Know about the Continental Railroad.
-People were obsessed with the railroad.
-The biggest obstacle was the Sierra Nevada it's more than two miles high and it's walls were made of granite.
-The government didn't have enough cash, so they paid the companies in federal land.
-It was difficult to travel by train in the winter because of snow and avalanches.
-A train got stuck in the snow and the people ate each other.
-They brought the Chinese to build the Continental Railroad because they had built the Great Wall of China. They did labor and they were considered between human and animal. They did back-breaking work.
-Men were blown to pieces working on the Railroad.
-Temperatres get as hot as the surface of the sun.
-Chinese men died because of the rocks exploding.
-They worked on building the track too.
-May 10th 1869 was when the railroad was finished.
-It's still used today.
-There is so little rain that nothing grows but grass.
-Trees can survive all the drouts.
-Great Plains have a lot of thunder storms and it's dangerous. There are high winds.
-More twisters hit that region than anywhere else on earth.
-Stuff about guns..
-There were a ton of buffalo.
-People hunted and killed buffalo.
-They harvest them for their hide.
-They ship over 1 million out of Kansas alone.
-On a good day the Mayor earned more than the President.
-Small pieces become coats and shoes.
-Hunters kill 8,000 buffalo a day.
-The Indians couldn't understand what the white people were doing but we were surviving off of natural resources.
-Black elk was 6 years old when the Railroad arrived.
-Skin is clothing, tee-pees, and coffins.
-They hunted them on foot beacause there were no horses to ride.
-1493 Spanish Conquistadors brought horses over.
-Buffalo can run at 35mph.
-It can take 15 arrows to kill a buffalo.
-30 million are killed in a decade.
-Native Americans then faced starvation.
-They had to leave, I think?
-In 1889 only 85 buffalo existed in the whole US.
-1865 Civil War leaves cities stripped of resources.
-By 1868 the Railroad spread to the east crossing Kansas but hadn't hit Texas.
-America needed a new kind of hero, the cowboy.
-After civil war 60% of people lived in rural poverty.
-The lasso dates back to Ancient Egyptians.
-Cattle brought over by the Spanish created a new breed, the Texas Longhorn.
-They were wild and easily spooked.
-Every cowboy dreaded a stampede.
-After the Civil War thousands of blacks went to Texas looking for work.
-Most cowboys were actually black.
-Barb wire changed cowboys lives.
-New farms covered half a billion of acres range.
-Farmers were on a collision course.
-Glitten made barb wire with a coffee grinder to get steel bars sharped and he lined them with wire and it was sharp.
-Within 10 years he sold enough to go around the world 25 times.
-Settling the Great Plains marked the end of one way of life and started another.
-1876 a century of Gov. Policies targeted Native Americans to keep them remote/separated.
-They lived on reservations.
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