Today is Friday, October 2nd. It is homecoming day, as we all know, and everyone is fairly happy because we have 30 minute classes. We continued our presentations about our assigned sections from chapters 5 through 8. We started off talking about the Native Americans, and settlers.The Indians were one with nature. Some were nomadic people, and others stayed in one place and lived completely off of the land. The settlers came and continuously drove the Indians farther and farther west, off of their native lands. The settlers were seeking gold, cheap land for farming and cattle ranching, and to get away from a crowded life. The government was the main instigator of driving out the Indians. They usually got the Indians drunk, and then coerced the drunken Chiefs into signing contracts that effectively removed the Indians from the land, and forced them onto land set aside as reservations. As time went on, the white settlers wanted something from the new land that the Native Americans were put on, and drove them out again and again, and they put the Indians on barren, worthless tracts of land for their reservation.The Daws act was passed that gave 160 acres of land to Native American families, and 80 acres fer individual. The Indians disliked this, because this was the white European way of doing things. This also was a way of trying to expunge the Native Americans customs and ways of life by "Americanizing". These lands were eventually taken from the Indians by white settlers who weren't supposed to, and did so without care for the Indians. For Indians who refused to conform, the U.S. government, and settlers would declare war on the Native Americans and eliminate them. The Settlers were also the reason that the buffalo were nearly killed off to extinction. They knew that the buffalo was essential to Indian way of life, and killed most of them off. The battle of wounded effectively ended the war against the Native Americans. The white man had won.The Cowboy way of life. Just as their were gold rushes, their was also a cattle rush. This only lasted for around twenty years. The Cowboy way of life was a rough way of life, but today, the Cowboy is romanticized through film. The Cowboys spent weeks on end driving their cattle from one part of the country to the next. They had no railroads, so all the driving had to be done on horse. Cowboys had to defend against thieves, carnivorous predators, and the perils of the trail. They would drive their cattle to cattle towns, where the cattle were replenished of their bulk and health, and then they were off to be processed.The white settlers were such jackasses. They killed 15 million buffalo in 70 years! What idiots! How in the world they could have justified that, I can never fathom.
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