Tricksters and Trailblazers

1
Tricksters and Trailblazers

• Unit 4, Part 2
• The Vanishing Frontier

2
Unit Focus

• Life in the West 1800-1900s
• Westward expansion
• The lure of the west
• Interpret the influences of historical contexts
  on a literary work

3
Pre-Expansion west of Mississippi

• Frontier populated by Native American tribes
• Great Plains Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa,
  Comanche.
• Southwest Apache, Navajo
• Great Plains Relied on Buffalo
• Southwest Sheep, goats, and crops (Spanish
  influence)

4
The American Dream

• 1841 First caravan of pioneers headed for
  California and Oregon.
• Within 2 years lt1,000 people made the trip
• 1849 California Gold Rush
• 1,000s traveled to find the American dream
• 1860s Plains begin to be settled
• 1862 Homestead Act Free Land
• Construction of Railroads 8 mil settlers in 2
  years.

5
Expansion Doom

• Native American way of life doomed
• White belief that they were bringing
  civilization to the savages
• Didnt believe that Native Americans had any
  legitimate right to the land.
• Gained land through force and treaties
• Tribes relocated to Reservations on terrible land

6
Post-Civil War Literature

• Romanticism a Realism
• Truth of ordinary life
• Local-color Realism
• Realistic stories about places or events close to
  home
• Mining camps, farming communities, cattle
  ranches, frontier towns.
• Wild West Influence of current literature

7

• No white person or persons shall be permitted
  to settle upon or occupy any portion of the
  territory, or without the consent of the Indians
  to pass through the same.
• - Treaty of 1868

8

• Our land here is the dearest thing earth to us.
  Men take up land and get rich on it, and it is
  very important for us Indians to keep it.
• - White Thunder

9

• I did not know then how much was ended. When I
  look back now from this high hill of my old age,
  I can still see the butchered women and children
  lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked
  gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still
  young. And I can see that something else died
  there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the
  blizzard. A peoples dream died there. It was a
  beautiful dream.
• - Black Elk

10

• What do these quotations say about the role of
  the land in the lives of Native Americans?
• What do you think is the dream referred to by
  Black Elk?
• What do these quotations suggest about conflicts
  between Native Americans and whites?