APUSH Learning Curve: Chapter 16

Why did Mormon women argue that giving them the right to vote in Utah Territory would benefit the Mormon community?

Because they would outvote non-Mormon miners

Which two languages became the primary languages spoken in parts of Minnesota and the Dakotas by the mid-1880s?

Norwegian and Swedish

Why did the United States switch from a bimetallic standard to a gold standard in 1873?

The discovery of immense silver deposits in the West

One critic called the Comstock Lode "the tomb of the forests of the Sierra." Why was that phrase apt?

The mining industry ravaged the landscape.

Why were Republicans so eager to fund the construction of a transcontinental railroad in the 1860s?

They saw the failure to connect different regions via the railroad as one cause of the Civil War.

What was the purpose of the U.S. Fisheries Commission, created in 1871?

To prevent the further decline of wild fish populations in the American West

What event highlighted federal incompetence in regard to Indian relations in 1870, early in Ulysses S. Grant's presidency?

U.S. troops killed over 170 Blackfoot Indians in Montana.

How were the homesteaders who moved onto the plains from 1878 to 1886 misled?

Unusual weather led to farming success.

What did Sitting Bull wish for his children by 1885?

A "white" education

Technological innovation and the global expansion of export agriculture had what impact on farmers working on the plains in the late 1800s?

A drop in crop prices

Who were the Exodusters?

African Americans who migrated to Kansas in the late 1870s

The purposeful destruction of which of the following opened the Great Plains to settlement?

Bison

Which Native American group was the last to try armed resistance against the U.S. government?

Chiricahua Apache under Geronimo

In the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of thirty-eight men from which group?

Dakota Sioux

Who was the one-armed Civil War veteran who wrote a famous book on western land conditions in 1879?

John Wesley Powell

How did Dr. Thomas Bland of the National Indian Defense Association recast the so-called "Indian Problem" at the time of Grant's peace policy?

The "white problem"

Which act gave 160 free public acres to applicants who occupied and improved them?

The Homestead Act

Exodusters were blacks who left which region to seek a better life in the 1870s?

The South

What was the term for President Grant's attempt to solve the "Indian problem" in 1868?

The peace policy

Why did new prairie homesteaders often spend their first winter in hillside dugouts rather than houses?

The plains lacked the lumber for housing construction.

Giant corporations that dominate whole sectors of the economy through monopoly power are known by what name?

Trusts

What triggered the migration of large numbers of Scandinavians and Germans in the 1870s?

A severe depression in northern Europe

During the 1870s, what decimated the vast herds of buffalo that had roamed the Great Plains?

Animal diseases and overhunting by whites

How did the United States initially use the Hawaiian Islands following the Civil War?

As a place to reprovision and repair whaling ships

Why did Great Britain agree to pay the United States $15.5 million in damages after the Civil War?

British shipyards had built Confederate raiding vessels such as CSS Alabama.

How did the United States persuade the Japanese to open trade relations?

By wielding naval power to persuade the Japanese to sign a treaty

Which interest group directly shaped Ulysses Grant's peace policy for the West?

Christian reformers

What distinguished the story of "Deadwood Dick" whose stories were published as The Life and Adventures of Nat Love in 1907?

He was born into slavery in Tennessee.

Which statement describes the motives of Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts in writing the Dawes Severalty Act?

He was eager for reform and hoped to improve the lives of Native Americans.

Republicans in the 1880s were staunch advocates of what economic policy?

High tariffs

What did the Homestead Act of 1862 do?

It gave 160 acres to applicants who occupied and improved them.

What problem plagued homesteaders of the Great Plains in the 1880s?

Lack of rain

Which issue distinguished homesteading in the plains from pioneer farming in Iowa or Oregon in the antebellum years?

Land speculation

Why was the General Mining Act of 1872 not useful in developing the West despite its generous grant of mineral resources to those who discovered them?

Large-scale operations were needed to extract many minerals.

Why was John Wesley Powell's advice about promoting water management and dry farming in the Great Plains ignored in Congress?

Members of Congress clung to the dream of homesteading.

What was one consequence of the shift to steam-powered vessels in the transoceanic trade in the 1850s?

Merchants and the U.S. Navy needed ports where they could refuel.

Why were the children of the Dakotas Sioux close to starvation in the late 1850s?

Minnesota's territorial governor and Indian agents stole their provisions.

Which Indian group of California in 1873 rebelled against removal to a reservation?

Modoc

Which church allowed for the controversial practice of polygamy in the 1800s?

Mormon

What did the advertisement for Buffalo Bills' Wild West show suggest to audiences?

Native tribes in the American West were a fierce and uncivilized race.

What ended the Long Drive of cattle from Texas to Missouri in the 1870s?

Railroads

Which of the following ethnic groups was represented in notable numbers in the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains?

Scandinavians

What did the U.S. Supreme Court rule in the case of Munn v. Illinois (1877)?

States had the right to regulate businesses with a public purpose.

Which technology permitted homesteaders in the West to plant crops in the prairie in the 1860s and 1870s?

Steel plows

Which trail was a private road under army protection that served as the main route into Montana in the 1860s and 1870s?

The Bozeman Trail

The major silver discovery made in Nevada in 1859 was known by what name?

The Comstock Lode

Which act of 1887 led to the break-up and sale of Indian reservation lands?

The Dawes Severalty Act

What federal department did Congress create in 1862 to conduct research and provide advice to farmers?

The Department of Agriculture

What was the name of the Native American religious movement that drew upon and combined significant Christian and native elements?

The Ghost Dance

Before it became heavily settled, how were the Great Plains characterized?

The Great American Desert

Who was in charge of Yellowstone National Park prior to the creation of a national park service?

The U.S. Army

According to the three maps, which of the following reservations did Dakota Sioux Indians gain between 1877 and 1889?

The Yankton Reservation

Which of the following regions was the last that Native Americans ceded to the United States?

The area of the North Dakota Territory to the east of the Missouri river

For the nation that mourned him, what era did the life and career of William T. Sherman seem to encompass?

The era of conquest

What was the basis for the development of the Far West of the United States?

The extraction of natural resources

What does this memory tell us about the Native American experience in Indian schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

The forced assimilation in these schools was a cultural capture and defeat.

What might have been the purpose behind this photo taken by Edward S. Curtis of Piegan (Blackfeet) warriors Little Plume and his son Yellow Kidney?

The photographer wanted to portray their distinctly different culture.

In the view of the railroad, what made the Yellowstone Valley more appealing?

The taming of Indians

What was a major difference between the settlement of the Great Plains and of mining camps and cattle ranches?

There were proportionately more women on the plains.

Why did Indian agents and missionaries create Indian schools off the reservations as part of the effort to solve what was seen as the "Indian problem"?

They did not think they could re-educate Indian children when still living with their families.

Why did Sioux and Cheyenne Indians sign on with Buffalo Bill's entertainment group?

They sought to escape the harsh conditions on reservations.

What was the purpose of the Long Drive?

To bring cattle from Texas to railroad towns so they could be shipped east for food

For what reason had states chartered corporations in the early nineteenth century?

To fulfill specific public purposes

Why did William Seward urge Congress to purchase refueling stations in the Pacific and the Caribbean?

To support growing trade with Asia and Latin America

Based on the map of Indian country in the West up to 1890 and on your reading, what best explains the pattern of Indian land cessions in the West?

When whites saw an area as valuable, they forced Native Americans to cede it.

What prompted the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?

White efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance

What idea from Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" do historians reject today?

White settlers claimed empty land.

Who was the expansionist secretary of state during the 1860s that negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia?

William Seward

Congress in 1864 set aside ten square miles of which valley for public use?

Yosemite

Although in the late 1800s critics decried the ways in which government spending aided the accumulation of enormous private wealth, they acknowledged that the giant railroad companies that received these funds

benefited the economy.

The creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 was an early important step toward a public commitment to

preservation

Unlike most European countries, the United States decided to finance railroads through

private investors.