AP®︎ US History: Topic 6.3 Flashcards

Offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who occupied and improved it for five years, encouraging western farming and migration

Rapidly growing settlements near mineral discoveries that often declined into ghost towns unless they developed other economic activities

Migrants who worked in railroads, mining, agriculture, and businesses while facing discriminatory laws, exclusion, and mob violence

African American soldiers in segregated western Army regiments, including the 9th and 10th Cavalry, who participated in campaigns against Native nations

African Americans who migrated from the post-Reconstruction South, especially to Kansas beginning in 1879, to escape oppression and seek land and autonomy

Promoter who encouraged Exodusters to migrate west to escape racial violence, political repression, debt, and the exploitative Southern agricultural system

Mexican cattle workers whose herding techniques and vocabulary strongly shaped western cowboy culture

Women homesteaded, farmed, ran businesses, taught, and sustained households and communities despite unequal rights and gender restrictions

The 1848 treaty that transferred the Southwest from Mexico to the United States and promised property protections that Mexican Americans often did not receive

Long-established residents who often lost land through litigation, taxes, fraud, violence, and squatting but preserved language, religion, and regional traditions

New Mexican resistance group that cut fences and destroyed large landholders' property to oppose enclosure of communal lands in the late 1880s and early 1890s

Commercial hunting, railroads, habitat loss, and military encouragement reduced the bison to fewer than 1,000 by about 1890, devastating Plains Indian life

An 1892 Wyoming conflict in which powerful ranching interests fought smaller ranchers and homesteaders accused of cattle theft

In 1871 Congress ended new treaties with Native nations, signaling that Indian policy would be imposed unilaterally rather than negotiated between sovereign nations

Recognized the Great Sioux Reservation, including the sacred Black Hills, and protected additional Native hunting territory

The 1876–1877 war caused by U.S. violation of Lakota lands after gold was found in the Black Hills; it ended with greater federal control and Native land loss

Army officer whose 1874 Black Hills expedition confirmed gold reports and whose 7th Cavalry was defeated at Little Bighorn

June 1876 Native victory in which Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated Custer's 7th Cavalry, provoking intensified U.S. retaliation

Hunkpapa Lakota spiritual and political leader associated with Native resistance during the Great Sioux War

Oglala Lakota war leader who played a major role in resistance to U.S. military conquest during the Great Sioux War

The 1877 conflict in which Nez Perce bands resisted confinement and retreated about 1,000 miles toward Canada before surrendering

Best-known Nez Perce spokesman associated with the 1877 retreat and surrender, although leadership was shared among several Native figures

Chiricahua Apache leader who used mobility and difficult terrain to resist U.S. and Mexican forces before surrendering in 1886

Federal system that confined Native peoples to restricted lands under extensive government control, freeing other territory for settlers and businesses

The inherent authority of a Native nation to govern its members and territory, increasingly denied by unilateral federal control

Opening in which settlers entered lands made available by the federal government, continuing the transfer of territory from Native control to non-Native settlement

Coercive federal policy intended to replace tribal identity, communal landholding, Native religions, and languages with private property, Christianity, English, and individual farming

The 1887 law that divided communal reservation land into individual allotments and opened “surplus” land to outsiders, causing massive Native land loss

Assimilation institutions that removed Native children from their families, suppressed their languages and religions, and imposed Euro-American education and customs

Influential Native boarding school founded in Pennsylvania in 1879 that became a model for coercive cultural assimilation

Founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School who expressed its assimilation goal as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

The 1889–1890 Native religious movement promising renewal, the return of the dead and bison, and freedom from oppression; officials misread it as an uprising

Northern Paiute religious leader who founded the Ghost Dance movement and taught moral renewal and the restoration of Native life

The 1890 killing of approximately 150 to 300 Lakota, many women and children, by the 7th Cavalry during an attempted disarmament in South Dakota

The Census Bureau's announcement that settlement was too widespread to identify a continuous frontier line, not that all western land was settled

Theory that free land and repeated westward settlement shaped American democracy, individualism, innovation, and social mobility

Historian who presented the Frontier Thesis in 1893 while largely overlooking Native ownership, federal power, conquest, women, and nonwhite labor

Popular portrayals that celebrated rugged white individualism and simplified cowboys, soldiers, outlaws, and Native peoples while obscuring government support, diversity, and conquest

Showman whose traveling Wild West performances dramatized and romanticized western conquest for American and international audiences

Division of collectively held reservation land into individual parcels to weaken tribal life and open “surplus” land to outsiders

Preservation of tribal identities, languages, religions, kinship, art, and ceremonies despite coercive federal assimilation policies

Use of farming, livestock raising, wage labor, leasing, crafts, and trade to pursue self-support while retaining tribal identity