Ch 16 Flashcards
(18 cards)
Comanche
- most powerful tribe on the western frontier in 1860
- benefited from the CW
- the Army and Texas Rangers that harassed them for decades were called to fight against each other in other battles
- hunted buffalo and traveled over the Great Plains
- 1850s= declined→ US Army began to take the upper hand in Texas
- Comanches needed space to hunt, trade…..didn’t want a permanent settlement
- 1858s= battles; 100 Comanches were kill; women and children taken prisoner
- peace near 1865→ US troops were taken out of Texas
Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty
- 1867= US peace commissioners met with more than 5,000 Comanches (Kiowas, Naishans, ….) at the Medicine Lodge Creek in Texas to restore order to the SW and open up new land for white settlements
- led by William Sherman
- provided a Comanche reservation but gave them a right to hunt on open plains below the Arkansas River in Indian Territory
- US thought the Comanche would become farmers but Comanche did not want to be settled farmers
- Comanches were thinking that they would spend winter at the reservation but go back to hunting for buffalo, Texas cattle and trading them
- misinterpretation realized the next spring when Comanches raided cattle and horses in Texas
How US destroyed Indian life
- kill buffalo
- put indians on reservations
- assimilation (schools)
Bosque Redondo
- reservation in central Mexico where the majority of the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches were confined in the Civil War
- failure
- Navajos and Apaches were enemies and did not want to cooperate
- NM land could not support large families
How did the Gold Rush affect the Indians
- not good for CA tribes bc they were already weak bc of the Spanish and Mexican efforts to turn them into workers on the missions and the large rancheros state
- federal commissioners negotiated treaties but were not followed
- settlers and miners ignored restrictions of Indians land if they thought they could find gold or plant a settlement
Ghost Dance
- movement initiated by spiritiual leader Wovoka
- promised return of the buffalo and the disappearance of white ppl if the Sioux dance and return to their ancient ways
- free themselves from dependence on white culture
- scared whites
Homestead Act
- act provided 160 acres of federal land to a family that would settle and maintain land for 5 years
- act didn’t specify where land would come from
- initial homestead lands were in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas
- all prime Buffalo hunting locations for tribes
Grant’s Peace Policy
- Grant’s thinking was shaped by the terrible bloodshed he had seen in the Civil War and by his identification with the emancipation of slaves
- wanted peace with Indians and wanted room for white settlement
- he wanted to assimilate Indians into white society
- Indians did not want to be productive and useful members of white society
Dawes Act
- aka General Allotment Act
- The act divided the reservations into 160-acre tracts to be assigned to each family
- after a 25 year waiting period, Indian families could sell the land like their white neighbors
- Indians who took possession of a homestead also became U.S. citizens
- the act pushed Indians to be farmers and to join an individualistic culture that many found to be alien
Carlisle Indian School
- Penn
- 25 Indian boarding schools, eventually both Catholic and Protestant, were built on the Carlisle model between 1879 and 1902
- used federal tax dollars to teach religion, western customs, and values
- assimilation
- Indian students resisted the goal of the boarding schools to transform them, though such resistance was hardly punished.
transcontinental railroad
- A train route across the United States, finished in 1869. It was the project of two railroad companies: the Union Pacific built from the east, and the Central Pacific built from the west. The two lines met in Utah.
- Pacific Railroad Act 1862
- Irish and Chinese built
Nez Perce
-some lived independently along the Salmon and Snake Rivers in Idaho and Oregon; eventually forced to live in Indian Territory in 1877
The Sioux
- Lakota Sioux, the most powerful by the 1860s and 1870s, signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868(opposed by Sitting Bull ); discovery of gold in the Black Hills region led to the Great Sioux War(Battle of Little Bighorn – 1876)
Indian Peace Commission
-believed that large tracts of land or reservations would protect the Indians and pave the way for assimilation
Pacific Railway Act
-Central Pacific and Union Pacific RRs
Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869
Standardized clocks to synchronize with RR schedules
Increased international trade
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST
Farms and ranches by the late 1800s
Texas longhorn cattle/Open Range on federal land(branding)
Abilene, Kansas, the nation’s first cattle town, founded by Joseph McCoy
Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene
Dodge City: saloons and less than reputable women
Refrigerator cars to Chicago – hub of the meatpacking industry
Charles Goodnight and his “Chuck Wagons”
1880s invention of barbed wire and declining market for beef/harsh weather
End of the open ranges, round ups, and cattle drives let to smaller scale family ranches and rising tensions between Mexicans and Anglos in Texas and New Mexico(fence cutting and Spanish language newspapers
`Gunfighters and Outlaws
- Wyatt Earp and his brothers helped to establish order in Tombstone, Arizona, after a gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881
- Jesse and Frank James – train robbing rampage in 1886 in Missouri and Billy the Kid in Lincoln County til Pat Garret killed him
- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show(William Cody) featured Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley
OTHER
1880’s Wyoming and Colorado granted women the right to vote
1896 Utah admitted as a state after rejecting polygamy
1907 Oklahoma admitted as a state
1912 New Mexico and Arizona admitted as states
