Download Event Timeline - 8th Grade Social Studies

1860 A Homestead Bill, providing federal land grants to Western settlers, is vetoed
by President Buchanan under pressure from the South. The veto divides
Buchanan's Democratic party, clearing the way for Abraham Lincoln's election
in a three-way race.
1862 Congress passes the Pacific Railroad Act, which authorizes the Central Pacific
and Union Pacific Companies to build a transcontinental rail line along the
42nd parallel and provides public lands and subsidies for every mile of track
laid.
1862 Idaho Territory organized.
1862 Congress passes the Homestead Act, which allows citizens to settle on up to
160 acres of surveyed but unclaimed public land and receive title to it after
making improvements and residing there for five years.
1864 A second Pacific Railroad Act is passed by Congress, one that aims to
stimulate investment in the enterprise by doubling the size of the land grants
and improving the subsidies offered for every mile of track laid.
1868 The Senate approves a treaty permitting unrestricted immigration from
China.
1869
A Golden Spike completes the transcontinental railroad at
Promontory Point, Utah.
1870 A California court rules in White vs. Flood that a black child may not attend a
white school, setting the legal precedent for school segregation.
1870 The Union Pacific in Wyoming hires Chinese laborers for $32.50 a month
rather than pay $52.00 a month to whites. From incidents like this one, white
laborers across the West develop the opinion that Chinese immigrants are
competing unfairly for jobs, a feeling that will lead to violent racial conflict
and labor unrest in years to come.
1871 A quarrel over a woman between two Chinese men in Los Angeles escalates
into a city-wide anti-Chinese riot, ending in the murder of at least 23 of the
city's 200 Chinese residents.
1872
1877
The Yellowstone Act sets aside more than 2 million acres in
northwest Wyoming as a public "pleasuring-ground" for the
"preservation... of all timber, mineral deposits, natural
curiosities or wonders... and their retention in their natural
condition." It marks the first time any national government
has set aside public lands to preserve their natural beauties and sets a
precedent later followed in countries around the world. Much of the impetus
for establishing the park can be traced to William H. Jackson's photographs of
its natural wonders, taken when he traveled there with the Hayden expedition
of 1871.
On August 29, Brigham Young, the Mormon leader who built a
prosperous community and a vigorous church in a seeming
wasteland, dies at age 76.
Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé, surrenders to General
Oliver Howard, bringing to an end his four-month-long circuitous retreat from
the Wallowa Valley in eastern Oregon toward Sitting Bull’s encampment in
Canada -- one of the most remarkable military feats of the Indian Wars.
Eluding or defeating army troops at every turn, Joseph and a band of fewer
than 200 warriors bring nearly 500 women and children over 1,500 miles of
mountainous terrain to within forty miles of the border before they are finally
stopped by a force of 500 troopers led by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. Reduced
by this time to just 87 men, Joseph still holds out for five days in a pitiless
snowstorm, and then surrenders only because his people have no food or
blankets and will soon die of cold and starvation. "I am tired of fighting," he
declares as he holds out his rifle to General Howard. "I want to have time to
look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find
them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and
sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
1877 Congress passes the Desert Land Act, which permits settlers to purchase up
to 640 acres of public land at 25¢ per acre in areas where the arid climate
requires large-scale farming, provided they irrigate the land.
1879 At the urging of John Wesley Powell and others, Congress creates the United
States Geological Survey to coordinate the many independent survey projects
it has funded since army surveyors first charted potential routes for a
transcontinental railroad in the 1850s. Under Powell's direction beginning in
1881, the USGS expands its focus beyond mineral resources and geological
formations to include study of the potential for irrigating the West's arid lands
and the selection of suitable sites for dams and reservoirs. This pioneering
work eventually bears fruit with passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in
1902.
1879
To complete its consolidation of federally-funded scientific
exploration in the West, Congress creates the United States
Bureau of Ethnology to coordinate study of the region's native
peoples and complete a record of their cultures before they
vanish under the pressure of expanding white settlement.
Directed by John Wesley Powell, the Bureau of Ethnology launches an
ambitious program to document the culture and society of Native Americans,
sending one of its first field teams to Zuni Pueblo, where ethnologist Frank
Hamilton Cushing anticipates the methods of 20th century anthropology by
becoming a member of the Zuni community.
The first students, a group of 84 Lakota children, arrive at the newly
established United States Indian Training and Industrial School at Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, a boarding school founded by former Indian-fighter Captain
Richard Henry Pratt to remove young Indians from their native culture and
refashion them as members of mainstream American society. Over the next
two decades, twenty-four more schools on the Carlisle model will be
established outside the reservations, along with 81 boarding schools and
nearly 150 day schools on the Indians’ own land.
1880 President Benjamin Hayes signs the Chinese Exclusion Treaty, which reverses
the open-door policy set in 1868 and places strict limits both on the number
of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the United States and on the number
allowed to become naturalized citizens.
1881 Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century of Dishonor, the first detailed
examination of the federal government’s treatment of Native Americans in
the West. Her findings shock the nation with proof that empty promises,
broken treaties and brutality helped pave the way for white pioneers.
1882
Intensifying its anti-Chinese policies, Congress passes the
Chinese Exclusion Act, which completely prohibits both
immigration from China and the naturalization of Chinese
immigrants already in the United States for a period of ten
years. The bill comes amid increasing outbreaks of antiChinese violence, stirred up by the belief that low-paid Chinese workers are
taking jobs away from Americans. Within the year, immigration from China
drops from 40,000 in 1881 to just 23.
1883 The Northern Pacific Railroad, connecting the northwestern states to points
east, is finally completed, after a 19-year struggle against treacherous terrain
and intermitent financing. Along the line, crews blast a 3,850-foot tunnel
through solid granite and construct a 1,800-foot trestle. As a result, the
round trip to the Columbia River that took Lewis and Clark two-and-a-half
years in 1803 now takes just nine days.
1883 A group of clergymen, government officials and social reformers calling itself
“The Friends of the Indian” meets in upstate New York to develop a strategy
for bringing Native Americans into the mainstream of American life. Their
decisions set the course for U.S. policy toward Native Americans over the
next generation and result in the near destruction of Native American culture.
1885 Federal troops are called in to restore order in Rock Springs, Wyoming, after
British and Swedish miners go on a rampage against the Chinese, killing 28
and driving hundreds more out of town. This "Rock Springs Massacre" follows
a similar race riot in Tacoma, Washington, where whites force more than 700
Chinese immigrants to spend the night crowded onto open wagons, then ship
them to Portland, Oregon, the next day.
1886 Anti-Chinese mobs in Seattle kill five and destroy parts of the city before
forcing 200 Chinese aboard ships bound for San Francisco. Leaders of the
race riot vow to sweep the city clean of Chinese within the month.
1887
Congress passes the Dawes Severalty Act, imposing a system
of private land ownership on Native American tribes for whom
communal land ownership has been a centuries-old tradition.
Individual Indians become eligible to receive land allotments of
up to 160 acres, together with full U.S. citizenship. Tribal lands
remaining after all allotments have been made are to be declared surplus and
sold. Proponents of the law believe that it will help speed the Indians’
assimilation into mainstream society by giving them an incentive to live as
farmers and ranchers, earning a profit from their own personal property and
private initiative. Others see in the law an opportunity to buy up surplus tribal
lands for white settlers. When the allotment system finally ends, Indian
landholdings are reduced from 138 million acres in 1887 to only 48 million
acres in 1934. And with their land many Native Americans lose a fundamental
structuring principle of tribal life as well.
1889 Farm and labor representatives meet with prohibitionists in Salem, Oregon, to form a
progressive Union Party.
1889 Washington, Montana and the Dakotas join the Union.
1891 Congress passes the Forest Reserve Act, which authorizes setting aside public
forests in any state or territory to preserve a timber supply for the future.
The law marks the first step in a process that will steadily place more and
more Western land in the hands of the federal government while leaving less
and less available for private purchase and use. As a result, federal priorities
in the West gradually shift from selling public land to managing public
resources, from land development to land conservation, and federal
regulations become a permanent presence on the once wide open spaces.
1892 A strike by silver miners in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, erupts in violence, as
miners are killed and a security guard barracks blown up. State and federal
troops intervene to restore order by locking miners into an outdoor bullpen.
The miners' defeat leads to the formation of the Western Federation of Miners
in Butte, Montana, the next year, an organization representing mine workers
across the West.