The document discusses westward expansion in the United States following the Civil War. It describes how the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged settlement by offering citizens parcels of free or low-cost land. The transcontinental railroad network expanded rapidly in the late 1800s, opening up the West to greater development. Cattle ranching became a major industry, with longhorn cattle driven north on trails like the Chisholm Trail to railheads and markets. Conflict increased with Plains Indians as settlers and the army seized more land, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 that marked the end of the Plains Indian way of life.

1. FRONTIERS OF
CHANGE, 1865-1898
CHAPTER 1

2. John O’Sullivan, an advocate for expansion, coined the phrase “Manifest
Destiny” to discuss the widely held belief that American settlers were
destined to expand across the continent.

3. AGENCIES OF WESTWARD
EXPANSION
• In 1862, Congress enacted the Homestead Act, which is considered
to be one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of
the United States.
• Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act offered any
citizen (white American) or future citizen (black American) a parcel of
land, typically called a homestead, at little to no cost.
• 270 million acres, or ten percent of the area of the United States was
claimed and settled under this act.
• From 1862 to 1900, upwards of 600,000 families took advantage of
the government’s offer and settled the western portion of America.

4. AGENCIES OF WESTWARD
EXPANSION
• One of the main channels of postwar growth was the railroad.
• Five transcontinental railroads went into service between 1869 and 1893.
• At the end of the Civil War, only 3,272 miles of rail ran west of the
Mississippi River but by 1890, the total was 72,473 miles.
• Railroad access and mobility urged settlement and economic development
on the high plains and in the mountain valleys.
• No longer did this region appear on maps as the Great American Desert.
• The term “Great American Desert” was used in the nineteenth century to
describe the western portion of the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains
in North America to about the 100th meridian.

7. AGENCIES OF WESTWARD
EXPANSION
• This was the age of the “sodbuster,” who adapted to the treeless
prairies and plains by fencing with barbed wire and building the first
house out of the sod that he broke with his steel plow.
• A soddy was small, offered little light or air, and were havens for snakes,
insects, and other pests.
• It was also the era of “bonanza farms” – huge wheat farms cultivated
with heavy machinery and hired labor – in the Red River Valley of
Dakota Territory and the Central Valley of California.

8. The prairie lacked standard building materials such as wood or stone;
however, sod from thickly-rooted prairie grass was abundant and made
for a well-insulated, inexpensive house.

9. This historic photograph of the High plains in Haskell County, Kansas,
shows a treeless semi-arid grassland and a “buffalo wallow” or circular
depression in the level surface.

10. JOSEPH F.
GLIDDEN
INTERESTING FACTS
• Glidden’s wire ended the open range
and the freedom of the rancher and
cowboy – an event lamented in Cole
Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.”
• By the time of his death in 1906,
Glidden was one of the wealthiest
men in America, valued at over one
million dollars.
• The “barbed wire salesman” in Back
to the Future Part III is based on
Glidden.

11. The term “bonanza,” which is derived from the Spanish and means
literally “good weather,” was coined in the mid-1800s; it is used to refer
any source of great and sudden wealth or luck.

12. AGENCIES OF WESTWARD
EXPANSION
• Perhaps even more important to the growth of the West were the
mining and ranching frontiers.
• This was the West of prospectors and boom towns, of cowboys and
cattle drives, of gold rushes and mother lodes, and of stagecoach
robbers and rustlers.
• It is a West so celebrated on stage, screen, radio, and television that it is
hard to separate the myths from reality.

13. THE MINING FRONTIER
• Gold discoveries had boosted the first waves of western settlement but
by the 1870s, silver eclipsed gold in volume and some years even in
value.
• Other minerals also increased in value – rich copper mines opened in
Montana in connection with the demand for thousands of tons of
copper wire brought on by:
• Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone (1876).
• Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the incandescent lightbulb (1879).
• The construction of a successful electrical generator (1881).

14. The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) began on January 24, 1848, when
gold deposits were found by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in
Coloma, California.

15. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• Of course, the dominant symbol of the Old West is not the
prospector or the hard-rock miner: it is the cowboy.
• The postwar boom in the range cattle industry had its beginnings in
southern Texas.
• The Spaniards had introduced longhorn cattle there in the eighteenth
century.
• This hardy breed multiplied rapidly and by the 1850s, millions of them
roamed freely on the Texas plains.
• The postwar explosion of population and railroads westward brought
markets and railheads ever closer to western cattle that were free to
anyone who rounded them up and branded them.

16. The Texas longhorns are the direct descendants of the first cattle in the
New World – ancestral cattle first brought over by Christopher
Columbus in 1493 to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

17. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• Clever Texans quickly saw that the longhorns represented a fortune on
the hoof – if they could be driven northward the 800 miles to the
railroad at Sedalia, Missouri.
• In spring 1866, cowboys hit the trail with 260,000 cattle in the first of
the great drives.
• Their experiences almost put an end to the range cattle industry before
it was born:
• Disease, stampedes, bad weather, Indians, and irate farmers in Missouri
(who were afraid that the Texas fever carried by some of the longhorns
would infect their own stock) killed or ran off most of the cattle.

18. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• By 1867, the rails of the Kansas Pacific had reached Abilene, Kansas,
150 miles closer to Texas, making it possible to drive the herds through
a lightly occupied portion of Indian Territory.
• About 35,000 longhorns reached Abilene that summer, where they
were loaded onto cattle cars for the trip to Kansas City or Chicago.
• This success resulted in the interlocking institutions of the cattle drive
and the Chicago stockyards.
• More than a million longhorns thundered their way north on the
Chisholm Trail to Abilene over the next four years while the railroad
crept westward to other Kansas towns.
• Dodge City became the most wide-open and famous of the cow towns.

19. Joseph G. McCoy promoted the transport of longhorn cattle from Texas
to the eastern United States by establishing Abilene, one of the first
“cow towns.”

20. Dodge city was such a menacing place that it serves as the source of the
idiom “get out of Dodge,” which means to leave a dangerous area.

21. The Chisholm Trail , named for Jesse Chisholm, was a late nineteenth
century trail used to drive cattle overland from the ranches in southern
Texas to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway.

22. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• By this time, however, the classic form of open-range grazing was
already in decline.
• The boom years of the early 1880s had overstocked the range and driven
down prices.
• Then came record cold and blizzards on the southern range in winter
1884-1885, followed by even worse weather on the northern plains two
years later.
• Hundreds of thousands of cattle froze or starved to death.
• These catastrophes spurred reforms that brought an end to open-
range grazing.

23. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• Although cowboys no longer rode the open range after the 1880s, the
classic cowboys image became a staple of American popular culture.
• Cheap novels of the period created the myth of a proud and rugged
white individual who overcame the West’s hostile environment as easily
as he overcame hostile Indians.
• Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show presented thousands of Eastern urban
Americans with a spectacle of cowboys conquering the West.
• The entertainment presented a strong message to Easterners:
• White conquest of the West was necessary to protect the nation from
aggressive Indians.

24. WILLIAM CODY
INTERESTING FACTS
• Cody was awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor in
1872, but when Congress revised it’s
standards in 1917, Cody’s medal was
revoked (reinstated in 1989).
• Cody was baptized into the Catholic
Church the day before his death.
• The NFL’s Buffalo Bills were named
in his honor even though Cody had
no special connection with New
York.

25. The Wild West show was a traveling vaudeville performance, which
introduced many western performers and personalities and a
romanticized version of the American Old West.

26. THE RANCHING FRONTIER
• Cheap novels and Western shows paid little attention to the realities of
cowboy life:
• Thousands of cowboys were in fact black or Hispanic.
• They were laborers paid for a difficult and grueling job.
• Few of them carried pistols tied to their legs.
• In fact, all myths ignored perhaps the greatest reality of all:
• Neither individualistic cowboys nor community-oriented pioneers
subdued the West.
• The U.S. Army conquered the Indians who lived there while the federal
government claimed and administered most of the land beyond the
Mississippi River.

27. THE LAST INDIAN FRONTIER
• The westward expansion of the ranching and farming frontiers after
1865 doomed the free range of the Plains Indians and the bison.
• In the 1830s, eastern tribes had been moved to preserves west of the
Mississippi to end strife by separating whites and Indians.
• In the 1850s, when the Kansas and Nebraska territories opened to
white settlement, the government forced a dozen tribes living there to
cede fifteen million acres, leaving them on reservations totaling less
than 1.5 million acres.

28. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by President Andrew
Jackson, authorized him to negotiate for the Native Americans’ removal to
federal territories west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their
homelands.

29. THE LAST INDIAN FRONTIER
• In the aftermath of the Civil War, the process of concentrating Indian
tribes on reservations accelerated.
• Chiefs of the five “civilized tribes” – Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, and Seminoles – had signaled treaties of alliance with the
Confederacy.
• At that time, they were living in Indian Territory (most of present-day
Oklahoma), where their economy was linked to the South.
• Bitter toward the United States, the leaders of the “civilized tribes,” on
the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” cast their lot
with the Confederacy.

30. THE LAST INDIAN FRONTIER
• Siding with the Confederacy proved to be a costly mistake for the
“civilized tribes.”
• The U.S. government “reconstructed” Indian Territory more quickly
and with less conflict than it reconstructed the former Confederate
states.
• Treaties with the five tribes in 1866 required them to grant tribal
citizenship to their freed slaves and reduced tribal lands by half.
• There would be no shortage of dispossessed Indians in the West.

31. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• The Civil War had set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that
was more violent and widespread than anything since the seventeenth
century.
• During the war, the Union army was forced to pull units from the frontier
posts to fight the Confederacy.
• In addition, the drain on the Union treasury to finance the war delayed
annuity payments to tribes that had sold their land to the government.
• Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of
Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the Santee Sioux grew agitated in the
summer of 1862 as starvation threatened the tribe.
• Angry braves began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting
grounds.

32. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• On August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were murdered,
launched the Dakota War of 1862.
• The braves persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath
and over the next few weeks at least 500 white Minnesotans were
massacred.
• Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising by
September.
• A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and
sentenced 303 of them to death.

33. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• President Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts
and reduced the number of executions to thirty-eight – the largest act
of executive clemency in American history.
• Even so, the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux on December 26, 1862, was
the largest mass execution the country has ever witnessed.
• The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota
Territory.
• By 1864 and for a decade afterward, fighting flared between the army
and the Sioux across the northern plains.

34. The mass execution was performed publicly on a single scaffold platform
in Mankato, Minnesota; afterward the prisoner’s bodies were buried en
masse in the sands of the riverbank.

35. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• It reached a climax in 1874 and 1875 after gold-seekers poured into the
Black Hills of western Dakota, a sacred place to the Sioux.
• At the battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory on June 25,
1876, Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, along with
their Cheyenne allies, wiped out George A. Custer and the 225 men
with him in the Seventh Cavalry.
• In retaliation, General Philip Sheridan carried out a winter campaign in
which the Sioux and Cheyenne were crushed.

37. SITTING BULL
INTERESTING FACTS
• In 1885, Sitting Bull left his
reservation and joined Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West show where he earned
$50 a week.
• While touring he met Annie Oakley,
whom he later symbolically adopted
as his daughter – “Little Sure Shot.”
• In 1890, authorities attempted to
arrest Sitting Bull; however, a
struggle ensued and Sitting Bull was
shot in the head.

38. CRAZY HORSE
INTERESTING FACTS
• Crazy Horse ranks among the most
notable and iconic of Native
American tribal members and was
honored by the U.S. Postal Service
with a 13ȼ Great Americans series
postage stamp.
• While in custody, Crazy Horse
struggled with the guard and
attempted to escape; however, he
was stabbed with a bayonet by a
nearby guard and died later that
evening.

39. GEORGE A.
CUSTER
INTERESTING FACTS
• Custer was admitted to West Point
Military Academy in 1858, where he
graduated last in his class.
• Custer was present at Robert E.
Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant
at the Appomattox Court Horse.
• After more than 100 years of
silence, the Northern Cheyenne
announced that Buffalo Calf Road
Woman struck the final blow against
Custer, which knocked him off his
horse.

40. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• Largest and most warlike of the Plains tribes, the Sioux were confined
to a reservation in Dakota Territory where poverty, disease, apathy, and
alcoholism reduced this once-proud people to desperation.
• In 1890, a current of hope arrived at the Sioux reservation in the form
of a Ghost Dance, which had first appeared among the Paiutes of
Nevada and spread quickly to other Indian nations.
• The Ghost Dance expressed the belief that the Indians’ god would
destroy the whites and return their land.

41. The ghost dance invoked the Great Spirit to restore the bison and drive
away the whites, thereby revitalizing traditional Sioux culture; however, it
provoked the U.S. Army into confrontation.

42. CONFLICT WITH THE SIOUX
• Alarmed by the frenzy of the dance, federal authorities sent soldiers to
the Sioux reservation.
• A confrontation at Wounded Knee in the Dakota badlands led to a
shootout that left twenty-five soldiers and at least 150 Sioux dead.
• Wounded Knee symbolized the death of nineteenth century Plains Indian
culture.
• In addition to trying to defeat the Indians in battle, the army
encouraged the extermination of the bison.

43. Originally referred to as a battle, Wounded Knee was in reality was a
tragic and avoidable massacre – nearly half of the Sioux were women
and children.

44. SUPPRESSION OF OTHER
PLAINS INDIANS
• Professional hunters slaughtered the large, clumsy animals by the
millions for their hides, depriving Plain Indians of both physical and
spiritual nourishment.
• The Indians understood that the huge animals were disappearing but
they believed the bison were retreating underground to avoid the
mistreatment by the whites.
• They believed the bison would reappear only after whites learned to
respect them as the Indians did.
• But when the bison became nearly extinct in 1883, the Plains Indians
understood that the old ways were gone forever.

45. By the 1880s, the once thirty million bison that roamed the grasslands in
North America were almost extinct, leaving behind millions of bones.

46. THE “PEACE POLICY”
• Many Eastern reformers condemned America’s violent repression of
the Indians.
• One of the most prominent reformers was Helen Hunt Jackson,
whose 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, summed up their accusations
of anti-Indian violence, exploitation, and broken treaties.
• Jackson also romanticized the Indian culture, especially in her best-selling
novel, Ramona (1884), which also helped to humanize the Indians.
• Nevertheless, most reformers wished to rebuild the Indian culture into the
white man’s way by means of schools and Christian missions.
• This was to be the first step toward being assimilated into the American
polity as citizens.

47. THE “PEACE POLICY”
• President Ulysses S. Grant, in his inaugural address in 1869, announced
his new Peace Policy toward Indians, urging “their civilization and
ultimate citizenship.”
• “Civilization” meant acceptance of white culture, including the English
language, Christianity, and individual ownership of property.
• It also meant allegiance to the United States rather than a tribe.
• In 1871, the century-long policy of negotiating treaties with Indian
“nations” came to an end.
• With their military power broken and the buffalo gone, most Indians
had agreed in the “reconstruction” that offered them citizenship by
the 1880s.

48. THE “PEACE POLICY”
• Also in the 1880s, land-hungry westerners began to greedily eye the
155 million acres of land tied up in reservations.
• If part of that land could be assigned directly to individual ownership by
Indian families, the remainder would become available for purchase by
whites.
• The Dawes Severalty Act did just that in 1887:
• It called for the dissolution of Indian tribes as legal units.
• It offered Indians the opportunity to become citizens.
• It allotted each head of family 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of
grazing land.
• Eventually, whites gained title to 108 million acres of former
reservation land.