Thursday, March 5, 2015

Day One Warms Ups- Progressive Era

1. The cultural conflicts between whites and Native Americans arose from cultural clashes in the interest of private properties. Native Americans didn't abide to conventional laws of private property, and that conflict with the white ideas of complete ownership of the resources and land, shown in the Homestead Act and the depletion of the buffalo populations. The battles were less organized fighting and more of massacres- the invention of quick-firing rifles with Samuel Colt and Winchester allowed the whites to slay Natives by the hundreds, which can be seen especially in the Battle of Wounded Knee.
2. Federal policy towards the Native Americans aimed to erase Native American culture and assimilate them into white American culture. This was brought up in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1867, establishing the reservation system. Federal soldiers killed Natives by the hundreds. Hellen Hunt Jackson wrote "A Century of Dishonor", outlining the injustice done to  the Native Americans in order to pressure politicians to take action in assisting the Americans. This resulted in the Dawes Act, granting natives property and establishing a path to citizenship after twenty five years. This is the last time the government will help out the natives until the 1930s.
3. Cattle ranches boomed in the midwest because it relied on the open range. This incorporates long drives, where cowboys lead cattle into cow towns- towns that sprouted up next to the railroads, placed there in order to take the meat back to other towns. After the rise of private property and barbed wire, this long drive was obstructed and declined very quickly. Droughts, desertification, and other environmental factors affected the decline of of the cattle populations as well. Mining frontiers started boom towns. These towns often had lawless towns that flourished on the intake of resources, beginning with the finding of gold and silver, but quickly dissolved into abandoned ghost towns after natural capitol was depleted. In mining towns, women had more rights than their counterparts in the eastern United States; as mining areas were admitted into the union, they granted women's suffrage as early as 1866.

No comments:

Post a Comment