Multiple Choice Questions

In 1851, the United States government began to introduce a Concentration Policy. This strategy would provide white settlers with the most productive lands and relocate Indians to areas north and south of white settlements. Over the next decade, Indians were evicted from their land to make way for a white society. However, the settlers were not satisfied with the Concentration Policy, and they sought to restrict Indians to even smaller areas through relocation. For example, the Sioux tribe, which had previously spread across the northern United States, was relocated to an area in Dakota Territory known as the Black Hills. Present-day Oklahoma became known as "Indian Territory" as additional tribes were relocated to reservations there. The federal government relocated hundreds of thousands of Indians under the guise of protecting them, when in truth the government's primary goal was attaining the Indians' lands.
  • The Homestead Act
  • The Chinese Exclusion Act
  • Concentration Policy
  • The Dawes Act
The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah, also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement which was incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the prophet Jack Wilson (Wovoka)'s teachings, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region. The basis for the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, is a traditional ritual which has been used by many Native Americans since prehistoric times, but this new form was first practiced among the Nevada Paiute inThe practice swept throughout much of the Western United States, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, Native American tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs. This process often created change in both the society that integrated it, and in the ritual itself.
  • China Towns
  • Ghost Dance
  • Plains Indians
  • Indian Wars
The Battle of Little Bighorn was an armed engagement between combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which occurred on June 25 and 26, 1876 near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory, was the most prominent action of the Great Sioux War ofIt was an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Gall, inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake). The U.S. Seventh Cavalry, including the Custer Battalion, a force of 700 men led by George Armstrong Custer, suffered a severe defeat. Five of the Seventh Cavalry's companies were annihilated; Custer was killed, as were two of his brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. The total U.S. casualty count, including scouts, was 268 dead and 55 injured.
  • Cattle Kingdom
  • The Homestead Act
  • Battle of the Little Bighorn
  • Range War
The nomadic tribes of Plains Indians survived on hunting, and the American Buffalo was their main source of food. Some tribes are described as part of the Buffalo Culture (sometimes called, the American Bison). These animals were the chief source for items which Plains Indians made from their flesh, hide and bones, such as food, cups, decorations, crafting tools, knives, and clothing. The tribes followed the seasonal grazing and migration of buffalo. The Plains Indians lived in tipis because they were easily disassembled and allowed the nomadic life of following game. When Spanish horses were obtained, the Plains tribes rapidly integrated them into their daily lives. The Indians began to acquire horses in the 17th century by trading or stealing them from Spanish colonists in New Mexico. The Comanche were among the first to commit to a fully mounted nomadic lifestyle. This occurred by the 1730s, when they had acquired enough horses to put all their people on horseback.
  • Cowboy culture
  • China Towns
  • Buffalo
  • Ghost Dance
The Chisholm Trail was a trail used in the late 19th century to drive cattle overland from ranches in Texas to Kansas railheads. The portion of the trail marked by Jesse Chisholm went from his southern trading post near the Red River, to his northern trading post near Kansas City, Kansas. Texas ranchers using the Chisholm Trail started on that route from either the Rio Grande or San Antonio, Texas, and went to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway in Abilene, Kansas, where the cattle would be sold and shipped eastward. The trail is named for Jesse Chisholm, who had built several trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War. Immediately after the war, he and the Lenape Black Beaver collected stray Texas cattle and drove them to railheads over the Chisholm Trail, shipping them back East to feed citizens, where beef commanded much higher prices than in the West.
  • China Towns
  • The Comstock Lode
  • The Chisholm Trail
  • Sand Creek Massacre
Californio (historic and regional Spanish for "Californian") is a term used to identify a Spanish-speaking, mostly Roman Catholic people, or of Latin American descent, regardless of race, born in California from the first Spanish colonies established by the Portolá expedition in 1769 to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, in which Mexico ceded California to the United States. Descendants of Californios are also sometimes referred to as Californios. The much larger population of indigenous peoples of California were not Californios because they were not native Spanish-speakers. Neither were the significant numbers of non-Spanish-speaking California-born children of resident foreigners.
  • Californios
  • Indian Wars
  • Assimilation
  • China Towns
The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on December 29, 1890,[4] near Wounded Knee Creek (Lakota: Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA. It was the last battle of the American Indian Wars. One version of events claims that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it.[6] A scuffle over Black Coyote's rifle escalated and a shot was fired which resulted in the 7th Cavalry's opening fire indiscriminately from all sides, killing men, women, and children, as well as some of their own fellow troopers. Those few Lakota warriors who still had weapons began shooting back at the attacking troopers, who quickly suppressed the Lakota fire. The surviving Lakota fled, but U.S. cavalrymen pursued and killed many who were unarmed. By the time it was over, at least 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed and 51 wounded. Twenty-five troopers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded would later die). It is believed that many were the victims of friendly fire, as the shooting took place at close range in chaotic conditions. At least twenty troopers were awarded the coveted Medal of Honor.
  • Wounded Knee Massacre
  • "Great American Desert"
  • Frontier Thesis
  • Sand Creek Massacre
The Chinatown in San Francisco is one of the largest Chinatowns in North America and the oldest north of Mexico. Other cities in North America where Chinatowns were founded in the mid-nineteenth century include almost every major settlement along the West Coast from San Diego to Victoria. European Chinatowns, such as those in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, are for the most part smaller and of more recent history than their North American counterparts. In the United States, opportunity was usually the driver of the building of Chinatowns. The initial Chinatowns were built in the west in places such as California, Oregon, Washington state, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. As the transcontinental railroad was built, more Chinatowns started to appear in railroad towns such as St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Butte Montana, and many east coast cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Baltimore. With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, many southern states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia began to hire Chinese for work in place of slave labor.
  • China Towns
  • Indian Wars
  • Ghost Dance
  • Plains Indians
The Comstock Lode was the first major U.S. discovery of silver ore, located under what is now Virginia City, Nevada, on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, a peak in the Virginia Range. After the discovery was made public in 1859, prospectors rushed to the area and scrambled to stake their claims. Mining camps soon thrived in the vicinity, which became bustling centers of fabulous wealth. It is notable not just for the immense fortunes it generated and the large role those fortunes had in the growth of Nevada and San Francisco, but also for the advances in mining technology that it spurred. The mines declined after 1874.
  • Sand Creek Massacre
  • The Comstock Lode
  • "Great American Desert"
  • The Chisholm Trail
Cultural assimilation is the process by which a subaltern group's native language and culture are lost under pressure to assimilate to those of a dominant cultural group. The term is used both to refer to colonized peoples when dominant colonial states expand into new territories or alternately, when diasporas of immigrants settle into a dominant state society. Colonized peoples or minority immigrant groups acquire new customs, language, and ideologies through contact and education in the dominant society. Assimilation may involve either a quick or gradual change depending on circumstances. Full assimilation occurs when new members of a society become indistinguishable from older members.
  • Plains Indians
  • Indian Wars
  • Assimilation
  • Californios
The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mind-sets and ending prior customs of the 19th century. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History. Other historians had begun to explore the meaning of the frontier, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who had a different theory. Roosevelt argued that the battles between the trans-Appalachian pioneers and the Indians in the "Winning of the West" had forged a new people, the American race. Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. His model of sectionalism as a composite of social forces, such as ethnicity and land ownership, gave historians the tools to use social history as the foundation for all social, economic and political developments in American history. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.
  • Wild West Shows
  • Cowboy culture
  • China Towns
  • Frontier Thesis
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treaty ofThose revisions allowed the U.S. to suspend Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years. This law was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943.
  • The Chinese Exclusion Act
  • Concentration Policy
  • The Homestead Act
  • The Dawes Act
The culture of the western United States, which many consider the epitome of American-ness, is in origin a synthesis of Anglo and Hispanic cultures which was created in Texas in the days of the Texas Republic and spread with the trail herds to what is now the western United States (and Canada). Major elements of the clothing, food, language and most importantly the cultural values and attitudes derive from Mexican as well as Southern American sources. There were many sources for the population of the western North America but these disparate peoples assimilated the Anglo-Hispanic culture of Texas. Although this culture is perceived as American by the rest of the United States it is a cousin culture rather than a sibling culture and it is just as much a cousin culture for Mexicans as it is for Americans of the eastern and midwestern Unitied States. The ties of the Texan culture to the culture of the southern United States, particularly that of the Scot-Irish of the southern Appalachians, are closer than those to the rest of the United States.
  • China Towns
  • Plains Indians
  • Cowboy culture
  • Frontier Thesis
Sodbusters are farmers who moved onto the Great Plains in the late 1800s, and are named for ploughing and working on the hard ground of the plains in order to plant their harvests.
  • Sodbusters
  • The Dawes Act
  • Boomtowns
  • Range War
The cattle industry grew tremendously in the two decades after the Civil War, moving into western Kansas and Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas in the 1870s and 1880s with the expansion of the railroads. While motion pictures, television, and novels have helped make cowboys —the men who rounded up, branded, and drove the cattle to market — the most heroic and best known symbols of the West, cattle ranching was in fact a big business that attracted foreign investment and required considerable organization.
  • Vigilante
  • Battle of the Little Bighorn
  • Cattle Kingdom
  • Boomtowns
Wild West Shows were traveling vaudeville performances in the United States and Europe. The first and prototypical wild west show was Buffalo Bill's, formed in 1883 and lasting untilThe shows introduced many western performers and personalities, and a romanticized version of the American Old West, to a wide audience. "Cowboys driving cattle over open range. Outlaws and lawmen facing one another on a dusty main street. Indian hunters racing through buffalo herds on horseback. These images, so familiar from books and movies, are what come to mind when many people think of the American West." Although these images are not entirely fictionalized, the real American West was a far less dramatic place. To European settlers, the west was unknown territory, almost like a debutante being first exposed to society. Not understanding the names and labels already given to the continent, Europeans thought it was calling out to be labeled, to be transformed from Native America into these dramatic images we envision when we think of the west. For many people of the 19th century, the west was the answer to their seeking for a promise of a new and better life. The claimed space of the region inspired this promise. The west was a place open for imagination and new starts.
  • Cowboy culture
  • Frontier Thesis
  • China Towns
  • Wild West Shows
The Dawes Act of 1887 (also known as the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887), adopted by Congress in 1887, authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. Dawes Act was amended in 1891 and again in 1906 by the Burke Act.
  • The Dawes Act
  • The Chinese Exclusion Act
  • Concentration Policy
  • The Homestead Act
The Homestead Acts were several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a "homestead", at little or no cost. In the United States, this originally consisted of grants totaling 160 acres (65 hectares, or one-fourth of a section) of unappropriated federal land within the boundaries of the public land states. An extension of the Homestead Principle in law, the United States Homestead Acts were initially proposed as an expression of the "Free Soil" policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave-owners who could use groups of slaves to economic advantage.
  • The Homestead Act
  • The Chinese Exclusion Act
  • Concentration Policy
  • The Dawes Act
The Sand Creek Massacre (also known as the Chivington Massacre, the Battle of Sand Creek or the Massacre of Cheyenne Indians) was an atrocity in the Indian Wars of the United States that occurred on November 29, 1864, when a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia attacked and destroyed a village of friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho encamped in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70-163 Indians, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. The location has been designated the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and is administered by the National Park Service.
  • The Chisholm Trail
  • Sand Creek Massacre
  • Wounded Knee Massacre
  • The Comstock Lode
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Multiple Choice Questions
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