1. FRIDAY 12/12
The Homestead Act set aside millions of acres of land for settlers in the West; Settlers had two ways to get approximately 160 acres of land. They could either live on the land for five years and then pay $30, or live on the land for six months and then pay $1.25 per acre. If you were a settler, which option would you choose? Why?
AGENDA:
TOTD
P25: Ranching and Mining
Bio-in-a-Bag (drawing)
Work on Study Guide

2. Open Range
-Great Plains area- flat, dry land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains
-no boundaries to man or cattle- fences were not used back then, no geographic barriers
-low population- land was scarcely populated
-branded Cattle to keep track of who’s Cattle belongs to who

3. Cattle Kingdom
-greater urban populations demanded more food
**raises demand for meat
-cattle drives to meet railroads: trains could move meat to eastern markets
Chisholm Trail: major route out of Texas for livestock
Abilene: cattle trail from northern Texas to the railway terminal in Abilene, Kansas.
-legend of the cowboy: Mexican Influences – Roping skills, saddles, chaps

4. Buffalo Soldiers: established by Congress as the first peacetime all-black regiments in the regular U.S. Army

5. Cattle’s Decline
-too many cattle
Demand for beef overproduction of beef –drove cost of beef down
-disease
Runoff from mining towns polluted farms
-drought: cattle died of starvation
-barbed wire fences blocked open range: ended the OPEN RANGE forever
First Patent

6. Mining Towns
-Gold Rushes
California, 1849
Black Hills
Boom towns – survived as long as gold and silver was there
Comstock Lode: largest gold/silver found
Alaska
-Ghost Towns – When resources were “mined out”
Vigilantes – self appointed law enforcers

7. Mining Life
-large mix of people – “so a ____, a ____ and a ____ walk into a bar”
-People from Mexico and China went to mine
-many opportunities for everyone – Miners needed supply too, so shops had good business
-saloons, gambling
-hard luck

8. New Technology
-deeper wells
-steel plows
-better farm equipment
reaper, harvesters
-Morrill Land Grants provided grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.
-railroad expansion
transcontinental railroad, 1869

9. Life on the Farm
-sod houses
-weather extremes
-drought
-isolation

10. -Frederick Jackson Turner “Frontier Thesis”
Decline of Farming
-rise of industry
-urbanization
-end of the frontier
-Frederick Jackson Turner
“Frontier Thesis”
-great debts
-Railroad charges

11. Voting Discrimination
-end of Reconstruction
Ways the South “got around” giving African Americans voting rights
-literacy tests
-poll taxes
-grandfather clause –

12. Segregation
-black codes
-Jim Crow laws
-segregation
-Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
separate but equal doctrine

13. Race Relations
-racial etiquette
-lynching
Ida B. Wells
-discrimination in the Northern cities also
-employment, housing, social discrimination
- not nearly as violent as it was in South

14. Booker T. Washington
-Founded Tuskegee Institute
-gradual improvement was goal
-economic equality first
vocational training
-Atlanta Compromise
-Washington proposed that blacks and white could cooperate on certain economic issues while being separate in social issues

15. W.E.B. DuBois
-Harvard educated
-demanded full equal rights now
-Niagara Falls Convention
-helped found the NAACP

16. Other Discrimination
-Mexican seasonal workers
-continued resentment of the Chinese