The Transformation of the Trans-Mississippi West, 1860-1900
I. Native Americans and the Trans-Mississippi West a. The Plains Indians i. Three major sub regions:
-The northern Plains: Lakota, Flatheads, Blackfeet, Assiniboins, northern Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Crows
-The Central region: Five Civilized Tribes, agricultural life, before horses
-South: western Kansas, Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and Texas: the Comanches, Kiowas, southern Arapahos, and Kiowa Apaches
-Extended family ties and tribal cooperation; families joined clans to help make decisions
-Sioux bands focused on religious and harvest celebrations and was complex; life was a series of circles; self torture; sacrificing;
-Indians dispersed …show more content…
New Farms, New Markets
-production boosted: steel plows, spring tooth harrows, improved grain binders, threshers, and windmills increased yield tenfold; also barbed wire
-“dry farming” plowing deeply to stimulate the capillary action of the soils and harrowing lightly to raise a covering of dirt that would retain precious moisture after a rainfall; grasshopper infestations
e. Building a Society and Achieving Statehood
-Churches and Sunday Schools; community cooperation, libraries, temperance clubs, and social associations, hotels, and opera houses
-To become a state: establish the territory’s boundaries, authorizing an election to select delegates for a state constitutional convention, ratified constitution, approval by Congress
-new state gov’ts supported women’s suffrage encouraged by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Wyoming the first
III. Exploiting the Western Landscape a. The Mining Frontier
- Henry Comstock discovers Comstock Load along Carson River; prospectors swarmed into the Rocky Mountains
-“placer” gold, panned from streams, attracted young male population thirsting for wealth and reinforced the myth of mining country as a “poor man’s paradise” ; western mining camps became ethnic melting