NAME_____________________________________ PERIOD________

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UNIT I: NotesWESTWARD EXPANSION

Miss Springborn- 8th grade Social Studies

WESTWARD EXPANSION & IMMIGRATION VOCABULARY

1.) SODBUSTER : Someone that builds their home out of sod (grass/mud mixture) because there were few trees on the Great Plains.

2.) HOMESTEAD ACT: Passed in 1862, the U.S. government gave 160 acres of land to anyone who farmed the land for 5 years.

3.) RESERVATION : Land set aside by the U.S. government where American Indians were forced to live

4.) MANIFEST DESTINY- Belief that the United states should expand from ocean to ocean

5.) FRONTIER- area out west during the 1800’s were thousands went to settle and live

6.) TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD- railroad across the United states, connecting East and West

7.) PONY EXPRESS- mail delivery system in which messengers transported mail on horseback across the country

8.) STANDARD TIME- system developed by railroad companies dividing the United States into four time zones

9.) BOOMTOWNS- towns that serviced the new mines and emptied when the mines closed

10.) CATTLE DRIVE- movement of cattle herds to market or new grazing lands

11.) WILD WEST- nickname given to the frontier region of the country in the mid/late 1800’s

12.) BARBED WIRE FENCING- invented by Joseph Glidden allowing farmers to fence in their land even with the lack of trees on the plains

13.) GOLDEN SPIKE- the final spike put in the rail road that officially finished the transcontinental railroad

14.) BATTLE OF LITTLE BIGHORN- last great victory for the Sioux, where they defeated Custer

15.) MASSACRE AT WOUNDED KNEE- battle in which US troops killed about 150 Sioux,

16.) ASSIMILATE- the process of absorbing and adopting a new culture or way of life; natives were forced to adopt western traditions and give up their own culture

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FOR MAP ON NEXT PAGE: Label Mississippi River and trace it in blue Label the Appalachian Mts., Rocky Mts., Sierra Nevada Mts. and shade over them in brown Label the Great Lakes and color them blue Label the Great Plains in RED

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7 th grade review of territories: Manifest Destiny Page | 5

WESTWARD EXPANSION:Page | 6

The U.S. government wanted to satisfy their idea of _____________________________, or that

they had the God-given right to expand. However, many Americans were afraid to go out west. They

were afraid of the ___________________________ out west and the horrifying tales they had heard

about them.

Therefore, the U.S. government had to find a way to lure people out west. Congress passed the

_____________________________, which gave 160 acres of land to any citizen that agreed to farm

the land for 5 years. This made a lot of people really want to go west, but they were still afraid. The

government decided to take some measures to make it safer for people to travel out west.

1) They decided to move the Native American Indians onto _______________________. On these, the

Indians were forced to cut their hair, give up their __________________ lifestyle and live in houses,

convert to _____________________, learn English, go to white man’s schools, and learn to farm.

2) President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act which paid two railroad companies to build the

_________________________________________________.

The companies were the Central Pacific which began in Sacramento, CA and the Union Pacific which

began in Omaha, NE. They were each given $48,000 and 6,400 acres of land per mile of track built.

The people that went out west were called _________________ or settlers or homesteaders.

Many of them settled the area of the U.S. known as the ______________________________. This

area lies between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Here, there were few trees. People

were forced to make their homes out of _______ or a grass/mud mixture. These people were called

___________________________.

Some of the technologies used on the Great Plains were: barbed wire, wind mills, grain elevators

and the colt revolver.

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“Go west young man, and grow up with the country.”

Horace Greeley, New

What does the government want from the west?

What are three things the government could do to get people to go west?

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Homestead Act, Reservation, Sodbuster

What did the buffalo mean to the Native Americans?

A more detailed list of how the buffalo was used:

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There were many native groups across the Great Plains and out West that lived on

the land now being settled by thousands of people.

Background: The Carlisle Indian School

The Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, PA has boxes upon boxes of jaw-dropping photos and archives from the Carlisle Indian School.

Just to quickly set these images up... a little bit of backstory. The Carlisle Indian School was founded in 1879 by Colonel RH Pratt, a complicated figure with a troubling legacy. While he championed racial equality (something he set out to showcase at the school), his idea of equality was a peculiarly 19th Century one. He aimed to prove that American Indians were the equals of whites by making them as white as possible. His slogan at Carlisle was "kill the Indian, save the man." Students were forbidden from speaking their own languages. Their hair was cut, they were dressed in suits and ties and corseted dresses. They didn't go home for years at a time. And they were taught trades, like baking and blacksmithing, which were meant to give them a foothold in the white world after

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graduation. Yet many students had good experiences, and remembered Pratt as a good man... the "father of Indian education," as one student describes him in our story.

Since Pratt's mission was to show that American Indians still had a place in a world that was destroying their homes and cultures, he was eager to hold up examples of students succeeding on his terms. Pratt commissioned these "Before and After" photos to demonstrate the transformations happening at Carlisle.

Let's start with the Tom Torlino -- his portraits are two of the most striking (and best-known) "Before and After" images. Taken by photographer John Choate in his Carlisle studio in 1882, this "before" photo was taken when Tom arrived at school, just a few years after it opened in 1879:

This is Tom Torlino, a Navajo boyHe attended the Carlisle School- a special boarding school for Native American students. The pictures provide both a before and after spending time at the school. The before and after photos are but one illustration NPR uses to tell the story of Native American boarding schools in the US. In a report titled

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Native American Boarding Schools Haunt Many, correspondent Charla Bear digs deep into the practices and processes used to forcibly strip young Native Americans from their heritage.

Check out the chilling reason these schools were developed in the first place:The federal government began sending Native Americans to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870’s, when the United States was still at war with Indians. An Army officer, Richard Pratt founded the first of these schools. He based it on an education program he had developed in an Indian prison. He described his philosophy in a speech he gave in 1892. "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

Even more frightening to me is the familiar ritual of colonization:

Transforming People, Inside and OutIn 1945, Bill Wright, a Pattwin Indian, was sent to the Stewart Indian School in Nevada. He was just 6 years old. Wright remembers matrons bathing him in kerosene and shaving his head. Students at federal boarding schools were forbidden to express their culture — everything from wearing long hair to speaking even a single Indian word. Wright said he lost not only his language, but also his American Indian name.

"I remember coming home and my grandma asked me to talk Indian to her and I said, 'Grandma, I don't understand you,' " Wright says.

"She said, 'Then who are you?' "

Wright says he told her his name was Billy. "

'Your name's not Billy. Your name's 'TAH-rruhm,' "she told him.

"And I went, 'That's not what they told me.' "

All of these actions were part of a long term strategy. According to Tsianina Lomawaima, head of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, the intent was to completely transform people, inside and out.

"Language, religion, family structure, economics, the way you make a living, the way you express emotion, everything," says Lomawaima.

Lomawaima says from the start, the government's objective was to "erase and replace" Indian culture, part of a larger strategy to conquer Indians.

"They very specifically targeted Native nations that were the most recently hostile," Lomawaima says. "There was a very conscious effort to recruit the children of leaders, and this was also explicit, essentially to hold those children hostage. The idea was it would be much easier to keep those communities pacified with their children held in a school somewhere far away."

These schools provided education to Native children for years. Lucy Toledo, who attended one such school in the 1950’s, explained how the children were not even taught the basic principles of arithmetic or grammar. Instead:

The government operated as many as 100 boarding schools for American Indians, both on and off reservations. Children were sometimes taken forcibly, by armed police. Lomawaima says that's not the only reason families let their children go.

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"For many communities, for a variety of reasons, federal school was the only option," she says. "Public schools were closed to Indians because of racism."

At boarding schools, the curriculum focused mostly on trades, such as carpentry for boys and housekeeping for girls.

"It wasn't really about education," says Lucy Toledo, a Navajo who went to Sherman Institute in the 1950s. Toledo says students didn't learn basic concepts in math or English, such as parts of speech or grammar.

She also remembers some unsettling free-time activities.

"Saturday night we had a movie," says Toledo. "Do you know what the movie was about? Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians. Here we're getting all our people killed, and that's the kind of stuff they showed us."

Corporal Punishment, abuse, manual labor, and malnutrition were common problems at the schools.

And for decades, there were reports that students in the boarding schools were abused. Children were beaten, malnourished and forced to do heavy labor. In the 1960s, a congressional report found that many teachers still saw their role as civilizing American Indian students, not educating them. The report said the schools still had a "major emphasis on discipline and punishment."

Wright remembers an adviser hitting a student.

"Busted his head open and blood got all over," Wright recalls. "I had to take him to the hospital, and they told me to tell them he ran into the wall and I better not tell them what really happened."

Wright says he still has nightmares from the severe discipline.

However, in more recent years, many of these schools have closed down. In the few that remain, a cultural shift has occurred where the school encourage the preservation of cultural activities:

One school that remains is Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, Calif. — the same boarding school Toledo attended.

Hershel Martinez, a Navajo student, gathers with a group of friends in a school hallway to form a drum circle. The school encourages cultural activities like this. That's one reason Martinez feels more comfortable here than at his former public school in Los Angeles.

"Everyone was wondering what nationality, what race am I," Martinez said when asked about being at a public school. "I'd tell them and they're like, 'Wow, you're Indian. You're like the only guy I know who's Native.' But here, at Sherman, they know how I feel about being Native. And they understand where we're all coming from."

But this year, the federal government made a budgeting change that reduces funding to the off-reservation boarding schools. And their future is in doubt.

Questions:1. Why were Native America boarding schools created?

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2. What type of abuse did Native children suffer at these schools?

3. What kind of education did these kids receive if they were not being taught the basic principles of arithmetic and grammar?

4. How did they change Tom Torlino?

FOR EACH OF THE PICTURES BELOW, PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THEY LED TO DE-INDIANIZATION.

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DE-INDIANIZATION

Declining buffalo population out West:

List the factors that led to the decline in buffalo population:

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The Story of Us- Heartland

Question #1- Describe the making of the Transcontinental Railroad as you watch. You can list information you are seeing as you watch.

Question #2- What role did the Chinese Immigrants play in the railroad building?

Question #3- Explain why is the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad considered a revolution?

Question #4-What does the Homestead Act do for westward settlement?Page | 17

Did you know that it took about 21 million hammer swings to finish the Transcontinental railroad?

Movie Clip: Far and Away

Describe the camp of land settlers in Oklahoma: What do you see and hear going on there:

On the morning of the land grab describe what the scene looks like as the settler’s line up:

What happens to the man who takes off before the starting time?

Describe what you see as the race begins. What kinds of things are happening to the settlers?

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After seeing these scenes do you think you would have gone off to try and get free land out west? Why or why not:

The Story of Us: Heartland (Part 2)

Question #1- Explain what starts to happen to the buffalo herds as the settlers move west:

Question #2- What types of skills where needed to be a cowboy? Where did the new settlers out west learn these skills from?

Question #3- Why was barbed wire invented and how did it help?

Question #4- Describe the impact of westward expansion on the natives.

Question #5- What was Custards last stand?

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Dances with Wolves: Movie Clip

Background information: John Dubar was a veteran of the Civil War and a hero of the Union Army. He requests a transfer to the frontier to “Go West”. He is sent out to a place called Fort Segwick and finds it totally abandoned. He decided to rebuild it himself and continue on with his mission. He tries to make contact with the Sioux tribe which are his neighbors at the fort but it proves to be difficult. He has many failed attempts due to language barrier and the tribes distrust of the “white man”. He eventually makes contact with a native named “Stands with Fist” who is an adopted white child of the Sioux nation. Her family was killed by the Pawnee tribe and she was rescued by the Sioux tribe.

NOTE: Translation between Officer Dunbar and the tribe is very difficult. He tries very hard to overcome these barriers though and is very persistent in his attempts to understand their culture.

Question #1- Describe John Dunbar’s attempts at meeting and talking with the Natives. What are some of the problems you see?

Question #2- What does long hair mean to the natives?

Question #3- Describe what happened to the native woman, Stands with fist.

Question #4- Describe the buffalo hunt John Dunbar goes on with the natives.

Question #5- What does the word totonka mean for the natives?

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End of the Frontier:Page | 21

By 1870 only small portions of the Great Plains reminded unsettled. For

most of the next two decades, this land remained open range.

In March 1889, government officials announced that homesteaders could file

claims on land in what is now the state of Oklahoma. This land had belonged to

the Creek and Seminole Indians. Within a month, about 50,000 people rushed to

Oklahoma to stake their claims.

In all, settlers claimed more than 11 million acres of former Indian land in

the famous Oklahoma land rush. This huge wave of pioneers was the last chapter

of the westward movement. From the time it began gathering information, the US

Census Bureau had mapped out a “frontier line” along the edge of western

population. The 1890 census showed more than 20 million people lived between

the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast. The disappearance of the “frontier

line” is considered to be the closing of the frontier.

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