Unit 6 Flashcards
What was the westward expansion?
The increased migration and settlement to the West, because of religious refuge or economic opportunities, due to the access to natural and mineral resources.
What was the concept of “manifest dynasty”?
John O’Sullivan introduced the concept in 1845 of the prevalent idea of the unique role of the United States in spreading over the continent. The phrase implied divine encouragement for territorial expansion to spread Protestant, democratic values.
What are the two significant pieces of legislation to encourage and facilitate westward migration in 1862?
The Homestead Act & The Pacific Act
What was the Homestead Act (1862)?
The act allowed the head of the household or individuals over 25 (including unmarried women) to receive a 160-acre parcel of land for a small filing fee, with the only requirement being that the owner needed to make improvements to the land within five years of taking possession.
What was the Pacific Railroad Act (1862)?
The act commissioned the Union Pacific Railroad to build a new track west of Omaha, Nebraska, while the Central Pacific Railroad moved east from Sacramento, California. This was the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed in the spring of 1869.
What was the impact of the Homestead and Pacific Railroad Act?
These acts helped create a steady flow of migration that would last until the end of the century. Nearly 400,000 settlers made the trek westward by the height of the movement in 1870.
What were the four main problems with homesteading
- Infertile Land
- Lack of Rainfall
- Lack of Timber (hard to build houses)
- Isolation
What solutions were created to help homesteaders?
- The 1873 Timber Culture Act let people claim more land to grow more crops to survive
- As the railroad built over time, the homesteaders became less isolated
- Water pumps were developed to try to bring water to the surface for the irrigation of farmland and drinking water
How did the gold rush of 1849 impact Plain Indians’ lives?
A gold rush would happen every few years on Plain Indians’ territory. Settlers would move onto tribal land and try to search for gold. This happened on the Arapaho tribe and the Cheyenne tribes’ land on the Rocky Mountain in 1859.
How did the railroad affect the growth of the cattle industry?
The railroad connected hundreds of towns across the United States. Beef could be sold to cities like New York and Chicago for 8-10x the cost it took rear the cows (cattle) because the problem had previously been transportation.
How were cowboys affected by the growth of the cattle industry?
Instead of working on open land, cowboys began to work on the ranches. The work was safer ranches. They could stay in houses and generally remained in a single place more often than when they roamed the country.
What caused the excess supply of cows?
Many investors and entrepreneurs got excited and overinvested in cattle.
What happened in the winter of 1886-87?
America saw one of its snowiest years in a decade. This is the ‘Big Die-Up.’ Many of the cattle got frostbite in the snow, and millions of cattle died. Some historians think that 15% of cattle died that winter.
What challenges did American farmers face in the last quarter of the 19th century that was significant?
- Rapidly declining farm prices
- Prohibitively high tariffs on items they needed to purchase.
- Foreign competition.
- Overproduction, where the glut of their products in the marketplace drove the prices lower
What was the Grange Movement?
Oliver Hudson Kelly believed that farmers could help themselves by creating farmers’ cooperatives. These cooperatives would pool their resources and help obtain better rates from railroad companies and other businesses. This was called Patrons of Husbandry.
What was the impact of the Grangers?
At a state level, the grangers did briefly succeed in urging the passage of Granger laws. The movement also created a political party, the Greenback Party, which saw brief success with the election of fifteen members of Congress; however, such successes were short-lived and had little impact on everyday farmers’ lives.
What was the Farmers’ Alliance?
A conglomeration of three regional alliances formed in the mid-1880s took root in the wake of the Grange movement. The alliance movement had several goals similar to the original Grange, including greater regulation of railroad prices and creating an inflationary national monetary policy.
Sand Creek Massacre
- In Colorado, Arapahoe and Cheyenne’s tribes fought back against land encroachment.
- Colonel John Chivington led a militia raid upon a camp near Sand Creek, Colorado, where the leader had already negotiated a peaceful settlement.
- Chivington’s troops murdered nearly one hundred people, mainly women, and children.
What was the Dawes Act of 1887?
This act permitted the federal government to divide the land of any tribe and grant 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land to each head of the family. Once all the allotments were determined, the remaining tribal lands - as many as eighty million acres—were sold to white American settlers, a deadly blow to the Indian way of life.
What was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
This treaty ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. It promised US citizenship to nearly seventy-five thousand Hispanics now living in the American Southwest
What caused conflict between Mexican Americans and American settlers during the westward expansion?
In 1889-1890 in New Mexico, a group called las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps) formed. Their goal was to try to reclaim their land and intimidate white Americans, preventing further land seizures.
What caused conflict and confrontation between Native Americans and American settlers during the westward expansion?
With the support of local militias and, later, the federal government behind them, American settlers sought to eliminate the tribes from their desired land. The result was devasting for the Indian tribes because they lacked the weapons and group cohesion to fight back against the well-armed forces.
How were Mexican Americans treated during the westward expansion?
- In California and throughout the southwest, Anglo-American settlers overran the Hispanic populations that had been living and thriving there.
- Despite promises made in the treaty, Mexican Americans in New Mexico were quickly dispossessed of their land by white settlers.
- Hispanic citizens were relegated to the worst-paying job under the most terrible working conditions.
What type of change did the American workforce undergo between the Civil War and the turn of the century?
In 1865, nearly 60 percent of Americans still lived and worked on farms, but by the early 1900s, only 40 percent still lived in rural areas, with the remainder living and working in urban and early suburban areas. In addition, many of these urban and suburban dwellers earned their wages in factories.
What were the disadvantages of working in factories?
- Wages were very low; the annual salary was barely $600
- Approximately 20 percent of the population in industrialized cities were at or below the poverty level
- Long hours, risk of death and injury, and dehumanizingly repetitive work were further hardships for workers
Why was there an increase in child labor?
- Factory owners were able to hire children to perform many tasks.
- Children were small enough to fit easily among the machines and could be hired for simple work for a fraction of an adult man’s pay.
