• The culture of the Plains
Indians was not well
known to Easterners
• The Osaga and the Iowa
had hunted and planted
in the Great plains for
over 100 years
• Tribes such as the Lakota
and Cheyenne hunted
buffalo
THE PLAINS
BUFFALO WERE USED FOR
FOOD, SHELTER AND
CLOTHING
 The introduction of horses
by the Spanish (1598)
and later guns, meant
natives were able to
travel and hunt
 While the horse provided
speed and mobility, it was
the buffalo that provided
for basic needs
 Small extended
families were the norm
 Men were hunters,
while women helped
butcher the game and
prepare it
 Tribes were very
spiritual and land was
communal
OSAGE TRIBE
A COVERED WAGON HEADS
WEST
 The white settlers who
pushed westward had a
different idea about land
ownership
 Concluding that the plains
were “unsettled, “
thousands advanced to
claim land
 Gold being discovered in
Colorado only intensified
the rush for land
• As more and more
settlers headed west, the
U.S. government
increasingly protected
their interests
• Railroad Companies also
influenced government
decisions
RAILROADS GREATLY
IMPACTED NATIVE LIFE
• 1834 – Government set
aside all of the Great
Plains as “Indian lands”
• 1850s- Government shifts
policy, giving natives much
smaller lands
• Conflict ensues
• 1864 - Massacre at Sand
Creek; US Army attack
killing 150 native women
and children
 Conflicts continued including;
Fetterman Massacre and Red
River War
 Custer’s Last Stand occurred
in early 1876 when Colonel
Custer reached Little Big Horn
 Led by Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull, the natives
outflanked and crushed
Custer’s troops
ONE OF THE FEW NATIVE
VICTORIES WAS LITTLE BIG
GOLD had been discovered in Black Hills, South Dakota. So many
Americans had rushed to the area killing buffalo so rapidly they were
disappearing.
Professional hunters hunted the buffalo to sell the hides. Many
hunters killed buffalo by the hundreds just for sport leaving their
bodies toThe
rot. The
Railroad
companies
hiredIndians
sharp shooters to kill
Lakota
Sioux
& Cheyenne
large numbers
of buffalo
who were
blocking the railways’ traffic.
were not
supposed
to leave
the reservation, but left to hunt for food
Lt. Colonel
George
A. Custer underestimated the 2,500
near the
Bighorn
Native
Americans
attacked them in daylight as they camped b
Mountains
in &
Montana.
Little Bighorn River.
The Lakota Sioux & Cheyenne Indians killed all of Custer’s men
reported Custer as the victim. Lakota Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull tr
flee with his people to Canada, but the Americans forced him &
back onto the reservation in the Black Hills.
The Battle of Little Big Horn
1876
Gen. George
Armstrong
Custer
Chief Sitting Bull
FAMOUS DEPICTION OF
NATIVE STRUGGLE
 The Dawes Act of 1887
attempted to assimilate
natives
 The Act called for the
break up of reservations
and the introduction of
natives into American life
 By 1932, 2/3rds of the
land committed to Natives
had been taken
THE DARK AREAS DEPICT NATIVE LANDS BY 1894
 The most significant blow
to tribal life on the plains
was the destruction of the
buffalo
 Tourist and fur traders
shot buffalo for sport
 1800: 65 million buffalo
roamed the plains
 1890: less than 1000
remained
SHIRTLESS HUNTER WITH
HIS KILL
Colonel John Chivington
Kill and scalp all, big and
little!
Sandy Creek, CO
Sand Creek Massacre
The Cheyenne were flying a
White flag & an America flag, but
Chivington ignored the symbols
Of peace.
The Cheyenne
were waiting
at a fort
November
29,
1864
To negotiate a peace treaty with the
Americans. Because they had been
Attacking women & children, Chivington
Killed them.
The United States Senate investigated Chivington’s attack & brought
no charges against him. This outraged many Americans who saw what
he did to the Cheyenne as unjustifiable.
Capt. William J. Fetterman
Fetterman’s Massacre
Lakota Sioux leader,
Crazy Horse led Captain
Fetterman into a trap.
Crazy Horse tricked
him into following a
small band of Lakota, &
lured him into an
ambush where hundreds
of Lakota Indians
waited to kill him & his
80 soldiers massacred
December 21, 1866
Crazy Horse Monument:
Black Hills, SD
Lakota Chief
Mt. Rushmore: Black Hills, SD
Nez Percé
Chief
Joseph
!
When Americans tried to force
Chief Joseph’s tribe onto a
smaller Reservation in Idaho, he
fled running for than 1300 miles
before being captured.
“Our Chiefs are killed…The little
Children are freezing to death. My
People…have no blankets, no food
Hear me, my chiefs; I am tired; my
Heart is sick and sad. From where
The sun now stands I will fight no
More forever.”
“Ghost Dance”, 1890
A terrible battle took place at
Wounded Knee Creek as the
Participants of the Ghost dance
Chief Sitting
Were attacked.
Bull Was Blamed
The Native Americans were not
Supposed to practice this type of ritual
Which would cause the settlers to disappear
& bring back the buffalo.
HUNDREDS OF CORPSES WERE
LEFT TO FREEZE ON THE
GROUND
 On December 29, 1890,
the Seventh Cavalry
(Custer’s old regiment)
rounded up 350 Sioux and
took them to Wounded
Knee, S.D.
 A shot was fired – within
minutes the Seventh Cavalry
slaughtered 300 unarmed
Natives
 This event brought the
“Indian Wars”– and an
entire era to a bitter end
BLACK ELK SPEAKING ABOUT
WOUNDED KNEE
“I did not know then how much was
ended. When I look back now from this
high hill of my old age, I can still see the
butchered women and children lying
heaped and scattered along the crooked
gulch as plain as when I saw them with
eyes still young. And I can see that
something else died there in the bloody
mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A
people’s dream died there. It was a
beautiful dream...
The nation’s hope is broken and
scattered. There is no center any longer,
and the sacred tree is dead.”
BLACK ELK
Assimilation was
The process of
Forcing Native
Americans
To abandon
Their culture &
Become American.
Dawes Act (1887):
Assimilation Policy
Carlisle Indian School, PA
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild
West Show
Indian Reservations Today
 Placer Mining was used to extract gold & minerals from the
ground, but only the shallow level of ground was
penetrated with this method.
Equipment like picks, shovels &
pans were used in Placer Mining.
• After Placer Mining, corporations would move in to begin
Quartz Mining.
• Quartz Mining dug deep beneath the surface.
• When there were no more deposits to dig, the corporations that mined
disappeared.
Henry Comstock
claimed some
Land in Six-Mile
Canyon, Nevada!
 The blue-gray mud there
turned
out to be pure
silver!
News of this strike caused a
boom of 30,000 people to
crowd into Virginia City,
Nevada almost overnight!
Suddenly, the town had
1. Opera house
2. Shops with European clothes & furniture.
3. Several Newspapers
4. A 6 story hotel with the West’s first “rising room”..
•Crime was a serious problem
All those people & no sheriff
They did have Vigilance Committees
(volunteers who enforced laws)
•They often punished innocent people
by accident or on purpose.
•Women worked at “hurdy-gurdy” houses
where they danced for a drink.
While some were mining silver and
digging for gold, other people headed
out west to build
ranches on the Great Plains.
In the early 1800s, no one thought
building a cattle ranch on the Great
Plains would be successful because the
cattle from the east
couldn’t live on the tough
prairie grass.
A breed of cattle that descended from Mexico had emerged in Texas!
This breed of cow was adapted to the tough grass and climate of
the Great Plains. The government offered free
Range to all cattle. The grazing land was owned by the
American government. It was free & unrestricted by the
ownership of private farms.
Mexican cowhands taught the
American herders the art of rounding
up & driving cattle. They helped to
create America’s first Cowboys.
Before the Civil War, there was
No reason to round up the
Texas Longhorns because beef prices
were so low!
Cattle could be driven up
North to the Rail lines &
Transported to the east
at 10 times the price the
cowboys could get in
Texas for the same cows.
1.The Civil War
2.Construction
of the Railroads
During the Civil War,
the Cattle were
needed in the east to
feed the soldiers.
Between 1867 & 1871 nearly
1.5 million head of cattle traveled
On the Chisholm trail.
When Abilene was full of
cowboys, it rivaled any
mining town in rowdiness!
The
Cattle
Trails
With the prosperity of the cattlemen
came an era of lawlessness. The famed
gunman Wild Bill Hickok served as
Abilene 's marshal in 1871 and is reputed
to have killed more than 50 alleged
lawbreakers during his brief tenure. The
appearance of homesteaders and fenced
ranges discouraged the Texas cattle
trade, much of which was diverted to
Wichita. Winter-wheat cultivation was
introduced in Abilene in the mid-1870s
and remains economically important.
Abilene is still a shipping point for
livestock, as well as for grain and other
agricultural products, and it has some
light
industry.
Abilene."
Encyclopædia
Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
1 Jan. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9003356>.
In 1876 Hickok married a widow, Mrs. Agnes
Lake Thatcher, but he soon left her (in
Cincinnati) to visit the goldfields of the
Black Hills in the Dakota Territory. It was
there, at a poker table in Nuttall & Mann's
No. 10 saloon in Deadwood, that Hickok was
shot dead by a drunken stranger, Jack
McCall. The cards Hickok was holding—a
pair of black aces and a pair of black eights
plus an unknown fifth card—became known
as the dead man's hand. McCall's motive was
never learned; he was tried, convicted of
murder, and hanged on March 1, 1877.
Hickok, Wild Bill." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
>.
1 Jan. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9040358
*Thousands of Cattle were rounded up & gathered from the open ranges.
*The brands on the cattle was the only thing that distinguished one from the
other.
*The ranchers branded their cattle before moving them.
*Stray calves with no brand were divided up between the different owners
and branded.
Most of the cowboys on the cattle
drives were former Confederate
soldiers who after the war were trying
to rebuild their lives.
Many were Mexican & some were African
Americans who had been freed after the Civil
War.
The open range would end when ranch owners began to build fences to
prevent sheep herders from grazing the land meant for cattle.
The price of beef fell due to oversupply & many went bankrupt.
Then, in the winter of 1886, blizzards covered the ground so deep that
Cattle could not graze any grass.
Temperatures fell to 40 degrees below zero.
The fences were usually made of barbed wire
not wood fences.
Barbed Wire
Joseph Glidden
The Range Wars
Sheep
Herders
Cattle
Ranchers
The Cattle Industry survived,
but it was changed forever.
The days of the open range had
ended.
Herds were fenced in on ranches
and the cowboy became a ranch
hand who worked on the
farm of the wealthy owner.
In the early 1800s, why was building ranches on the Great
Plains considered a bad idea?
What is a stray calf called?
What are 2 developments that made
cattle drives worth while?
•Extends all the way to the Rocky Mountains to about
the center of Abilene ,Texas.
•Rainfall is about 20 inches each year on the
Great Plains & trees grow only along the banks of
rivers & streams.
•Many people considered the Great Plains to be a
Desert unfit for farming or grazing.
The Transcontinental Railroad
encouraged the establishment of towns
along the railroad.
The Government encouraged people to
settle the Great Plains by passing the
Homestead Act.
•People could claim up to 160 acres of public land & get the title to the land
if they lived there for 5 years.
The people who decided to take
the offer faced many
challenges!
No trees to build a home
No water to drink
People were forced to build homes from
sod cut from the ground.
They had to dig wells 300 feet deep to tap
drinking water.
Summer temperatures soared to over 100 degrees!
Prairie fires were a constant threat.
Grasshopper swarms swept over farms & destroyed
entire crops.
Winter brought blizzards and bitter cold!
The Realty--A Pioneer’s Sod House, SD
• New Farming Methods
• Dry farming required planting seeds deep
into the ground where there was enough moisture to help them
grow.
New Equipment made dry farming easier:
seed drills, steel plows, reapers
And threshing machines helped
to farm wheat.
New Agricultural
Technology
Steel Plow [“Sod Buster”]
“Prairie Fan”
Water Pump
Farmers weren’t familiar with the
prairie soil & when they used dry
farming to plant seeds during the
dry season, all the soil just blew
away with the wind.
These farmers were called sodbusters!
Most lost their homesteads because of drought,
wind erosion, and overuse of the land.
They had the same problem with the wind, but they were
able to
make quick profits by using
mechanical reapers to speed harvests.
Wheat became to the
Great Plains like cotton
was to the south!
Many farmers moved to
The Great Plains Region to
farm wheat. This area become known as
the Wheat Belt.
New machines allowed a single family to bring in a huge
harvest!
Some of these wheat farms were 50,000 acres.
They were called Bonanza Farms because they
made so much profit!
The United States became the
world’s largest exporter of wheat in
the 1880s.
Other Nations trying to compete
Caused an oversupply of wheat &
Prices crashed!
A terrible drought in
the late 1880s also
strained the farms.
Most farmers had to borrow money
On their lands. When they couldn’t
pay, the bank took their ranches.
Some were given the chance to stay
and work on the farms they once
owned, as tenant workers.
By 1900, 1/3 of the
farms were tenant
farms in the Wheat
Belt.
Much of the land in the west was still unoccupied by 1890,
but the Government reported that it was nearly full when it
took a census of People living in the west.
It was upsetting to some people who always had the hope of
being able to go west and make a new start.
Even though news spread that the frontier
was closing, many more people traveled
west in the 1900s making their new starts,
but unlike the stories of “getting rich
quick”, the work was hard in their new
environment.
Water from the deep wells watered their gardens.
The Railroad brought lumber to build houses & coal to
use for fuel.
The real story of the people who went west wasn’t about
Heroes who rode off into the sunset.
It was about “regular ole’ people” who built places to live,
formed communities and worked hard to do what had to
be done.
They didn’t get rich, but most were
proud of the lives they had made
on the frontier.
Write the question & answer completely for a grade.
Explain the Homestead Act.
Name 5 problems people who took advantage of the
Homestead Act faced.
What is dry farming?
List 2 new advances in agricultural technology that
helped the farmers.
What were the huge farms called?