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TheThe AmericanAmerican FrontierFrontier ’s Thesis (1893)

▶ Frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” . "begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader... the pastoral stage in life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory system.” ▶ The frontier defined the American identity . "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant " ▶ U.S. Census of 1890 claims American frontier is closed . "And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” Homestead Act Of 1862

▶ Parameters . 160-acre plots for minimum of 5 years . File application, improve the land, file for deed ▶ Demographics . Eastern families . . Old Immigrants MorrillMorrill LandLand GrantsGrants

▶ Purpose . “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” ▶ Parameters . 30,000 acres of federal land ▶ Colleges . University of Florida . Florida A&M . MIT . Cornell TranscontinentalTranscontinental RailroadRailroad

▶ Pacific Railway Acts ▶ First Transcontinental Railroad . Central Pacific and Union Pacific . Promontory Point (1869) ▶ Impact . Communication . Settlement and Expansion ▶ 35,000 miles (1865) ▶ 193,000 miles (1900) . Commerce ▶ Innovations . Standardized gauges . Time zones Settling : Cattle Frontier And Mining Frontier Settling The West: Farming Frontier

▶ Society . Mostly families settled in Frontier . Promotion of gender equality ▶ Innovation . . Dry farming ▶ National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (Grangers) (1867) . Cooperatives TheThe FrontierFrontier AndAnd NativesNatives ▶ Plains Natives Lifestyle . Buffalo hunt ▶ White hunters decimated buffalo herds for fur, sport, pests ▶ Reservations . Concentrations of tribes through separate treaties . Tribal chiefs selected by white officials ▶ Oklahoma Land Rush (April 1889) . Sooners and Boomers Americanization Of Natives

▶ A Century of Dishonor (1881) . Helen Hunt Jackson . “It makes little difference...where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one tribe is the story of all, varied only by differences of time and place.... is as greedy and unjust in 1880 as was Georgia in 1830, and Ohio in 1795, and the government breaks promises now as deftly as then, and with the added ingenuity from long practice....” ▶ Dawes Severalty Act (1887) . 160-acre plots of land from tribal territory . Designed to encourage farming among natives ▶ Ghost Dance Movement . Wovoka IndianIndian WarsWars

▶ Native American Leaders and Warriors . and () . and (Lakota) . () ▶ (1864) ▶ Little Big Horn (1876) . “Custer’s Last Stand” ▶ Wounded Knee (1890)

10th Calvary – “Buffalo Soldiers”