Chapter 16 Learning Curve
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
What triggered the migration of large numbers of Scandinavians and Germans in the 1870s?
A severe depression in northern Europe
Who were the Exodusters?
African Americans who migrated to Kansas in the late 1870s
During the 1870s, what decimated the vast herds of buffalo that had roamed the Great Plains?
Animal diseases and overhunting by whites
How did Frederick Jackson Turner's audience conceive of the frontier in the 1890s?
As an illustration of American exceptionalism
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 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
What did Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud accomplish in 1868?
He convinced the United States to withdraw troops from the Bozeman Trail.
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.
Readers of Frederick Jackson Turner's essay on the frontier in American history believed that, in contrast to European nations, the United States had avoided what practice?
Imperialism
What did the Homestead Act of 1862 do?
It gave 160 acres to applicants who occupied and improved them.
Who was the one-armed Civil War veteran who wrote a famous book on western land conditions in 1879?
John Wesley Powell
What problem plagued homesteaders of the Great Plains in the 1880s?
Lack of rain
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.
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.
A drop in crop prices
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.
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
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 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
What federal department did Congress create in 1862 to conduct research and provide advice to farmers?
The Department of Agriculture
Who was in charge of Yellowstone National Park prior to the creation of a national park service?
The U.S. Army
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
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 did new prairie homesteaders often spend their first winter in hillside dugouts rather than houses?
The plains lacked the lumber for housing construction.
The purposeful destruction of which of the following opened the Great Plains to settlement?
The purposeful destruction of which of the following opened the Great Plains to settlement?
What did the 1868 Burlingame Treaty guarantee?
The rights of U.S. missionaries in China and terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers to the United States
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.
For what reason had states chartered corporations in the early nineteenth century?
To fulfill specific public purposes
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
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
What was the status of land ownership in New Mexico and Arizona in the late 1800s?
Traditional land claims from Spanish colonial times were rejected in favor of new claims by Anglos.
Giant corporations that dominate whole sectors of the economy through monopoly power are known by what name?
Trusts
What idea from Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" do historians reject today?
White settlers claimed empty land.
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.
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
Which issue distinguished homesteading in the plains from pioneer farming in Iowa or Oregon in the antebellum years?
land speculation
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
What ended the Long Drive of cattle from Texas to Missouri in the 1870s?
railroads
Which technology permitted homesteaders in the West to plant crops in the prairie in the 1860s and 1870s?
steel plows
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
How were the homesteaders who moved onto the plains from 1878 to 1886 misled?
unusual weather led to farming success
Gertrude Bonnin, in her memories of her time at a Quaker Indian school in Indiana published in 1900, recalled one day when "late in the morning, my friend Judewin gave me a terrible warning. Judewin knew a few words of English; and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy." 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.
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.
What role did trade and industrial development play in the adoption of the gold standard by the U.S. government in 1873?
adopting the gold standard opened the country to foreign investment
What prompted the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?
white efforts to suppress the ghost dance
