Introduction to Native American History and Westward Expansion

Vocabulary and key concepts regarding the resistance of Native American tribes, government policies like the Dawes Act, and the impact of the Transcontinental Railroad on US expansion.

Board of Indian Commissioners

A board founded in 1869 that focused on placing Native Americans on reservations and forced their Christianization and adoption of white lifestyles.

Boarding Schools

Government-run institutions where Native American children were taken from their parents and forced to speak English, dress in European style, and learn the 'white way' for a period of about 100 years.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer

A Civil War hero and officer in the Seventh Cavalry who was killed alongside all $209$ of his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Little Bighorn

A river in Montana where, on June 25, 1876, Sioux forces ambushed and defeated Custer's Seventh Cavalry.

Dawes Act

An 1887 law that divided reservation land into individual allotments of $160$ acres for farming or $320$ acres for grazing, leading to a $65\%$ reduction in Native American land holdings.

Dawes Registry

A 140-year-old government record established under the Dawes Act to track Native American ancestry; inclusion is still used today to be legally considered Native American.

Wovoka

A Native American from the Great Basin area who started the Ghost Dance movement after receiving visions from the great spirit.

Ghost Dance

A ritual spreading through tribes in the 1880s and 1890s based on the belief that the dead would return, the buffalo would reappear, and the white man would disappear.

Ghost shirt

A white cotton or linen garment that practitioners of the Ghost Dance believed would make bullets bounce off of them.

Wakusa

A subtribe of the Sioux whose members left their reservation in December 1890 while starving and freezing, leading to the conflict at Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee

The site in South Dakota where, on December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry massacred approximately $300$ out of $340$ Native Americans, marking the end of the Indian Wars.

Bigfoot

Also known as Blackfoot, he was the leader of the Sioux subtribe at Wounded Knee who was dying of pneumonia at the time of the massacre.

Lost Bird

The Native American name of the infant girl found alive after the Wounded Knee massacre and adopted by a soldier.

Transcontinental Railroad

The first railroad to connect the East and West coasts, completed on May 10, 1869, which reduced coast-to-coast travel time to one week.

Promontory Point

The location in Utah where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met to complete the Transcontinental Railroad.

Central Pacific Railroad

The railroad company that built eastward from Sacramento, California, employing approximately $12,600$ Chinese immigrants who provided their own food and tents.

Union Pacific Railroad

The railroad company that built westward from Omaha, Nebraska, using mostly Irish, Mexican American, and free Black laborers.

Pacific Railroad Act

An 1862 law that authorized the creation of railroads and granted companies large tracts of land that they could later sell for profit to settlers.

Mail order brides

Women who advertised for marriage in business catalogs like Sears or Montgomery Ward and were paid for by settlers to move to the Great Plains frontier.

Cash crops

Crops grown specifically for profit rather than survival, such as wheat in the Northern Plains, corn in Iowa and Illinois, or tobacco in Texas.

Mennonites

A religious group from Russia who moved whole villages to Kansas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including $60,000$ people transported by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1905.