America’s History Fifth Edition Chapter 16: The American West Copyright © 2004 by Bedford/St. Martin’s Henretta Brody Dumenil Ware.

America’s HistoryFifth Edition

Chapter 16: The American West

Copyright © 2004 by Bedford/St. Martin’s

Henretta • Brody • Dumenil • Ware

The Great Plains• Indians of the Great Plains• Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Ranchers• Homesteaders• The Fate of the Indians

I. The Great Plains

A. Indians of the Great Plains1. About a hundred thousand Native Americans lived on the

Great Plains at mid-nineteenth century; they were divided into six linguistic families and over thirty tribal groupings.

2. In the eastern section lived the Mandan, Arikaras, and Pawnees; in the Southwest, the Kiowas and the Comanches; on the Central Plains, the Arapahos and Cheyennes; to the north, the Blackfeet, Crows, Cheyennes, and the Sioux nation.

3. The Sioux were nomadic people and once they were on horseback, they claimed the entire Great Plains north of the Arkansas River as their hunting grounds.

4. The Sioux dominated the northern Great Plains by driving out or subjugating longer-settled tribes.

I. The Great Plains

A. Indians of the Great Plains5. Sioux women labored on the buffalo skins that the

men brought back; the women did not see their unrelenting labor as subordination to men.

6. The Sioux saw sacred meaning in every manifestation of the natural world; the natural world embodied a “series of powers pervading the universe.”

7. Once white traders appeared on the upper Mississippi River during the eighteenth century, the Teton Sioux traded pelts and buffalo robes for the goods they offered.

I. The Great Plains

B. Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Ranchers

1. On first encountering the Great Plains, Euro-Americans thought the land “almost wholly unfit for cultivation” and best left to the Indians.

2. In 1834, Congress formally designated the Great Plains as permanent Indian country.

3. In the 1840s, settlers began moving to Oregon and California, and the Indian country became a bridge to the Pacific.

I. The Great Plains

B. Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Ranchers4. In 1861, telegraph lines brought San Francisco into

instant communication with the East; the next year the federal government began a transcontinental railroad project.

5. The federal government awarded generous land grants, plus millions of dollars of loans to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads.

6. The Union Pacific built westward from Omaha, and the Central Pacific built eastward from Sacramento until the tracks met in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Other rail companies laid track in the West, but many went bankrupt in the Panic of 1873.

I. The Great Plains

B. Wagon Trains, Railroads, and Ranchers

4. Railroad tycoons realized that rail transportation was laying the basis for the economic exploitation of the Great Plains; a railroad boom followed economic recovery in 1878.

The Far West• The Mining Frontier• Hispanics, Chinese, Anglos• Golden California

Map 16.1 The Natural Environment of the West, 1860s (p. 458)

Map 16.2 Western Trunk Lines, 1887 (p. 461)

Map 16.3 The Rural Ethnic Mosaic: Blue Earth County, Minnesota, 1880 (p. 467)

Map 16.4 The Indian Frontier, to 1890 (p. 470)

Map 16.5 The Sioux Reservations in South Dakota, 1868-1889 (p. 471)

Map 16.6 The Mining Frontier, 1848-1890 (p. 474)

Map 16.7 The Settlement of the Pacific Slope, 1860-1890 (p. 477)

Figure 16.1 Freight Rates for Transporting Nebraska Crops (p. 469)

The Yo-Hamite Falls (1855) (p. 456)

Tepee Liner (p. 459)

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (p. 463)

Cowboys on the Open Range (p. 464)

The Dead at Wounded Knee (p. 472)

Mexican Miners (p. 479)