Chapter 16 - Conquering a Continent Flashcards
The railway line completed on May 10, 1869, that connected the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines, enabling goods to move by railway from the Eastern United States all the way to California.
Transcontinental Railroad
A tax or duty on foreign producers of goods coming into or imported into the United States; tariffs gave U.S. manufacturers a competitive advantage in America’s gigantic domestic market.
protective tariff
An 1854 treaty that, in the wake of a show of military force by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, allowed American ships at two ports in Japan.
Treaty of Kanagawa
An 1868 treaty that guaranteed the rights of U.S. missionaries in China and set official terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers to work in the United States.
Burlingame Treaty
An 1877 Supreme Court case that affirmed that states could regulate key businesses, such as railroads and grain elevators, if those businesses were “clothed in the public interest.”
Munn v. Illinois
The practice of backing a country’s currency with its reserve of gold. In 1873 the United States, following Great Britain and other European nations, began converting to the gold standard.
gold standard
A term used by those critical of an 1873 law directing the U.S. Treasury to cease minting silver dollars, retire Civil War-era greenbacks, and replace them with notes backed by the gold standard from an expanded system of national banks.
Crime of 1873
The 1862 act that gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property. This policy led to the rapid development of the American West after the Civil War; facing arid conditions in the West, however, many homesteaders
Homestead Act
An 1862 act that set aside 140 million federal acres that states could sell to raise money for public universities.
Morrill Act
Public universities founded to broaden educational opportunities and foster technical and scientific expertise. These universities were funded by the Morrill Act, which authorized the sale of federal lands to raise money for higher education.
land-grant colleges
Immense silver ore deposit discovered in 1859 in Nevada that touched off a mining rush, bringing a diverse population into the region and leading to the establishment of boom-towns.
Comstock Lode
Facilitated by the completion of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1865, a system by which cowboys herded cattle hundreds of miles north from Texas to Dodge City and the other cow towns of Kansas.
Long Drive
An unfounded theory that settlement of the Great Plains caused an increase in rainfall.
“rain follows the plow”
African Americans who walked or rode out of the Deep South following the Civil War, many settling on farms in Kansa in hopes of finding peace and prosperity.
Exodusters
Established in 1872 by Congress, Yellowstone was the United States’s first national park.
Yellowstone National Park
A federal bureau established in 1871 that made recommendations to stem the decline in wild fish. Its creation was an important step toward wildlife conservation and management.
U.S. Fisheries Comission
The November 29, 1864, massacre of more than a hundred peaceful chyennes, largely women and children, by John M. Chivington’s Colorado militia.
Sand Creek Massacre
A massacre in December 1866 in which 1500 Sioux warriors lured Captain William Fetterman and 80 soldiers from a Wyoming fort and attacked them. With the Fetterman massacre the Sioux succeeded in closing the Bozeman trail, the main route in Montana.
Fetterman massacre
A 1903 Supreme Court ruling the Congress could make whatever Indian policies it chose, ignoring all existing treaties.
Lone Wolf V Hitchcock
The 1887 law that gave Native Americans severalty by dividing reservations into homesteads. The law was a disaster for native peoples, resulting over several decades in the loss of 66% of lands held by Indians at the time of the law’s passage.
Dawes Severalty Act
The 1876 battle begun when American cavalry under George Armstrong Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Indians who resisted removal to a reservation. Custer’s force was annihilated, but with whites calling for US soldiers to retaliate, the Native American military victory was short-lived.
Battle of Little Big Horn
Religion of the late 1880s and early 1890s that combined elements of Christianity and traditional Native American religion. It fostered Plains Indians’ hope that they could through sacred dances, resurrect the great bison herds and call up a storm to drive whites back across the Atlantic.
Ghost Dance Movement
The 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians by American cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Sent to suppress the Ghost Dance, soldiers caught up with fleeing Lakotas and killed as many as 300.
Wounded Knee
