USA Geographical Features
• Using the map of the United States label and/or
color the following items.
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Rocky Mountains – Blue
Appalachian Mountains – Red
Great Plains – Green
Continental Divide – black line
Atlantic and Pacific Ocean
Gulf of Mexico
Each of the Great Lakes
Essential Questions
1. What national issues emerged in
the process of closing the
western frontier?
2. Why does the West hold such an
important place in the American
imagination?
3. In what ways is the West
romanticized in American culture?
Key Tensions
Native
Americans
Cattlemen
Ranchers
Buffalo Hunters
Railroads
U. S. Government
Sheep Herders
Farmers
Key Tensions
Ethnic
Minorities
Nativists
Environmentalists
Lawlessness of
the Frontier
Big Business Interests
[mining, timber]
Local Govt. Officials
Farmers
Buffalo Hunters
“Civilizing” Forces
[The “Romance” of the West]
Land Acts
• Homestead Act – permitted “any
citizen or intended citizen to select any
surveyed land up to 160 acres and to
gain title to it after five years’
residence”
– Started the land boom.
• Pacific Railway Act – gave lands to
railroad companies to develop a
railroad line linking the East and West
Coast (1869)
• Morrill Act – granted a total of more
than 17 million acres of federal land to
the states who then sold it to fund the
formation of agricultural and
Why was the government
engineering colleges.
practically giving way land?
The Battle of Little Big Horn
1876
Gen. George
Armstrong
Custer
Chief Sitting Bull
Chief Joseph
I will fight no more forever!
Nez Percé tribal
retreat (1877)
Geronimo, Apache Chief: Hopeless Cause
Helen Hunt Jackson
A Century of Dishonor (1881)
Dawes Severalty Act (1887):
Assimilation Policy
Carlisle Indian School, PA
Indian Reservations Today
Railroad Construction
Promontory Point, UT
(May 10, 1869)
Frontier Settlements: 1870-1890
Homesteads From Public Lands
What is the Message of this Picture?
The Realty--A Pioneer’s Sod House, SD
Prospecting
Mining Centers: 1900
Anaconda Copper Mining Co. (MT)
Mining (“Boom”) Towns-Now Ghost Towns
Calico, CA
The
Cattle
Trails
New Agricultural
Technology
Steel Plow [“Sod Buster”]
“Prairie Fan”
Water Pump
Barbed Wire
Joseph Glidden
Frederick Jackson Turner
The Significance of the Frontier
in American Society (1893)
Black
“Exoduster”
Homesteaders
The Buffalo Soldiers on the Great Plains
The “Chinese Question”
 Exclusion Act (1882)
- Oriental Exclusion Act
- Chinese Exclusion Act
Yellowstone National Park
First national park
established in 1872.
National Parks