Download Closing of the Plains - Westward Expansion (1830-1900)

Note: Until 1863, the state of Virginia comprised its present territory and the territory of present day West Virginia.
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Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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Note: Until 1863, the state of Virginia comprised its present territory and the territory of present day West Virginia.
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Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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Note: Until 1863, the state of Virginia comprised its present territory and the territory of present day West Virginia.
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Closing of the Plains - Homestead Act (1862)
The Homestead Act of 1862, was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on
May 20, 1862. Anyone who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government (including
freed slaves and women); was 21 or older, or the head of a family; could file an application to
claim a federal land grant. There was also a residency requirement.
The "yeoman farmer" ideal of Jeffersonian democracy was still a powerful influence in
American politics during the 1840–1850s, with many politicians believing a homestead act
would help increase the number of "virtuous yeomen". The Free Soil Party of 1848–52, and
the new Republican Party after 1854, demanded that the new lands opening up in the west
be made available to independent farmers, rather than wealthy planters who would develop it
with the use of slaves forcing the yeomen farmers onto marginal lands. Southern Democrats
had continually fought (and defeated) previous homestead law proposals, as they feared free
land would attract European immigrants and poor Southern whites to the west. After the
South seceded and their delegates left Congress in 1861, the Republicans and other
supporters from the upper South passed a homestead act.
The intent of the first Homestead Act, passed in 1862, was to liberalize the
homesteading requirements of the Preemption Act of 1841. Its leading advocates were
Andrew Johnson, George Henry Evans and Horace Greeley.
The law (and those following it) required a three step procedure: file an application,
improve the land, and file for deed of title. Anyone who had never taken up arms against the
U.S. government (including freed slaves) and was at least 21 years old or the head of a
household, could file an application to claim a federal land grant. The occupant had to reside
on the land for five years, and show evidence of having made improvements.
Between 1862 and 1934, the federal government granted 1.6 million homesteads and
distributed 270,000,000 acres (420,000 sq mi) of federal land for private ownership. This was
a total of 10% of all land in the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act_of_1862
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Closing of the Plains - Homestead Act (1862)
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any
person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the
age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States,
or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become
such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United
States, and who has never borne arms against the United
States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies,
shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and.
sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less
quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person
may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time
the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar
and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less
of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per
acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal
subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have
been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing
on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land
lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with
the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the
aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.
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Closing of the Plains - Dawes Act (1887)
Background
The Dawes Act of 1887, authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian
tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. Dawes Act was amended in
1891 and again in 1906 by the Burke Act. The stated objective of the Dawes Act was to
stimulate assimilation of Indians into American society. Individual ownership of land was
seen as an essential step. The act also provided that the government would purchase
Indian land "excess" to that needed for allotment and open it up for settlement by nonIndians.
The Dawes Commission, set up under an Indian Office appropriation bill in 1893, was
created, not to administer the Dawes Act, but to try to persuade the Five Civilized Tribes,
which were excluded under the Dawes Act, to agree to an allotment plan. This
commission registered the members of the Five Civilized Tribes on what became known
as the Dawes Rolls. The Curtis Act of 1908 completed the process of destroying tribal
governments by abolishing tribal jurisdiction of Indian land.
After decades of seeing the disarray these acts caused, the Franklin D. Roosevelt
administration supported passage in 1934 of the US Indian Reorganization Act. It ended
allotment and created a "New Deal" for Indians, including renewing their rights to
reorganize and form their own governments.
Adapted From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_act
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Closing of the Plains - Dawes Act (1887)
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all
cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall
hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their
use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of
Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their
use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is,
authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part
thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and
grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part
thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot
the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located
thereon in quantities as follows:
To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section;
To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of
a section;
To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of
a section; and
To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or
who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President
directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation,
one-sixteenth of a section:
Sec. 8. That the provisions of this act shall not extend to the
territory occupied by the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Osage, Miamies and Peorias, and
Sacs and Foxes, in the Indian Territory, nor to any of the
reservations of the Seneca Nation of New York Indians in the
State of New York, nor to that strip of territory in the State of
Nebraska adjoining the Sioux Nation on the south added by
executive order.
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Closing of the Plains - Settlement of the Plains
The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was the first land run into the
Unassigned Lands and included all or part of the 2005 modern day
Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne
counties of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The land run started at high
noon on April 22, 1889, with an estimated 50,000 people lined up for
their piece of the available two million acres.
The Unassigned Lands were considered some of the best unoccupied
public land in the United States. The Indian Appropriations Bill of 1889
was passed and signed into law with an amendment by Illinois
Representative William McKendree Springer, that authorized President
Benjamin Harrison to open the two million acres for settlement. Due to
the Homestead Act of 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln,
legal settlers could claim lots up to 160 acres in size. Provided a settler
lived on the land and improved it, the settler could then receive the title
to the land.
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Closing of the Plains - Settlement of the Plains
Effects were...
Dawes Act
Homestead Act
Stated that...
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Closing of the Plains - Klondike Gold Rush
With cries of "Gold! Gold! in the Klondike!" there unfolded in
the Yukon and Alaska a brief but fascinating adventure,
which has captured the imagination of people around the
world ever since. In August 1896 when Skookum Jim Mason,
Dawson Charlie and George Washington Carmack found
gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon
Territory, they had no idea they they would set off one of the
greatest gold rushes in history. Beginning in 1897, an army
of hopeful goldseekers, unaware that most of the good
Klondike claims were already staked, boarded ships and
Seattle and other Pacific port cities and headed north toward
the vision of riches to be had for the taking.
All through the summer and on into the winter of 1897-98, stampeders poured into the
newly created Alaskan tent and shack towns of Skagway and Dyea - the jumping off
points for the 600-mile trek to the goldfields.
Skagway, at the head of the White Pass Trail, was founded by a former steamboat
captain named William Moore. His small homestead was inundated with some 10,000
transient residents struggling to get their required year's worth of gear and supplies over
the Coast Range and down the Yukon River headwaters at lakes Lindeman and Bennett.
Dyea, three miles away at the head of Taiya Inlet, experienced the same frantic
boomtown activity as goldseekers poured ashore and picked their way up the Chilkoot
Trail into Canada.
Stampeders faced their greatest hardships on
the Chilkoot Trail out of Dyea and the White
Pass Trail out of Skagway. There were murders
and suicides, disease and malnutrition, and
death from hypothermia, avalanche, and, some
said heartbreak. The Chilkoot was the toughest
on men because pack animals could not be
used easily on the steep slopes leading to the
pass. Until tramways were built late in 1897 and
early 1898, the stampeders had to carry
everything on their backs. The White Pass Trail
was the animal-killer, as anxious prospectors
overloaded and beat their pack animals and
forced them over the rocky terrain until they
dropped. More than 3,000 animals died on this
trail; many of their bones still lie at the bottom on Dead Horse Gulch.
Source: National Park Service
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Closing of the Plains - Klondike Gold Rush
During the first year of the rush an estimated
20,000 to 30,000 goldseekers spent an
average of three months packing their outfits
up the trails and over the passes to the lakes.
The distance from tidewater to the lakes was
only about 35 miles, but each individual
trudged hundreds of miles back and forth
along the trails, moving gear from cache to
cache. Once the prospectors had hauled their
full array of gear to the lakes, they built or
bought boats to float the remaining 560 or so
miles downriver to Dawson City and the
Klondike mining district where an almost
limitless supply of gold nuggets was said to
lie.
By midsummer of 1898 there were 18,000
people at Dawson, with more than 5,000
working the diggings. By August many of the
stampeders had started for home, most of
them broke. The next year saw a still larger exodus of miners when gold was discovered
at Nome, Alaska. The great Klondike Gold Rush ended as suddenly as it had begun.
Towns such as Dawson City and Skagway began to
declines. Others, including Dyea, disappeared
altogether, leaving only memories of what many
consider to be the last grand adventure of the 19th
century.
Source: National Park Service
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Closing of the Plains - Assimilation / Americanization
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Western_Indian_Wars.jpg
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Closing of the Plains - Assimilation / Americanization
Portraits of Native
Americans from the
Cherokee, Cheyenne,
Choctaw, Comanche,
Iroquois, and Muscogee
tribes in Euro-American
attire. Photos date from
1868 to 1924.
Native American group
of Carlisle Indian
Industrial School Male
and Female Students;
Brick Dormitories And
Bandstand in
Background 1879.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanization_(of_Native_Americans)
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Closing of the Plains - Assimilation / Americanization
http://commons.wikimedia.org
http://commons.wikimedia.org
The photographs above are of people from different American Indian tribes. What to the
photographs have to do with the concept of Americanization?
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Closing of the Plains - Cattle Drive
Cattle drives were a major economic
activity in the American west, particularly
between 1866 and 1886, when 20 million
cattle were herded from Texas to railheads
in Kansas for shipments to stockyards in
Chicago and points east. The long
distances covered, the need for periodic
rests by riders and animals, and the
establishment of railheads led to the
development of "cow towns" across the
American West.
http://cfbstaff.cfbisd.edu/wallm/Texas%20Main/Frontier%20and%20Industry/western_cattle_trails.htm
Cattle towns flourished between
1866 and 1890 as railroads reached towns
suitable for gathering and shipping cattle.
The first was Abilene, Kansas. Other towns
in Kansas, including Wichita and Dodge
City, succeeded Abilene or shared its
patronage by riders fresh off the long trail.
In the 1880s Dodge City boasted of being
the "cowboy capital of the world."
Communities in other states, including
Ogallala, Nebraska; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Miles City, Montana; and Medora, North Dakota, served the
trade as well. Amarillo, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls, all in Texas; Prescott, Arizona, Greeley, Colorado,
and Las Vegas, New Mexico were regionally important.
The most famous cattle towns like Abilene were railheads, where the herds were shipped to the
Chicago stockyards. Many smaller towns along the way supported open range lands. Many of the cow
towns were enlivened by buffalo hunters, railroad construction gangs, and freighting outfits during their
heyday. Cattle owners made these towns headquarters for buying and selling.
Later, however, continued overgrazing, combined with drought
and the exceptionally severe winter of 1886–1887 wiped out much of
the open-range cattle business in Montana and the upper Great
Plains. Following these events, ranchers began to use barbed wire
to enclose their ranches and protect their own grazing lands from
intrusions by others' animals.
In the 1890s, herds were still occasionally driven from the
Panhandle of Texas to Montana. However, railroads had expanded
to cover most of the nation, and meat packing plants were built
closer to major ranching areas, making long cattle drives to the
railheads unnecessary. Hence, the age of the open range was gone
and the era of large cattle drives were over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_drives_in_the_United_States
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