The name given to African American farmers who claimed their 160 acres and moved to Kansas.
Exodusters.
The term for forced Americanization and Westernization of Native Americans.
Assimilation.
These organizations of farmers took political actions, such as protests, petitions, and speaking tours.
Farmers Alliances
Edison was to the lightbulb as Christopher Sholes was to the
Typewriter
Sharecropping, racist violence, lack of good farmland in the east, and poverty are examples of this reason for moving West.
Push Factors
New farming technologies that helped western settlers included steel plows and this large rotating innovation that helped pump water from the ground.
(Steel) Windmills
This massacre on the Pine Ridge reservation was the last major confrontation between the U.S and the Plains Indians.
Wounded Knee
This man delivered a rousing speech during the 1896 election cycle, in which he proclaimed, ""You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"
William Jennings Bryan
Horizontal Integration