1. Americans Move West

2. What opportunities and conflicts emerged as Americans moved westward?
Essential Question
What opportunities and conflicts emerged as Americans moved westward?

3. 1. What mood or emotions does the melody or lyrics evoke?
Home on the Range
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Chorus
Home, home on the range,
How often at night when the heavens are bright,
With the light of the glittering stars,
I stood there amazed and I asked as I gazed,
Does their glory exceed that of ours.
1. What mood or emotions does the melody or lyrics evoke?
2. What region of the country do you think this song is referring to? How can you tell?
3. Do you think the settlement of this region had a more positive effect or a more negative effect on the person or people who wrote this song? How can you tell?
4. Do you think the settlement of this region had the same effect on all the different groups of people who lived there? Why or why not?

4. Miners and Ranchers

5. Miners 1848: John Sutter and his sawmill on the American River
Discovered gold and thousands of migrants flocked to CA
By Spring 1849:
40,000 people overland
40,000 steamships
CA population: 93,000 to 380,000
By early 1850s, most gold had been mined. Individual prospectors gave way to large mining companies that use hydraulic machines that washed away hillsides, damaged the habits, polluted rivers, and left behind piles of debris

6. Ranchers and Cowboys Cattle ranching
Started with Mexican vaqueros
Post-Civil War, demand for beef in eastern cities had risen ($5 in TX vs. $40 in East)
Working as a team, white, black and Mexican Americans worked together as cowboys

9. Railroads Open the West to Settlement
1861: Central Pacific Railroad Co. started by the “big four”
Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, C.P. Huntington, Charles Crocker
The South’s secession and Civil War led Congress to approve uniting CA and OR with the rest of the Union

10. Transcontinental Railroad
Completed 1869
Pacific Railroad Act (1862) authorized the Union Pacific Railroad to lay out tracks westward from Omaha, Nebraska
The Central Pacific Railroad lay track eastward from Sacramento

12. Indian Wars Shatter Tribal Cultures
For many the railroad represented progress, but for Native Americans on the Great Plains, it threatened their existence
In 1830 Indian Removal Act forced those east of Mississippi to move to OK territory
This led to a clash of cultures
Sand Creek Massacre 1864
Reservations: areas of federal land for an Indian tribe

13. mov’t to the reservations

14. 1876- Battle of Little Bighorn “Custer’s Last Stand”
federal forces hunted down and captured 3,000 Sioux warriors
Settlement of the West was disastrous//many Native Americans died from violence, disease and poverty
Gov’t policies aimed at assimilation, absorption of a group into the dominant culture
1887 Dawes Act: a tribe could no longer own reservation lands as a group, instead gov’t distributed land to individuals within a tribe

15. From this…

16. To this…

17. Primary Documents Moving West: Opportunities and Challenges
Miners
Transcontinental Railroad Workers
Settlers
Ranchers, Cowboys & Cowhands
Native Americans