17, 18 Test Flashcards
Diet of the Natives
Corn, bison, and salmon
Lack of Native unity
They had trouble uniting because of language barriers and the long physical distance between them.
Supreme Court decisions, 1884 and 1886
In 1884, the court decided Native Americans were not citizens by birth under the Fourteenth Amendment and could therefore be denied the right to vote. In 1886, the court decided that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants constitutional protections to corporations.
Sandy Creek Massacre
In 1864, Colonel Chivington lead troops to fire upon innocent Natives that were staying near Big Sandy Creek after they had been instructed to stay there.
Battle of Little Bighorn
Colonel Custer and his troops decided to attack a camp of over 3000 Natives without reinforcements after being told to scout ahead for the enemy. Custer and all his troops were killed. This was one of the most publicized battles.
WNIA
One of the most active Indian reform organizations, it is composed mainly of white women who sought to use domestic skills to help people in need. It urged gradual assimilation of Indians.
IRA
The other most active Indian reform organizations were more influential but numbered few Native Americans among its members. It advocated citizenship and landholding by individual Indians. Most reformers believed Indians were culturally inferior to white and assumed Indians could succeed economically only if they embraced middle-class values of diligence and education. Women were leaders in Native culture.
Zitkala-Sa
Some exceptional Indians managed to use white-controlled education to their advantage. At the age of twelve, she was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Indiana and later attended Earlham College and the Boston Conservatory of Music. She became an accomplished orator and violinist, but her major contribution was her writing on behalf of her people’s needs and preservation of their cultures. She published a work of fiction titled Old Indian Legends, in which she translated Sioux oral tradition into stories. She was elected the first full-blooded Indian secretary of the Society of American Indians.
Dawes Severalty Act
In 1887 Congress reversed its reservation policy and passed the Dawes Severalty Act. The act, supported by reformers, authorized dissolution of community-owned Indian property and granted land allotments to individual Indian families. The government held that land in trust for 25 years, so families couldn’t sell their allotments. The law also awarded citizenship to all who accepted allotments. It also entitled the government to sell unallocated land to whites. Indian policy now took on two main features, both of which aimed at assimilating Indians into white American culture. First, the government distributed reservation land to individual families in the belief that the American institution of private property would create productive citizens and integrate Indians into the larger society. Second, officials believed that Indians would abandon their “barbaric” habits more quickly if their children were educated in boarding schools away from reservations.
Ghost Dance, Wounded Knee
In 1890 the government made one last show of force. With active resistance having been suppressed, some Lakotas and other groups turned to the religion of the Ghost Dance as a spiritual means of serving native culture. It consisted of movement in a circle until the dancers reached a trancelike state and envisioned dead ancestors. Some dancers believed these ancestral visitors heralded a day when buffalo would return to the Plains and all elements of white civilization would be buried. It expressed this messianic vision in a ritual involving several days of dancing and meditation. The government worried about revolt, so the government sent the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment, to detain Lakotas moving toward Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Although the Indians were starving and seeking shelter, the army assumed they were armed for revolt. The troops massacred an estimated 300 men, women, and children at a creek called Wounded Knee.
Timber and Stone Act 1878, who did it benefit?
Races started mixing
As the West developed, it became a rich multiracial society, including not only Native Americans and native born white migrants but also Mexicans, African Americans, and Asians, all involved in a process of community building.
Chinese Exclusion Act
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers, some 200000 Chinese, mostly young, single males, came to the US and built communities in California, Oregon, and Washington. Many came with five-year contracts to work on railroad construction, then return home, presumably with resources for a better life. They also worked in the fields. The act suspended immigration of Chinese laborers and prohibited naturalization of those Chinese already residing in the US.
Exodusters, where did they come from? Where did they receive aid?
The majority of Exodusters settled in Kansas, but many settled in what would become Oklahoma, Colorado, Ohio, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana. Kansas Governor John P. St. John created The Freedmen’s Relief Association of Kansas to assist with settling the new citizens. This organization built schools and permanent as well as transitional housing for the new arrivals.
Western women, how did they seek fortune?
Although unmarried men numerically dominated the western natural-resource frontier, many communities contained populations of white women who had come for the same reason as men: to make their fortune. But on the mining frontier as elsewhere, women’s independence was limited; they usually accompanied a husband or father and seldom prospected themselves. Even so, many women used their labor as a resource and earned money by cooking and laundering, and in some case providing sexual services for the miners in houses of prostitution. In the Northwest, they worked in canneries. Mexicano women took jobs in cities as laundresses and seamstresses.
Significance of race, who cared about it? Ethnocentrism?
To control labor and social relations within this complex population, white settlers made race an important distinguishing characteristic. They usually classified people into five races: Caucasians (themselves), Indians (Native Americans), Mexicans, Mongolians (a term applied to Chinese), and Negroes. In applying these categories, whites imposed racial distinctions on people who had never before considered themselves to be a “race”. Whites using these categories ascribed demeaning characteristics to all others, judging them to be permanently inferior. Only blacks and whites really cared about race.
Conservation Movement
After the civil war, people who were eager to protect the natural landscape began to organize a conservation movement. Sports hunters, concerned about the loss of wildlife, opposed market hunting and lobbied state legislatures to pass hunting regulations. Artists and tourists in 1864 persuaded Congress to preserve the beautiful Yosemite Valley by granting it to the state of California, which reserved it for public use. Then, in 1872, Congress designated the Yellowstone River region in Wyoming as the first national park. And in 1891 conservationists pressured Congress to authorize President Benjamin Harrison to create forest reserves–public lands protected from private-interest cutting. Such policies met with strong objections from lumber companies, lumber dealers, railroads, and householders accustomed to cutting timber freely for fuel and building material.
What was the first national park in the US?
Yellowstone National Park
The person who did a lot of work with conservation.
Admission of new states. Deadwood and Tombstone.
Development brought western territories to the economic and population threshold of statehood. In 1889 Republicans seeking to solidify control of Congress passed an omnibus bill granting statehood to North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Montana. Wyoming and Idaho, both which allowed women to vote, were admitted the following year. Congress denied statehood to Utah until 1896, wanting assurances from the Mormons, who constituted a majority of the territory’s population and its controlled government, that they would give up polygamy. Western states’ varied communities spiced American folk culture and fostered a “go-getter” optimism that distinguished the American spirit.
Irrigation.
Gold, trees, and oil shaped popular images of the West, but water gave it life. In western territories and states promised wealth from mining, cutting, and drilling, their agricultural potential promised more, but only if the settlers could find a way to bring water to the arid land. Western economic development is the story of how public and private interests used technology and organization to develop the region’s river basins and make the land agriculturally productive. For centuries, Indians irrigated southwestern lands to sustain their subsistence farming.
First European American that practiced irrigation.
Rights to water. Riparianism? Prior appropriation?
Efforts at land reclamation through irrigation in Colorado and California sparked conflict over rights to the precious streams that flowed through the West. Americans had inherited the English common-law principle of riparian rights, which held that only those who owned land along a river’s banks could benefit from the water’s flow. Americans who settled in the West rejected riparianism in favor of the doctrine of prior appropriation, which awarded a river’s water to the first person who claimed it. They argued that anyone intending economically productive use of the river should have the right to appropriate it.
Newlands Reclamtion Act
Although state irrigation provisions stimulated development, the federal government still owned most of the western lands in the 1890s. States wanted the federal government to transfer them at least part of the public domain lands. They claimed that they could make these lands profitable through reclamation, providing them with irrigated water. However, if one state sponsored irrigation to develop its own land, who would regulate waterways that flowed through more than one state? Only the federal government, it seemed, had the power to regulate regional water development. In 1902, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act. It allowed the federal government to sell western public lands to individuals in parcels, not to exceed 160 acres and to use proceeds from the sales to finance irrigation projects. It provided for control but not conservation of water. The act represented a decision by the federal government to aid the agricultural and general economic development of the West.
Railroad construction, why and how did they get so big?
Between 1865 and 1890, railroad expansion boomed, as total track in the US grew from 35000 to 200000 miles, mostly from construction of the west of the Mississippi River. A diverse mix of workers made up construction crews. Construction had powerful economic effects. After 1880, when steel rails began to replace iron ones, railroads helped boost the nation’s steel industry to international leadership. Railroad expansion also created related industries, including coal production, passenger and freight-car manufacture, and depot construction. It also gave a push towards western urbanization. With their ability to transport large loads of people and freight, lines such as the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific accelerated growth of western hubs.
Standard gauge. Standard time.
By the late 1880s, almost all lines adopted standard-gauge rails so that their tracks could connect with one another. Rail transportation altered conceptions of time and space. First, by surmounting physical barriers to travel, railroads transformed space into time. Instead of expressing the distance between places in miles, people began to refer to the amount of time it took to travel from one place to another. Second, railroad scheduling required nationwide standardization of time. Before railroads, local church bells and clocks struck noon when the sun was directly overhead, but it wasn’t overhead at the same time everywhere. To impose regularity, railroads created their own time zones. In 1883, without authority from Congress, the nation’s railroads agreed to establish four standard time zones for the country. Most communities adjusted their clocks accordingly, and railroad time became national time.
Hardships on the plains, social isolationism.
Life on the farm was harder than it seemed like. Migrants often encountered scarcities of essentials that they had once taken for granted, and they had to adapt to the environment. The prairies contained insufficient lumber for housing and fuel, so pioneer families had to build houses of sod and burn buffalo dung for heat. Water for cooking and cleaning was sometimes scarce too. Machinery for drilling wells was expensive, as were windmills for drawing water to the surface. The weather would be hot for weeks, and then violent storms would wash away crops and property. The wind of blizzards halted outside movement. Settlers also had to cope with social isolation. In Europe, farmers lived in villages and traveled daily to nearby fields. This was rare in the vast expanse of the Plains. They were separated from each other. Men might find escape by working in distant fields and taking occasional trips to sell crops or buy supplies. Women were more isolated, confined by domestic chores to the household.
Mail order companies, free delievery.
Farm families survived by sheer resolve and by organizing churches and clubs where they could socialize a few times a month. By 1900 two developments had brought rural settlers who lived east of the rainfall line into closer contact with modern consumer society. First, mail-order companies made new products attainable by the 1870s and 1880s. Second, after farmers petitioned Congress for extension of the postal service, in 1896 the government made Rural Free Delivery (RFD) widely available. Farmers previously had to go to town to pick up mail. Now they could receive letters, newspapers, and catalogs in a roadside mailbox nearly every day.
Mechanization.
When the Civil War drew men away from farms, women and older men who remained behind began using reapers and other mechanical implements to satisfy the demand for food and took advantage of high grain prices. After the war, continued demand encouraged farmers to utilize machines, and inventors developed new implements to facilitate planting and harvesting. Seeders, combines, binders, mowers, and rotary plows improved grain production on the Plains and in California. Technology also aided dairy and poultry farming.
