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The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

APUSH CHAPTER 26

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The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• After the Civil War, the Great West was still relatively untamed, wild, and full of– Indians, Bison, wildlife, and a few Mormons

and Mexicans• As the White settlers began to populate

the Great West, the Indians, caught in the middle– They turned against each other– They were infected with white man’s

diseases

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The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• The federal government tried to pacify the Indians by signing treaties– Fort Laramie in 1851 and –Fort Atkinson in 1853

• The U.S. signed these treaties with the chiefs, who did not always represent the tribes–Many Indians did not accept the

authority of chiefs

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The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• In the 1860s, the U.S. government intensified its efforts by herding Indians into still smaller and smaller reservations (like the Dakota Territory)– Indians were often promised that they wouldn’t

be bothered further after moving out of their ancestral lands• Often Indian agents were corrupt and pawned off

shoddy food and products to their own fellow Indians• White men often disregarded treaties, though, and

frequently swindled the Indians

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The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• In frustration, many Native American tribes fought back

• Indian vs. White skirmishes emerged between roughly 1864 to 1890 in the so-called “Indian Wars.”– After the Civil War, the U.S. Army’s new mission became

—go clear Indians out of the West for White settlers to move in

– The Indians were better equipped than the federal troops sent to quell their revolts because arrows could be fired more rapidly than a muzzle-loaded rifle• Invention of the Colt .45 revolver (six-shooter) and Winchester

repeating rifle changed this

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Receding Native Population• Violence reigned supreme in Indian-White

relations–Sand Creek Massacre• In 1864, Colorado, Colonel J.M. Chivington’s

militia massacred some four hundred Indians in cold blood

– In 1866, a Sioux war party ambushed Captain William J. Fetterman’s command of 81 soldiers and civilians who were constructing the Bozeman Trail• There were no survivors

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Receding Native Population• Colonel Custer found gold in the Black

Hills of South Dakota (sacred Sioux land), and hordes of gold-seekers invaded the Sioux reservation in search of gold–Sitting Bull lead the Sioux on an attack on

Custer and his men at the Battle of Little Big Horn–The reinforcements that arrived later

brutally hunted down the Indians

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Receding Native Population• The Nez Percé Indians also revolted

when gold seekers made the government shrink their reservation by 90%–Chief Joseph finally surrendered his band

after a long trek across the Continental Divide toward Canada• He buried his hatchet and gave his famous

speech saying, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

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Receding Native Population

• The most difficult to subdue were the Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexico–They were lead by Geronimo–Were excellent horse soldiers–They eventually surrendered after

being pushed to Mexico

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The Bison• In the early days, tens of millions of bison dotted

the American prairie, and by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 million buffalo grazing– The eruption of the railroad that really started the

buffalo massacre• Many people killed buffalo for their meat, their

skins, or their tongues• Others either killed the bison for sport or killed

them, took only one small part of their bodies, leaving the carcass to rot

– By 1885, fewer than a 1,000 buffalo were left

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The End of the Trail• Sympathy for the Indians finally

materialized in the 1880s, helped in part by Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor and her novel Ramona–Humanitarians wanted to kindly help

Indians “walk the White man’s road” while the –Hard-liners stuck to their “kill ‘em all”

beliefs, and no one cared much for the traditional Indian heritage and culture

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The End of the Trail• Zealous White missionaries would force Indians to

convert– in 1884, they helped urge the government to

outlaw the sacred Sun Dance, called the Ghost Dance by Whites• It was a festival that Whites thought was the war-drum

beating

–At the Battle of Wounded Knee, the “Ghost Dance” was brutally stamped out by U.S. troops• This battle marks the end of the Indian Wars as by then

the Indians were all either on reservations or dead

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The End of the Trail• The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

dissolved the legal entities of all tribes–The Indians behaved the way Whites

wanted them to behave (become farmers on reservations), they could receive full U.S. citizenship in 25 years–An immigrant from a foreign nation could

become a citizen much, much faster than a native-born Native American

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The End of the Trail• Reservation land not allotted to Indians under the

act was sold to railroads• In 1879, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania

was founded to teach Native American children how to behave like Whites, completely erasing their culture

• The Dawes Act struck forcefully at the Indians, and by 1900 they had lost half the land than they had held 20 years before

• This plan would outline U.S. policy toward Indians until the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act which helped the Indian population rebound and grow

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Mining• Gold was discovered in California in the late 1840s,

and in 1858• The Comstock Lode in Nevada was discovered in

1859, and a fantastic amount of gold and silver worth more than $340 million was mined

• Smaller “lucky strikes” also drew money-lovers to Montana, Idaho, and other western states. Anarchy in these outposts seemed to rule, but in the end, what was left were usually ghost towns

• After the surface gold was found, ore-breaking machinery was brought in to break the gold-bearing quartz

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The Cattle Drives• As cities back east boomed in the latter

half of the nineteenth century, the demand for food and meat increased sharply• The problem of marketing meat profitably

to the public market and cities was solved by the new transcontinental railroads. Cattle could now be shipped to the stockyards under “beef barons” like the Swifts and Armours

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The Cattle Drives• The “Long Drive” emerged to become

a spectacular feeder of the slaughterhouses, as Texas cowboys herded cattle across desolate land to railroad terminals in Kansas–Dodge City, Abilene, Ogallala, and

Cheyenne became favorite stopovers• At Dodge City Wyatt Earp and in Abilene,

Marshal James B. Hickok maintained order

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The Cattle Drives

• The railroads made the cattle herding business prosper, but it also destroyed it–The railroads also brought

sheepherders and homesteaders who built barbed-wire, invented by Samuel Glidden, –Fences that erased the open-range

days of the long cattle drives

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The Farmers’ Frontier

• The Homestead Act of 1862–Allowed people to get as much as 160

acres of land • In return they promised to live on it for

five years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30.00

–It also allowed people to get land after only six month’s residence for $1.25 an acre

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The Farmers’ Frontier• Before the Homestead Act the U.S. government

had sold land for revenue, now it was giving it away

• This act led half a million families to buy land and settle out West– It often turned out to be a cruel hoax because in the

dry Great Plains, 160 acres was rarely enough for a family to earn a living and survive

– Often, families were forced to give up their homesteads before the five years were up, since droughts, bad land, and lack of necessities forced them out

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The Farmers’ Frontier• Fraud was spawned by the Homestead

Act, since almost ten times as much land ended up in the hands of land-grabbing promoters than in the hands of real farmers–Sometimes these cheats would not even

live on the land, but say that they’d erected a “twelve by fourteen” dwelling—which later turned out to be twelve by fourteen inches!