Unit One: The Wild West

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Unit One The Wild West

• Settling the West

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Westward Expansion

• From the beginning of American history, Americans
  were constantly moving westward expanding the
  boundaries of the country and to gain their own
  land or sense of independence.
• This constant wave of settlers led to regular
  conflicts with Native tribes who lived in the
  areas.
• The Americans first moved across the Great Plains
  to the Pacific Coast because it was thought to be
  a vast desert, but American settlers starting
  just before the Civil War began closing in the
  Great Divide.

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Indian Territory

• The Great Plains also known as the Prairies (a
  vast rolling grassland) was a sparsely populated
  vast amount of land in the center of North
  America.
• The Great Plains was given to the Indians by
  the American government as a reserve known as the
  Indian Territory.
• The Plains were populated by the Plains Indians
  which included the Arapaho, Sioux, Cheyenne,
  Pawnee, and Navajo.

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Indian Territory

• The Plains Indians due to the introduction of the
  horse by the Spanish became expert breeders and
  riders with all aspects of their society based
  around their Horse Culture.
• The horse made the Plains Indians extremely
  mobile nomadic hunters.
• The Plains Indians hunted the American Buffalo,
  which was used for food, housing (teepee),
  clothing, medicine, and as
  part of their religion.

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Indian Territory

• The Plains Indians were not the only Indians who
  lived in the region, due to the Indian Removal
  Acts (1830) of Andrew Jacksons administration
  most all Eastern tribes were moved across the
  Mississippi into the Oklahoma Territory (Plains).
• The greatest example of this forced movement was
  the Trail of Tears when the Cherokee Indians were
  forced out of Georgia to the Oklahoma Territory.

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Indian Territory

• The Natives of the Plains heard of the American
  white man from the Eastern tribes, but already
  new about the white man when the Spanish owned
  the territory.
• The Great Plains or Western frontier would not
  stay long in the hands of the Natives due to the
  movement of miners, ranchers, homesteaders, and
  railroads into the area to claim it for American
  prosperity.

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Manifest Destiny

• Americans believed through Manifest Destiny that
  it was Americas mission from God to spread over
  the whole of the continent and settle the land.
  (no matter who was in the way)
• The American government just before the Civil War
  tried to entice settlement into the Great Plains
  region and railroad expansion across the
  continent to the Pacific Ocean to connect the
  nation.

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Western Expansion

• There were many push-pull factors leading to
  settlement of the West.
• Push displacement of farmers, former slaves,
  and other workers after the Civil War mass
  immigration into the Eastern seaboard high cost
  of living in the East.
• Pull government incentives through various acts
  offering large tracts of land for cheap prices
  owning own land (private property) gold strikes
  vast amount of cattle and buffalo.

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Government Incentives

• The Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 1864 gave
  large land grants to the Union and Central
  Pacific Railroads for the purpose of the building
  of a Trans-Continental Railway or Overland Route.
  (They received more than 175 million acres of
  public land).
• The Union Pacific started at Omaha Nebraska and
  was built mostly by Irishmen (patty or mick),
  veterans, and free blacks.
• The Central Pacific started just south of San
  Francisco, California and was built mostly by
  Chinamen (chink, celestials, or coolies) and
  Native Americans.

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Transcontinental Railroad

• The construction was hard with tunnels having to
  be blasted into the Sierra Nevada Mountains
  with the use of nitro-glycerin (liquid
  explosive).
• The final spike (golden spike) was driven on 10
  May, 1869 at Promontory Point Utah. (Driven by
  Leland Stanford president of the Central
  Pacific)
• The driving of the Golden Spike signaled the
  completion of Manifest Destiny and led to mass
  settlement of the Great Plains region.

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Transcontinental Railroad

• To better organize the train routes and time
  schedules the railroads adopted A System of
  National Time Zones for Railroads, dividing the
  nation into four time zones.

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Government Incentives

• The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 gave state
  governments millions of acres of land in the West
  to sell for the establishment of Land Grant
  colleges for agriculture and mechanical arts.
  (Auburn and Alabama AM)
• The largest amounts of these lands were purchased
  by bankers and land speculators (people who
  bought land in the hope that the price would rise
  and sell it for a profit later.)
• The Homestead Act of 1862 offered people 160
  acres of land (quarter mile square) for a dollar
  an acre if they lived and cultivated the land for
  five years, it was free.

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Government Incentives

• The Timber Culture Act of 1873 provided a free
  grant of 160 acres of land if forty acres were
  planted in trees, for ten years.
• The Desert Act of 1877 provided for 640 acres of
  land for a dollar an acre to reclaim, irrigate,
  and cultivate the land for three years.
• These many incentives caused people in mass
  numbers to settle the Western lands, but the
  first mass wave of people developed because of
  the gold strikes.

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The Mining Strikes

• There are two types of mining placer and quartz.
• Placer mining is when dirt from river beds is
  sifted for gold, or small mines are dug into
  mountains. (panning or using a sluice box)
• Quartz mining is done by deep mines dug into the
  ground or mountain sides by large mining
  corporations.
• A person who came to the west to hunt for gold
  was called a prospector.
• A prospector staked a claim on his land and
  had to protect it from others, because if he left
  it he lost the claim. (later claims were bought
  and sold)

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Mining Techniques
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The Mining Strikes

• The first gold strike that moved people to the
  West in great numbers was the discovery of gold
  on Sutters Mill sparking the California Gold
  Rush and the mass movement of single men called
  Forty-niners (1849) into the area.
• The next major gold strike was the Colorado Gold
  Rush in 1859 at Pikes Peak by William Greenberry
  Russell near Cherry Creek.
• Many people headed to the area with the slogan
  Pikes Pike or Bust, but many did not find
  gold, because it was too deep.

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The Mining Strikes

• Also in 1859 a huge silver and gold strike
  developed in Nevadas Six-Mile Canyon by Henry
  Comstock with his famous Comstock Lode. ( It was
  one of the richest silver veins in the world with
  306,000,000 worth of bullion.)
• John W. Mackay and partners found the largest
  vein of ore in the Comstock Lode known as the
  Big Bonanza.
• During the Civil War gold strikes and rushes
  occurred in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wyoming,
  and New Mexico.

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The Mining Strikes

• In the 1870s a gold strike was found in the Black
  Hills of the Dakota Territory by a group of
  prospectors led by George Armstrong Custer
  starting the Black Hills Gold Rush.
• One of the biggest effects of the Black Hills
  Gold Rush was the encroachment on Sioux Indian
  lands and war.
• The last great gold strike was in the 1890s in
  Alaska known s the Klondike or Yukon Gold Rush.
  (Last Frontier)

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Effect of the Mining Strikes

• The quick rush of people into the mining areas
  led to quickly put together towns known as Boom
  towns.
• When the gold, silver, copper, or etc. veins went
  dry so did the town, now called a ghost town.
• In the West famous and infamous mining towns
  developed like Tombstone, Deadwood, Last Chance
  Gulch, Leadville, Silver City, and Virginia City.
• Most all Boomtowns had a Saloon (casino and bar),
  Hurdy-gurdy House/brothel/bordello (prostitutes),
  Opium din, Race track, and General Store.

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The Mining Frontier
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Effect of the Mining Strikes

• The mining towns were at times violent places to
  live with prospectors fighting over claims,
  highway men or road agents attacking stagecoaches
  that carried goods and precious metals, and town
  violence.
• To enforce the law because organized law was
  scarce or corrupt, miners and townspeople formed
  vigilance committees to track down criminals and
  hang them by lynching (lynch mob justice).
• A new style of dress developed in the
  mining areas led
  by Levi Strauss who in 1872 with
  inventor Jacob Davis patented denim
  blue jeans to sell to the miners.

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Effect of the Mining Strikes

• People in these areas before
  the expansion of the railroads got
  their mail through the Pony Express.
• One of the most famous stagecoach services was
  Wells Fargo Co. formed by the founder of
  American Express (pony mail
  service) Henry Wells, William Fargo,
  and John Warren Butterfield.
• The Mining Frontier led to mass movements of
  people into the Western Frontier and gave needed
  capital and materials for the Industrial boom in
  America.