CH 15 Learning Curve
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 persuade the Japanese to open trade relations?
By wielding naval power to persuade the Japanese to sign a treaty
How did post-Civil War U.S. foreign policies regarding Latin America differ from pre-Civil War U.S. policy?
Emphasis was placed on trade over direct conquest.
What did the Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull mean when he said that "the life of white men is slavery"?
He had no interest in adopting white culture.
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.
What did the Homestead Act of 1862 do?
It gave 160 acres to applicants who occupied and improved them.
What explains the popularity of the Ghost Dance movement in the 1880s?
Its promise of Indian resurrection
What problem plagued homesteaders of the Great Plains in the 1880s?
Lack of rain
Why were the children of the Dakota Sioux close to starvation in the late 1850s?
Minnesota's territorial governor and Indian agents stole their provisions.
What ended the Long Drive of cattle from Texas to Missouri in the 1870s?
Railroads
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
Which piece of legislation set aside 140 million federal acres that states could sell to raise money for public universities?
The Morrill Act
Which practice eventually led to the Sioux tribes seeking accommodations and assistance on reservations in the 1870s?
The decimation of bison through disease and wasteful overhunting
What trend is evident in the three maps of South Dakota reservations?
The diminishment of lands guaranteed to the Sioux
What was the basis for the development of the Far West of the United States?
The extraction of natural resources
Why did Pacific northwestern cities like Seattle and Portland grow substantially in the late 1800s?
They acted as gateways to gold-rush regions.
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
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
With regard to Indians, the core of President Grant's peace policy in the 1870s was
assimilation.
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
benefitted the economy.
Through legislation such as the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act, Republicans sought to
encourage western settlement.
In the 1870s, federal courts gradually interpreted the "due process" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to stipulate that it protected
corporations.
