The American West

1. Chapter 16: The American West
a. The Great Plains
i. Indians of the Great Plains
1. In the middle of the 19th century, probably around 100,000 Native American lived in the Great Plains. They were very diverse, and were consisted of around 6 linguistic families and at least 30 tribal groupings. The Native Americans were then hurt greatly by the small pox and measles introduced by the Europeans.
2. The Teton Sioux were Native Americans, who had lived in the Great Plains. The land in the Great Plains had attracted many buffalos and antelopes, which the Sioux had hunted. They were a nomadic tribe and lived in portable skin teepees. Before they had horses, the Sioux tribe treated men and women equally. After they had gotten horses, men had become the hunters. They also drove out other tribes that lived in the Great Plains.
3. The Teton Sioux’s religion: they believed that everything was sacred and there was a hierarchy of how sacred everything was.
4. The Sioux were all self-contained; they did trade with other tribes and when they became acquainted with white settlers, they traded with them too. ii. Wagon Trails, Railroads, and Ranchers
1. At first the Euro-Americans believed the Great Plains to uninhabitable by people depending on agriculture. They called it the Great American Desert. When people wanted to go westward, they took their wagons; the wagons hurt the land as they went over it.
2. Soon the government gave 2 companies generous land grants plus millions of dollars to build the transcontinental railroad. The Union Pacific built westward from Omaha, and the Central Pacific built eastward from Sacramento, California. In 1869, the tracks met at Promontory Point, Utah. Soon railroad tycoons figured out the benefit of building railroads in the Great Plains, and soon during the 1880’s, 40,000 miles of track were laid west of the Mississippi.
3. Buffalos had started to reap much profit. Soon people realized that hides could be used to make leather, which made even more profits and killing buffalos had become efficient. iii. Homesteaders
1. At first many people had believed that the Great Plains was not fertile and had been named as “The Great American Desert”. Soon newspapers started to change its image by calling it the garden spot of the world. The exceptionally “wet” years between 1878-1886 supported this vision. Soon homestead acts started drew many settlers to the Plains.
2. This benefited women because if a woman was widowed, women were able to operate the farms on their own. Even if a man was around, women still contributed greatly to the farm. This may explain why only 2.4 percent of women had never married.
3. African Americans had started to move to Kansas because they believed it to be a land of racial freedom. Many of them called themselves Exodusters: “participants in the exodus to the dry prairie”.
4. Farming in the plains was no easy venture. The imagery of rainfall after planting had disappeared. Heat waves killed many of their crops and many people even gave up the west and moved back. Farmers, in order to use the land, they started using dry farming methods. These methods included planting deep to bring sub soil moisture to the plants, and quickly harrowing after rainfall in order to slow down evaporation. Soon a much of the crops and animals came from the Great Plains.
5. The farmers did not earn much profit. They had a lot of disadvantages that supplied them with machinery, arranged their credit, and marked their products. They then started to use local granges, which provided the farmers with meeting places. Thy soon started to set up their own banks and purchasing in bulk from machinery. iv. The Fate of the Indians
1. Although the Native Americans had many treaties and their lands had protected by federal law, their land was still settled upon by white settlers.
2. Whites then started to move Native Americans in to reservations. The Native Americans fought back but they were no matcSSSSSSXXXXSSSSSSXSXSSXSSXSXSSXXh for the union army, which consisted of veterans and of black cavalrymen of the 9th and 10th regiment (called “buffalo soldiers” by the Native Americans).
3. White land hunger ruined the reservation system. They started to search for gold, and the government opened some of the reservation land to whites.
4. The government was trying to assimilate Native Americans in to white culture. Many reformers were trying to change how the Native Americans would be treated; the reformers also favored the Indian Office’s efforts to undermine tribal authority. They also wanted to give Native Americans land. This resulted in the Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed the president to split up tribal lands, giving each family head 160 acres of land, and selling the rest of the land to help further Indian education.
5. A man named Wovoka had started a new religion, where he had a vision where he visited god. He believed that the white men would go away by the spring of 1891, and the plains would return to the way before they came.
6. The Battle of Wounded Knee was the final episode in this war.
b. The Far West
i. The Mining Frontier
1. California was very hilly and mountainous and did not attract farmers who were in search for arable land. Instead, its settlers were attracted by the opportunities for mining gold. Many people had found gold in California, and when they had depleted much of the gold, they started searching elsewhere. Soon they had found gold in more places in the west, and those places had then attracted more settlers.
2. Virginia City had started of as a “bawdy, ramshackle mining camp”, but as time went on families came to this city. Men worked as miners below ground, and some women worked as dance-hall entertainers and prostitutes. Virginia City had still been a relatively normal town, shown by the diary of John Galloway.
3. In many places copper, lead, and zinc were actually more important than gold and silver because they were in high demand. ii. Hispanics, Chinese, Anglos
1. The Chinese were at first attracted by the gold rush and came to make a name for them. Many had come as indentured servants, but those were soon outlawed in America in the 1820’s as involuntary servitude. After the transcontinental railroad was made, they scattered.
2. The government believed there were too many Chinese, so they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped the flow of Chinese working immigrants in to the United States. Many Chinese, who were born in the United States had brought in other people as “paper sons”.