Chapter 26: The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution
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20 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Buffalo Soldiers | Name given to African Americans by the Native Americans, supposedly because of the resemblence of their hair to the bison's furry coat. African Americans made up aproximately 1/5th of all U.S. Army personnel on the frontier. |
| George Armstrong Custer | "Boy general" of the Civil War who got demotedto colonel and turned Indian fighter. He led an attack on Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in 1876, when his command was massacred near Little Big Horn. |
| Battle of the Little Bighorn | Attack made by Colonel Custer's against the Indians, wanted to oppress and return Indians to the reservation (people were flooding the land to obtain gold and the Sioux Indians "defended" their land-turning to warfare); Custer and his 264 men completely wiped out by Sitting Bull/Crazy Horse and their 2,500 Indians in 1876. |
| Helen Hunt Jackson | Stirred the national conscience after writing "A Century of Dishonor". She was a Massachusettes children's author. Her book cronicled the sorry record of government ruhlessness and chicaney in dealing with the Indians. She later wrote the novel "Ramona"-a love story of injustice to the California Indians. |
| Battle of Wounded Knee | The government tried to wipe out the "Ghost Dance" cult which had spread all the way to the Dakota Sioux. The army bloodily stamped it out in 1890, killing an estimated 200 Indina men/women/children as well as 29 invading soldiers. |
| Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 | Act that sturck directly at tribal organization and tried to make rugged individualists out of the Indians. The act dissolved many tirbes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up individual Indina 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. The probationay period was later extended by full citizenship was graned to all Indians in 1924. Reservation land not alotted to the Indians was to be sold to railroads and white settlers, with the proceeds used by the federal govenment to educate and "civilize" the native peoples. By 1900 Indians had lost 50% of the 156 million acres they had held just 2 decades earlier. |
| Long Drive | Texas cowboys-black/white/Mexican-drove herds numbering 1,000-10,000 head slowly over the unfenced and unpeopled plains until they reached railroad shipping centers. |
| Homestead Act of 1862 | A law that allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres of land by living on it for 5 years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30 dollars. |
| Frederick Jackson Turner/Turner Thesis | Wrote essays about American history, especially the closing of the frontier. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History in 1893". |
| Bonanza Farms | Enormous wheat farms of the MN and ND area, that were larger than 15,000 acres. They communicated to eachother by telephone and the large scale farming foreshadowed the gigantic agribusinesses of the next century. |
| The Grange | Officially called the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, organized in 1867 by Oliver H. Kelly. The first objective was to enhance the lives of the isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternal activities. By 1875, there were over 800,000 memebers in the MW and S. The Grangers raised their goals from individual self-improvement to improvement of the farmer's collective plight. In a determined effort to escape the clutches of the trust, they established cooperatively owned stores for consumers and cooperatively owned grain elevators and warehouses for producers. They attempted to manufacture havensting machinery adn strove to regulate railway rates and the storage fees charge by rrailroads and by the operators of warehouses and grain elevators. |
| Greenback Labor Party | Political party that farmers joined, which combined inflationary appeal of earlier Greenabackers w/ program for improving labor. |
| The Farmers' Alliance | Alliance founded in Texas around the 1870's that was made up of a group of farmers. They came to socialize but more importantly to break the strangling grip of the railroads and manufacturers trhough cooperative buying and selling. By 1890 the alliance held over 1 million farmers. It unfortunately ignored the plight of the tenant farmers, sharecroppers, farmworkers and excluded blacks. |
| The Populists | A new political party formed from the Farmer's Alliance emerging in the early 1890's. It attacked Wall Street and the "money trust", it called for nationalizing the railroads/telephones/telegraphs, it instituted a graduated income tax and created a new federal "subtreatreasury". They also wanted the free and unlimited coinage of silver. |
| Pullman Strike of 1894 | Workers rebelled because the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages, and wouldn't allow their rent payments to be cut and the AFL refused to support the strikers. Military action was needed in order to deliver mail. |
| Eugene V. Debs | Man who led the Pullman strike. He was a Charismatic leader who helped organize the American Rialway Union. |
| William Mckinley | Eventually became the 25th president. He was the Republican candidate and a former Congressman. He stood on the gold standard act. |
| Marcus Alonzo Hanna | He became the personificaion of big industry in politics. He led the Republican presidential campaign for Mckinley, felt that the prime function of government was to aid business. |
| William Jennings Bryant | Nebraskain Democratic candidate who ran his platfrom on silver coinage. He gave a speech called "the Cross of Gold" and divided the Democratic Party with "Gold Bugs". |
| Dingley Tariff Bill | Bill passed in 1897, it raised money for the annual Treasury deficits. It was still not enough however to satisfy the paunchy lobbyists. |
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