1. Civilisation des Etats-Unis 9c: Gilded Age
Prof. Sämi LUDWIG

2. West: mining frontier: • Sierra Nevada: Comstock silver mining corporations, Eastern financiers  e.g., Virginia City o Enrico Caruso o Mark Twain’s Roughing It

3. 1862 Homestead Act 160 acres of unoccupied government land, cultivate 5 years → too small for Great Plains → land speculation Cowboys • “Long Drive” from Texas • Chisholm Trail • picturesque frontier characters • pony, lasso, six-shooter • singing • press coverage after Civil War • numerous blacks → replaced by railroads

4. Indians:. • conflict with miners
Indians: • conflict with miners • destruction of the buffalo 1867 removal to reservations • Black Hills, Oklahoma (“Indian Territory”) 1869 Board of Indian Commissioners • convert the nomadic Plains Indians to agriculture Indian boarding schools, e.g., Carlisle, PA

5. Jim Thorpe - Olympics 1912. penathlon
Jim Thorpe - Olympics penathlon decathlon - professional football - professional basketball - professional baseball Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881) • Ramona pageant Dawes Act • dissolve tribal autonomy → get 160 acres: ownership, US citizenship • but: most Indians want to keep tribal ownership, get worst land

6. US government breaks promises to Plains Indians of 1820s and 1830s General W. T. Sherman: “We will have a sort of a predatory war for years … we cannot make a single war to end it.” General S. R. Curtis: “I want no peace till the Indians suffer more.” Indian wars: 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, MT • Sioux beat General George Armstrong Custer Sitting Bull “Custer’s Last Stand”

7. 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, SD
1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, SD 150 Sioux men, women, children massacred Big Foot

8. 1934 Indian Reorganization Act