Chapter 25 Flashcards
The system that allotted land with designated boundaries to Native American tribes in the West, beginning in the 1850s and ending with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Within these reservations, most land was used communally, rather than owned individually. The U.S. government encouraged and sometimes violently coerced Native Americans to stay on the reservations at all times.
reservation system
On November 29, 1864, militia under the command of John C. Chivington assaulted a Cheyenne village in southeastern Colorado Territory. Initially hailed as a military triumph, it was later found that Chivington’s men had attacked the village without provocation, killing over one hundred women and children.
Sand Creek Massacre
A particularly violent example of the warfare between whites and Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, also known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” In two days, June 25 and 26, 1876, the combined forces of 2500 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians defeated and killed more than 250 U.S. soldiers, including Colonel George Custer. The battle came as the U.S. government tried to compel Native Americans to remain on the reservations and Native Americans tried to defend territory from white gold-seekers. This Indian advantage did not last long, however, as the union of these Indian fighters proved tenuous and the U.S. Army soon exacted retribution.
Battle of the Little Bighorn
Refers to President Ulysses Grant’s attempt in 1868 to end the Plains Indians Wars by enlisting Christian missionaries to supervise Indian reservations. Though it was hoped that the churches would be more gentle agents of “assimilation,” the policy failed and was eventually terminated in 1881.
Peace Policy
An act that broke up Indian reservations and distributed land to individual households. Leftover land was sold for money to fund U.S. government efforts to “civilize” Native Americans.
Dawes Severalty Act
A battle between the U.S. Army and the Dakota Sioux, in which two hundred Native Americans and twenty-nine U.S. soldiers died. Tensions erupted violently over two major issues: the Sioux practice of the “Ghost Dance,” which the U.S. government had outlawed, and the dispute over whether Sioux reservation land would be broken up because of the Dawes Act.
Battle of Wounded Knee
After gold and silver strikes in Colorado, Nevada, and other western territories in the second half of the nineteenth century, fortune-seekers by the thousands rushed to the West to dig. These metals were essential to U.S. industrial growth and were also sold into world markets. After surface metals were removed, people sought ways to extract ore from under the ground, leading to the development of heavy mining machinery. This, in turn, led to the consolidation of the mining industry, because only big companies could afford to buy and build the necessary machines.
mining industry
A geographical, north-south line that bisects the United States from the Dakotas through West Texas, marking off the more humid, or well-watered eastern part of the North American continent from the arid landscapes of the West. Traditionally, the meridian was where Americans imagined that the “West” began.
100th meridian
(1861-1932) Author of the famous “frontier thesis” in which he argued that the taming of the West had shaped the nation’s character. The experience of molding wilderness into civilization, he argued, encouraged Americans’ characteristic embrace of individualism and democracy. Although he is now criticized for, among other things, entirely ignoring the role of Native Americans in the West, his argument remains a keystone of thought about the West in American history.
Frederick Jackson Turner
