Today Tayor Schaben presented her powerpoint called Cultures Clash on the Prairie which is the second part to Taylor Peterson's powerpoint yesterday.
Assimilation:
- Definition: A plan that was made to make Native Americans part of white culture
- Forced Native Americans to change their beliefs
Dawes Act:
- The purpose of this act was to make Native Americans like white people
- Also meant to take away reservations and divide it among the Native Americans individually
Buffalo:
- Native Americans used buffalo for rituals, cookware, tools, glue, clothes, and food
- The white men would hunt the buffalo for sport
- In 1800, 65 million existed and by 1900 only a single herd existed in Yellowstone National Park
The Battle of Wounded Knee:
- 350 Souix camped on Wounded Knee creek
- US troups surrounded Souix and were ordered to arrest the chief and his followers
- Souix performed "Ghost Dance" because they thought it would protect their way of life
- Soldiers attacked Sioux with canon when they refused to hand over their weapons
- Symbolizes the end of the Indian Wars
Cattle:
- Native Americans could no longer use the buffalo so they had to use cattle instead
- Horses also became common in the Plains
- Mexicans taught them how to ranch in Texas and Kansas
Vaqueros and Cowboys:
- The first cowboys were Mexican
- Mexican's taught settlers how to round up animals, take care of them and to brand them
- Once railroads reached the Great Plains, the need for cowboys rose
- Vaqueros influenced the speech, clothing, and food of the cowboys
Beef:
- Cities started expanding when the Civil War ended
- The need for beef increased
- Transportation of cattle was hard because of thunderstorms, overflowing rivers, and blockades by angry farmers
Chisholm Trail
- Was a major cattle route
- Responsible for shipping 35,000 cattle in its first year, and increases that number 40,000 in the second year
- Cowboys were hired to drive cattle along this trail since they were able to transfer more cattle
- Ran from San Antonio, Texas, to Kansas
Cowboy Days:
- Worked 10-14 hours a day on a ranch
- Worked 14 hours if on the trail
- Started work at the age of 15 and had to stop at age 40 because of the hard labor
- Carried around guns to protect themselves from diseased animals
Cowboy Work:
- Long horn cows were free to open range
- Cowboys performed a four step process: gather as many long horns as possible so they could graze and not run to fatten them up, brand them to tell whose is whose, and chose which ones to travel and which ones would stay
Long Drive:
- Usually lasts 3 months
- Includes about 300 cattle, a cook and a wrangler
- Travel from morning to night
End of Open Range:
- Cattle herds grew as well as the ranching business
- Open range ended because of overgrazing of land, bad weather, and the invention of barbed wire fences
- Barbed wire fences allowed fenced in ranches and made it cheaper and easier
Then Molly Brown gave her presentation called Settling on the Great Plains
Moving Westward:
- From 1870 to 1900 was the time it took to settle 800 million acres
- Federal land policy and the completion of the railroads helped the rapid settlements
- Trough treaties with foreign nations and native people, the United States expanded from coast to coast fulfilling its belief in Manifest Destiny
Railroads
- From 1850 to 1871 to the government made many land grants to build railroads
- In one grant, both the Union Pacific adn the Central Pacific received 10 square miles of public land for every mile of track laid in a state and 20 square miles of land for every mile of track laid in the territory
- This began the race between the two in the 1860's
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