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33 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Indian Territory
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the Great West, by 1890, had been carved into states and the four territories of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma
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Sand Creek Massacre, 1864
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Colonel J. M. Chivington’s militia massacred in cold blood some four hundred Indians who apparently thought they had been promised immunity. Women were shot praying for mercy, children had their brains dashed out, and braves were tortured, scalped, and unspeakably mutilated.
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Custer’s Last Stand, 1876
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Colonel Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, nearly half of them immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to return them to the reservations. Attacking what turned out to be a superior force of 2,500 well-armed warriors, the “white Chief with Yellow Hair” and his 264 officers and men were completely wiped out in 1876 when two supporting columns failed to come to their rescue.
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Chief Joseph and Nez Perce', 1877
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band of Nez Perce' Indians in northeastern Oregon were goaded into daring flight in 1877, when U.S. authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation. Chief Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen-hundred mile, three month trek across the Continental Divide towards Canada. There Joseph hoped to rendezvous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge north of the border after the Battle of Little Bighorn (Custer’s Last Stand). Betrayed into believing they would be returned to their ancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Perce's instead were sent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40% of them perished from disease.
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Geronimo and the Apache
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Geronimo, whose eyes blazed hatred of the whites, led the Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexico. They were pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun flashing heliograph, a communication devise that impressed the Indians as “big medicine.”
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Helen Hunt Jackson
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a Massachusetts writer of children’s literature who pricked the moral sense of Americans in 1881 when she published A Century of Dishonor. The book chronicled the sorry record of government ruthlessness and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later novel Ramona, a love story of injustice to the California Indians, sold some 600.000 copies and further inspired sympathy for the Indians.
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Battle of Wounded Knee, 1890
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When the “Ghost Dance” cult spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army bloodily stamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked, an estimated two hundred Indian men, women, and children were killed, as well as twenty-nine invading soldiers.
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Dawes Severalty Act, 1887
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Dissolved many tribes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. If the Indians behaved themselves like “good white settlers,” they would get full title to their holdings, as well as citizenship, in 25 years.
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Carlisle Indian School, 1879
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In 1879, the government had already funded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where native American children, separated from their tribes, were taught English and inculcated with white values and customs. “Kill the Indian and save the man” was the school founder’s motto.
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Comstock Lode, 1859
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“Fifty-niners” poured into Nevada in 1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had been uncovered. A fantastic amount of gold and silver, worth more than $340 million, was mined by the “Kings of the Comstock” from 1860 to 1890. The scantily populated state of Nevada, “child of the Comstock Lode,” was prematurely railroaded into the Union in 1864, partly to provide three electoral votes for President Lincoln.
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Long Drives, 1866- 1888
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A spectacular feeder of the new slaughterhouses. Texas cowboys---black, white, and Mexican---drove herds numbering from one thousand to ten thousand head slowly over the unfenced and unpeopled plains until they reached a railroad terminal. The bawling beasts grazed en route on the free government grass. As long as lush grass was available, the Long Drive proved profitable. Over 4 million steers were driven northward from the beef bowl of Texas in the Long Drive.
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Homestead Act, 1862
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This new law allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres of land by living on it for five years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30. This marked a drastic departure from previous policy. Before this act, public land was sold for revenue; but now it was to be given away to encourage a rapid filling of empty spaces and to provide a stimulus to the family farm.
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Sodbusters
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“Sodbusters” poured onto the prairies. Lacking trees for lumber and fuel, they built homes from the very sod they dug from the ground, and burned corncobs for warmth.
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100th Meridian
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That imaginary line, running north to south from the Dakotas through west Texas, separated two climatological regions---a well-watered area to the east, and a semiarid area to the wet.
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John Wesley Powell
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Bewhiskered and one armed geologist John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River’s Grand Canyon and director of t U.S. Geological Survey, warned in 1874 that beyond the 100th meridian so little rain fell that agriculture was impossible without massive irrigation.
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Joseph F. Glidden
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Perfected the invention of barbed wire. It solved the problems of how to build fences on the treeless prairies.
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Oklahoma Sooners
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When the federal government made available to settlers vast stretches of fertile plains formerly occupied by the Indians in the district of Oklahoma, scores of overeager and well armed “sooners” illegally jumped the gun and entered Oklahoma territory. Oklahoma became the “sooner state” in 1907.
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Frederick Jackson Turner
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He wrote “the Significance of the Frontier in American History” (an essay). He wrote “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.” (a quote from him)
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National Grange, 1867
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(National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry) -- Its leading spirit was Oliver H. Kelley, a shrewd and energetic Minnesota farmer then working as a clerk in Washington. Kelley’s first objective was to enhance the lives of isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternal activities. Farm men and women, cursed with loneliness in widely separated farmhouses, found the Grange’s picnics, concerts, and lectures a godsend. The Grange spread like an old-time prairie fire and by 1875 claimed 800,000 members, chiefly in the Midwest and South. The Grangers gradually raised their goals from individual self-improvement to improvement of the farmers’ collective plight. In a determined effort to escape the clutches of the trusts, they established cooperatively owned stores for consumers and cooperatively owned grain elevators and warehouses for producers.
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Greenback Labor Party, 1878
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Farmers’ grievances found a vent in the Greenback Labor party which comibined the inflationary appeal of the earlier Greenbackers with a program for improving the lot of labor. In 1878, the high-water mark of the movement, the Greenback Laborites polled over a million votes and elected fourteen members of congress. In the presidential election of 1880, the Greenbackers ran General James B. Weaver.
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Farmers Alliance, late 1880s
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a striking manifestation of rural discontent came through the Farmers’ Alliance. Farmers came together in the Alliance to socialize, but more importantly to break the strangling grip of the railroads and manufacturers through cooperative buying and selling. Local chapters spread throughout the South and the Great Plains during the 1880s’s until by 1890 members numbered more than a half million hard bitten souls. Unfortunately, the Alliance weakened itself by ignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers.
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People’s Party (Populists)
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this new political party emerged from the Farmers’ Alliance. These frustrated farmers attacked Wall Street and the “money trust.” They called for nationalizing the railroads, telephones, and telegraph; instituting a graduated income tax; and creating a new federal “sub-treasury”---a scheme to provide farmers with loans for crops stored in government-owned warehouses.
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Coin’s Financial School, 1894
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Written by William Hope Harvey, it was illustrated by clever woodcuts, one of which depicted the gold ogre beheading the beautiful silver maiden. In fiction parading fact, the booklet showed how the “little professor”---”Coin” Harvey---overwhelmed the bankers and professors of economics with his brilliant arguments on behalf of free silver.
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James B. Weaver
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In the presidential election of 1880, the Greenbackers ran General James B. Weaver, an old Granger who was a favorite of the Civil War veterans and who possessed a remarkable voice and bearing. He spoke to perhaps a half-million citizens a hundred or so speeches but polled only 3 percent of the total popular vote.
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Panic of 1893
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strengthened the Populists’ argument that farmers and laborers alike were being victimized by an oppressive economic and political system.
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Coxey’s Army, 1894
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Coxey set out for Washington in 1894 with a few score of supporters and a swarm of newspaper reporters. His platform included a demand that the government relieve unemployment by an inflationary public works program, supported by some $500 million in legal tender notes to be issued by the Treasury. Coxey rode in a carriage and his tiny “army” tramped along behind him. The “Commonweal Army” of Coxeyites straggled into the nation’s capital but Coxey and his “lieutenants” were arrested for walking on the grass.
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J. P. Morgan, 1895
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during the depression of the 1890s, he drove into his arms many bleeding businesspeople, wounded by cutthroat competition. His prescribed remedy was to consolidate rival enterprises and to ensure future harmony by placing officers of his own banking syndicate on their various boards of directors. In 1895, he reorganized Drexe, Morgan & Company as J.P. Morgan & Company.
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Pullman Strike, 1894
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Most dramatic of the labor protests. Workers struck---in some places overturning Pullman cars---and paralyzed railway traffic from Chicago to the Pacific coast.
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Eugene V. Debs
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charismatic labor leader who had helped organize the American railway Union of about 150,000 members.
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Gov. John Atgeld
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He believed that the turmoil in Chicago was serious but not completely out of hand. He was a friend of the downtrodden and had pardoned the Haymarket Square anarchists the year before.
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Richard Olney
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U.S. attorney General Richard Olney, an archconservative and an ex-railroad attorney, urged the dispatch of federal troops to stop the riots. His legal grounds were that the strikers were interfering with the transit of U.S. mail. Cleveland supported Olney with the ringing declaration, “If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered”
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William Jennings Bryan
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“the Boy Orator of the Palette” -- he stepped confidently onto the platform at the Democratic Convention before fifteen thousand people. His masterful presence was set off by a peninsular jaw and raven-black hair. He radiated honesty, sincerity, and energy. With an organ like voice that rolled into the outer corners of the huge hall, he delivered a fervent plea for silver. Rising to supreme heights of eloquence, he thundered, “We will answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them: ¡®You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’”
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Cross of Gold Speech
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The Cross of Gold Speech by Bryan was a sensation. Swept off its feet in a tumultuous scene, the Democratic convention nominated Bryan the next day on the fifth ballot. The platform demanded inflation through the unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 ounces of silver to 1 of gold, though the market ratio was about 32 to 1.
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