Gold Rush, Homestead Act, Indian Wars, etc.

1. Chapter 16: 444-459

4.  Tribes of Pacific Coast decimated by
disease; 150K
 Southwest=Mix of Mexican, Native,
Spanish cultures
• Apaches, Navajos, Pueblos, Comanches
 Plains Indians
• Sioux (most powerful), Pawnee, Arapaho,
Cheyenne
• Dependent on buffalo

5.  By the post-Civil War era
Mexicans/Mexican-Americans were
delegated to working class
 Lost land
 Faced discriminatory laws
 Many took up migrant farming or
unskilled labor

6.  Started during Gold Rush; “Gold
Mountain”
 Racism, discrimination, struggle to gain
financial success
• Foreign Miners Tax; $20/month
 Worked for Central Pacific on
transcontinental RR (90% of workforce)
 200K by 1880; mostly in CA

7.  Moved to urban areas
 Created “China Towns”
• Kept clothing style, language, food, etc.
 Servants, small business owners, laundry
 Few females
• Often prostitutes

8.  As Chinese population increased so did
Anti-Chinese feelings
 Criticized for “clannishness” & keeping
culture, rather than assimilating
 One San Francisco newspaper
• “The manners and habits of the Chinese are
repugnant to Americans in California. Of
different language, blood, religion, and
character, and inferior in most mental and bodily
qualities.”

9.  Anti-Coolie clubs
 Workingmen’s Party created in 1878
 Kearney, party’s founder:
• “The Chinese must go!”
• “We intend to try and vote the Chinaman out, to
frighten him out, and if this won’t do, to kill him
out and when the blow comes we won’t leave a
fragment for the thieves to pick up…The heathen
slaves must leave this coast, if it cost 10,000
lives…”

12.  Anti-Chinese Riot in 1886

13.  Banned Chinese immigration for 10 years
(renewed in 1892 & 1902)
 Banned Chinese in U.S. from citizenship
 Hoped to protect “American” workers

14.  Chinese immigration

16.  Most from eastern U.S.
 2 million from Europe between 1870 &
1900
 Homestead Act (1862)
• 160 acres, had to stay five years & pay small fee
• Most failed to stay
 Economic troubles, isolation, weather

17.  Timber Culture Act (1873)-allowed
homesteaders to claim another 160 acres
if they planted 40 acres of trees
 Other laws followed suit
 Fraudulent claims, speculators
 Towns sprouted mostly along rail lines
 Nebraska Railroad Maps

18.  #34—Kansas—1861
 #36—Nevada—1864
 #37—Nebraska—1867
 #38—Colorado—1876
 #39—North Dakota—1889
 #40—South Dakota—1889
 #41—Montana—1889
 #42—Washington—1889
 #43—Idaho—1890
 #44—Utah—1896

19.  1889 & 1893
 Broke up Indian
Territory
 160 acres
 89ers, Boomers, &
Sooners
 Land Run of 1889

20.  Labor shortage
 Higher wages
 Temporary work; lack of job security
 Social classes dictated by race

21.  1849—CA—Gold Rush
 1858—Pike’s Peak, CO—Gold
 1858—Nevada, Comstock Lode—Gold &
Silver
• Produced $306 million
 1874—Black Hills, Dakota Territory—
Gold
 1897—Alaska--Klondike
 Booms led to new cities overnight
 Vigilante rule

22.  Gender imbalance
 Difficult working conditions
 Heat, explosions, fires
 1 in 30 injured & 1 in 80 killed in the
mines
 Gaming & Entertainment in Gold Rush Towns

23.  Open range
• Grazing for free
 Started by Texan & Mexican ranchers
 5 million cattle roamed Texas
 Cattle drives started in earnest after Civil
War
 Driven north to towns on rail lines
• Dodge City, KS; Abilene, KS; Sedalia, Mo
• *See map on p. 454

24.  Cattle drives became romanticized
 Cowboys were often former Confederate
soldiers or African Americans
 Farmers moved in (Homestead Act) and
impeded on open range
• Led to range wars
 Large profits led to corporations moving in
 Severe winters (1885-1886 & 1886-1887)
killed thousands of cattle
• Diminished the Cattle Kingdom

26.  Long drives were replaced by rail lines &
refrigerated railcars
 Ranches stayed though
 250,000 female ranch owners by 1890

27.  Paintings of the West became popular
 Tourism took off in 1880s and 1890s
 Fascination with cowboys
• Lack of social constraints, connection to the land,
ruggedness, individualism
 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
 Still popular today
• Country music, western movies & novels

28.  “The Last Frontier”
 Twain, Remington, Roosevelt all
romanticized the West

29.  Remington’s A Dash for the Timber, 1889

30. Arizona Cowboy, 1901

31. The Stampede; Horse Thieves, 1909

32.  1890 census marked the end of the
frontier
 Frederick Jackson Turner, historian from
U. of Wisconsin
• The Significance of the Frontier in American
History”—1st
delivered in 1893
 Frontier was line between “savagery” and
“civilization”

33. • Restless, nervous energy; that dominant
individualism” all be attributed to the the
frontier
• Valuable land would be harder to acquire
 "And now, four centuries from the discovery of America,
at the end of a hundred years of life under the
Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going
has closed the first period of American history."