HIST 122 | Week 1: Manifest Destiny & Westward Expansion (Ch. 17)

Manifest Destiny (1845)

The belief that the U.S. had a divinely ordained mission to expand across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Significance: Provided the moral and political justification for westward expansion, the Mexican-American War, and the forced displacement of Native Americans.

Homestead Act (1862)

Federal law granting 160 acres of surveyed public land in the West to settlers for a small fee if they lived on and farmed it for 5 years. Significance: Accelerated mass settlement of the Great Plains and turned communal Indigenous lands into private plots.

Pacific Railway Act (1862)

Federal charters and land/loan subsidies granted to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Significance: Linked western markets with eastern industry, cut coast-to-coast transit from months to days, and decimated Great Plains bison herds.

Exodusters (1879–1880)

Thousands of African Americans who migrated together from the Deep South to Kansas after the collapse of Reconstruction. Significance: Represented the first mass post-emancipation migration of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow violence, Klan terror, and sharecropping peonage.

Sodbusters & Sod Houses

Great Plains homesteaders and the homes they built out of thick bricks of prairie dirt and root systems due to a lack of timber and stone. Significance: Illustrated the severe environmental hardships settlers faced (drought, locusts, isolation) and proved Plains farming required radical adaptation.

Bonanza Farms

Massive commercial wheat operations (often 20,000+ acres) funded by eastern capital and run by corporate managers using hired migrant laborers and steam machinery. Significance: Marked the transition from independent small-scale family farming to industrial agribusiness.

Comstock Lode (1859)

The first major discovery of rich silver ore deposits in the United States located under Mount Davidson in Nevada. Significance: Spurred rapid migration, accelerated Nevada statehood, and shifted western mining from individual prospectors to heavily capitalized corporate operations.

Fence Cutting Wars (1883–1884)

Conflicts in Texas between landless cowboys driving cattle along open trails and wealthy ranchers who used barbed wire to enclose public pastures and water sources. Significance: Marked the end of the Open Range era and established the legal supremacy of private fenced property and rail transport over free cattle drives.

Las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps) (1889–1890)

A clandestine Hispanic resistance group in northern New Mexico that conducted nighttime raids to cut barbed wire fences and burn railroad ties. Significance: An armed community response against Anglo-American land speculators who fraudulently surveyed and seized traditional communal Hispanic land grants.

Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

An unprovoked attack by Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado militia on an unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment flying a truce flag, killing over 150 people (mostly women and children). Significance: Exposed extreme frontier military brutality and escalated full-scale warfare across the Plains Indian tribes.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School & Americanization

An off-reservation boarding school system established by Richard Henry Pratt using the assimilation philosophy "Kill the Indian, save the man." Significance: Enforced systematic cultural erasure by forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families, banning native languages, and suppressing their traditions.

Dawes Severalty Act (Dawes Act of 1887)

Federal law that dissolved communal tribal reservations, dividing the land into individual 160-acre parcels and selling off leftover surplus land to white settlers. Significance: Struck a devastating blow to tribal sovereignty, resulting in the loss of roughly two-thirds of all reservation lands between 1887 and 1934.

Ghost Dance Movement (1889–1890)

A spiritual movement founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka preaching that ritual dancing would restore ancestors, replenish buffalo, and remove white settlers. Significance: Misinterpreted by U.S. authorities as a military uprising, which led directly to the military mobilization at Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)

The slaughter of nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in South Dakota while soldiers were attempting to disarm them. Significance: Marked the violent tragic end of armed Native American resistance against federal confinement on the western frontier.

Frederick Jackson Turner Frontier Thesis (1893)

An academic paper arguing that the continuous settlement of the frontier shaped distinct American traits such as individualism, democracy, and egalitarianism. Significance: Argued that the closing of the frontier (reported in the 1890 census) threatened American vitality, fueling early arguments for overseas imperialism.