The Conquest of the Far West - Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, legislation, events, and concepts from the conquest and settlement of the Far West in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

Plains Indians

The most widespread native group in the Far West, consisting of many distinct cultures and language groups whose economic way of life was largely based on hunting buffalo.

Californios

The Hispanic residents of California who struggled to maintain land and political power after the territory was acquired by the United States and inundated by English-speaking immigrants.

Six Companies

Prominent merchant-led organizations in San Francisco's Chinatown that served as employment brokers, unions, arbitrators of disputes, defenders against persecution, and social service providers.

Tongs

Secret Chinese organizations in western cities, a few of which were violent criminal organizations involved in the opium trade and prostitution.

Workingmen's Party of California

A political party founded in 1878 by Irish immigrant Denis Kearney that gained significant power in the state largely due to its hostility toward Chinese immigrants.

Chinese Exclusion Act

An 1882 law passed by Congress that banned Chinese immigration into the United States for ten years and barred Chinese residents already in the country from becoming naturalized citizens.

Homestead Act of 1862

A federal law permitting settlers to buy plots of 160 acres of public land for a small fee if they occupied and improved the land for five years.

Timber Culture Act

An 1873 federal law that permitted homesteaders to receive grants of 160 additional acres of land if they planted 40 acres of trees on them.

Desert Land Act

An 1877 federal law allowing claimants to buy 640 acres of land at $1.25 an acre, provided they irrigated part of their holdings within three years.

Rocky Mountain School

A group of nineteenth-century painters, best known through Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, who celebrated the western landscape in grandiose canvases that inspired tourism.

Turner Thesis

The historical theory proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 claiming that the process of westward expansion had stimulated individualism, nationalism, and democracy, shaping the unique American character.

Placer Mining

An early method of mining in which individual prospectors panned for gold or extracted shallow surface deposits of ore largely by hand.

Quartz Mining

A deeper mining process, usually undertaken by corporations, that retrieved gold or silver embedded in deeper rock veins after surface deposits dwindled.

Comstock Lode

A massive silver deposit discovered in 1858 in the Washoe district of Nevada by Henry Comstock, yielding hundreds of millions of dollars in bullion.

Concentration Policy

An 1851 federal policy that assigned each Native American tribe its own defined reservation confirmed by individual treaties, dividing native groups and opening up desirable land for white settlement.

Indian Peace Commission

A commission established by Congress in 1867, composed of soldiers and civilians, that created a policy to move all Plains peoples into two large reservations in Indian Territory and the Dakotas.

Sand Creek Massacre

An 1864 attack in eastern Colorado in which Colonel J. M. Chivington led a volunteer militia force to massacre 133 unsuspecting Cheyenne and Arapaho people under Black Kettle.

Battle of the Little Bighorn

An 1876 battle in southern Montana where an alliance of approximately 2,500 Sioux warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull surrounded and killed Colonel George A. Custer and his regiment.

Chief Joseph

The leader of the Nez Percé who led a group of over 500 followers on a 1,321-mile retreat toward Canada in 1877 before surrendering to General Nelson Miles.

Wovoka

A Paiute prophet who inspired a spiritual revival across the Plains in the late 1880s by teaching the Ghost Dance and predicting the retreat of white settlers and the restoration of buffalo herds.

Battle of Wounded Knee

An 1890 massacre in South Dakota where the U.S. Seventh Cavalry used machine guns against a cold and starving group of Sioux, resulting in up to 200 native deaths.

Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

A law that abolished communal tribal ownership of reservation lands and allotted tracts to individual owners to force Native American assimilation into white society.

Carlisle School

A federally funded boarding school in Pennsylvania established in 1879 to assimilate Native American children into white culture by stripping them of their traditional customs.

Barbed Wire

A fencing material developed and marketed in the mid-1870s by Joseph H. Glidden and I. L. Ellwood that revolutionized fencing practices on the treeless Great Plains.

Dryland Farming

A tillage system designed to conserve soil moisture in dry regions by covering the soil with a dust blanket.