Day 105: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

Baltimore Polytechnic InstituteFebruary 13, 2013A/A.P. U.S. History

Mr. Green

Objectives: Students will:Describe the nature of the cultural conflicts and battles that accompanied the white American migration into the Great Plains and the Far West.Explain the development of federal policy towards Native Americans in the late nineteenth century.Analyze the brief flowering and decline of the cattle and mining frontiers, and the settling of the arid West by small farmers increasingly engaged with a worldwide economy.

AP FocusFederal land grants entice whites to seek out new lives in the West, which brings them into conflict with the Indians, many of whom had earlier been pushed west by the U.S. government.

By the end of the century, the frontier is closed—all of the land in the continental United States is settled or can no longer be considered frontier, according to the Census Bureau.

The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution

CHAPTER THEMESAfter the Civil War, whites overcame the Plains

Indians’ fierce resistance and settled the Great West, bringing to a close the long frontier phase of American history.

The farmers who populated the West found themselves the victims of an economic revolution in agriculture. Trapped in a permanent debtor dependency, in the 1880s, they finally turned to political action to protest their condition. Their efforts culminated in the Populist Party’s attempt to create an interracial farmer/labor coalition in the 1890s, but William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in the pivotal election of 1896 signaled the triumph of urbanism and the middle class.

Chapter Focus

1890s Decade Chart due today

Announcements

Reservation system developed when the federal government signed treaties with various tribes at Fort Laramie in 1851 and Fort Atkinson in 1853

Difficulty in making treatiesTribes/Chiefs were not used in Native American cultureMany groups were nomadic/scattered bands

1860’s-Dakota Territory/Indian TerritoryCorrupt federal Indian agentsMany wars after the Civil War with Native

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

1864-Sand Creek, CO massacreColonel J. M. Chivington’s militia massacred 400 Indians

1866-Sioux massacred Captain William J. Fetterman’s 81 soldier/civilian crew

1868-2nd Fort Laramie treaty guaranteeing Sioux land

1874-Custer discovered gold in Black HillsBattle of Little Big Horn-Custer lost everyone

Receding Native Population

Willingness to use military force to back its land claims

RailroadDiseasesFirewaterExtermination of the Buffalo

“Taming of the Indians”

15 million Bison grazed the plains after the Civil War

By 1885 only a few 1,000 remained

Bellowing Herds of Bison

Battle of Wounded Knee-1890200 Indian men, women, and children killed

Dawes Severalty Act of 1887dissolved many tribesended tribal ownership of landindividual family heads with 160 free acrescitizenship in 25 yearsfull citizenship granted in 1924

Carlisle Indian School in PA“Kill the Indian and save the man”

243,000 in 18871.5 million according to Census 2000

The End of the Trail

Colorado-1858Comstock Lode-1859Once the gold was gone, ore breaking

machinery was brought inThe mining industry began with corporations

pooling resources-industrialization of gold panning

Increased the federal Treasury, helped fund the Civil War, railroads, and conflict with the Indians

Mining: From Dishpan to Ore Breaker

The railroad started and ended the Long DriveCowboys brought cattle to train stationsCattle shipped to stockyards, then the east coast

The railroad ended the Long Drive with new routes and accessibility

Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive

1.How did whites finally overcome resistance of the Plains Indians, and what happened to the Indians after their resistance ceased?

2. What social, ethnic, environmental, and economic factors made the trans-Mississippi West a unique region among the successive American frontiers? What makes the West continue to be a region quite distinctive from other regions such as the Northeast, the Midwest, and the South? How does the myth of the frontier West differ from the actual reality, in the late nineteenth century, and after?

Discussion-Review

Identifications due on February 19Study/Prepare for Unit 6 assessment-gilded

age 1865-1900

Homework