The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution
Terms
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- Sand Creek California
- site of indian massacre by militia forces in 1864
- Little Big Horn
- site of serious but temporary US Amry defeat in the Sioux War of 1876-1877
- Sitting Bull
- Sioux "medicine mam" and leader of an uprising 1876-1877
- Cheif Joseph
- leader of the Nez Perce tribe who cnducted a brilliant but unsuccessful military campaign in 1877
- Geronimo
- leader of the Apaches of Arizone in their warfare with the whites
- Helen Hunt Jackson
- Massachusetts writer whose books aroused sympathy for the plight of the Native Americans
- Battle of Wounded Knee
- bloody affair that resulted when the federal government attempoted to stamp out the indians scared "Ghost Dance"
- Pikes Peak, Colorado
- site of a mojor gold discovery, 1858-1859, the drew fortune seekers to the Rocky Mountains
- Oliver H Kelley
- leading organizer of the Grange, who initially stressed social ritual and education for farmers
- James B Weaver
- former Civil War general and Granger who ran as the Greenback Labor party candidate for president in 1880
- Mary E Lease
- eloquent Kansas Populist who urged famers to "raise less corn and more hell"
- Ignatius Donnelly
- leading Populist roator and congressmen from Minnesota
- Sioux
- major nothern pains Indian nation that fought and eventually lost a bitter war against the US Army 1876-1877
- Appache
- southwestern Indians led by Geronimo who were finally conquered and forced to settle in Oklahoma
- reservations
- generally poor areas where vanquished indians were eventually confined under federal control
- "Ghost Dance"
- idian religious movement, originiating out of the sacred Sun Dance, that the federal government attempted to stamp out in 1890
- DOS act
- federal law that attempted to dissolve tribal landholding and establish indians as individual farmers
- Com Staulkload
- huge silver and gold deposit that brough wealth and statehood to Nevada
- Long Drive
- general term for the herding of cattle from the grassy plains to the railroad termianls of Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming
- Homestead 1862
- federal law that offered generous land opportunities to poorer farmers but also provided the unscrupulous with opportunioties for hoaxes and fruad
- bardwire
- improved type of fencing that enabled farmers to ebclose land on the treeless plains
- Oklahoma
- former "Indian Territory" where "sooners" tried to get the jump on "boomeres" when it was opened for settlement in 1889
- safety
- the theory that the availablitiy of the frontier lessened social conflict in America by providing economic opportunities for eastern workers
- grange
- farmers organization that began as a secret social group and expanded into such activityes as profarmer politics and lawmaking
- greenback part
- short lived profarmer third party that gained over a million votes and elected fourteen congressmen in 1878
- farmers alliance
- board based organizations of the 1880s that drew both black and white agriculturists into social, economic and political activity
- populous party
- thirt political party that emerged in the 1890s to express rural grievance and mount major attacks on the Democrats and Republicans
- the encroachment of the white settlements and the violation of treaties with indians
- led to nearly constante warfare with plains Indians from 1868 to about 1890
- rail lines, disease and the destruction of the buffalo
- decimated Inian populations and hastened their defeat at the hands of advancing whites
- reformers attempts to make native Americans conform to white ways
- further undermined native Americans traditional tribal culture and morale
- the coming of big business mining and stock raising to the west
- ended the romantic, colorful era of the miners and cattlmens frontier
- "dry farming", barded wire and irrigation
- made it possible to farm the dry, treeless areas of the Great Plains and the West
- the passing of the frontier of 1890
- created new psycholofical and economic problems of a natin accustomed to a boundless open West
- the growing economic specialization of the western agriculturalists
- made the farmers vulnerable to vast industtrial and market forces beyond their control
- the decline of farm prices and the static money supply
- created severe deflation and forced famers deeper into debt
- the inabilty of individualistic farmers to organize economically
- led grain and cotton growers to turn from economics to politics as a solution for their grievances
- the racial divisions between white and black famers
- prevented famers in the South from forming a united front to promote their interests