- Most Great Plains Indians in the mid-nineteenth century
Your answer:
lived in semipermanent villages and did some farming.
lived in nuclear family units and seldom saw others beyond their immediate relatives.
hunted the migratory buffalo herds and utilized the animals' meat, hides, bones, and skulls.
adjusted quickly to reservation life because they were used to living in tribal communities.
lived in cities with populations of 50,000 to 75,000.
- Lakota Sioux culture included
Your answer:
the belief that life is a series of circles--the circles of relatives, band, tribe, and nation.
belief in a hierarchy of plant and animal spirits whose help could be invoked through the Sun Dance.
ceremonies in which young men "sacrificed" themselves through self-torture to gain access to spiritual power.
A and C
A, B, and C
- The Board of Indian Commissioners was
Your answer:
a council of representatives from all the tribes of the Plains Indians that established Indian self-government on reservations.
an agency established by Congress to Christianize the Indians on reservations and teach them farming.
a militant Indian organization dedicated to preserving tribal customs.
an Indian social-welfare organization that encouraged Indians to produce traditional crafts for sale.
a board of inquiry established to investigate the Battle of Little Big Horn.
- An Indian people who adjusted somewhat more successfully than others to the reservation system, preserving traditional ways while selectively incorporating elements of the new order, were the
Your answer:
Five Civilized Tribes.
Sioux
Navajo.
Nez Percés.
Maya.
- What were the terms of the Homestead Act?
Your answer:
It offered 160 acres of land to any settler who would pay a $10 registration fee, live on the land for five years, and cultivate and improve it.
It offered 40 acres and a mule to former slaves who relocated to the frontier after the Civil War.
It granted ex-soldiers from Homestead, Pennsylvania, a parcel of western land as payment for service during the Civil War.
It was devised by Massachusetts senator Henry Homestead to break up Indian reservations and provide 160 acres of land to Indians for farming.
It created reservations to which Indians were forced to move.
- Western farmers generally
Your answer:
specialized in a single cash crop such as wheat or corn because the expense of setting up farm operations was so high
used black sharecroppers to farm portions of their large land holdings.
were rugged frontier individualists, not dependent on external forces such as the railroads and the international grain market.
represented the American dream because they needed only a few hundred dollars and a parcel of land from the government to get rich in "agribusiness."
were unrefined and backward
- Frontier communities were characterized by
Your answer:
cooperation among neighbors as a form of insurance in a rugged environment.
communal households as nuclear families gave way to frontier polygamy.
deep suspicion of neighbors or any outsiders who were not kin.
homosexuality since there were no women on the frontier.
matriarchal leadership, because the men tended to be away from home for months at a time.
- Which of the following statements best describes the attitude of western state governments regarding woman suffrage?
Your answer:
They believed that the West was a place where "men were men and women were women," and only men should vote.
They believed that women had made important contributions to settlement and that woman suffrage would attract female settlers.
They preferred to wait and see how the "experiment" of woman suffrage would work out in the more progressive eastern states.
It was not a major concern, because there were few women in most western states.
They refused to grant women suffrage because they feared women would vote for prohibition, put an end to gambling and brothels, and in general "clean up government."
- The first transcontinental railroad was
Your answer:
financed entirely by private capital, with no government subsidy.
built primarily with forced labor of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche prisoners of war and black slaves.
completed in 1869 with the joining of the Union Pacific and Central tracks in Utah.
a patchwork of short state railroads, built with little thought to transcontinental connections.
chartered originally by the Confederacy, in its hopes to take over the West, and then continued by the Union after the South’s defeat.
- The "range wars" pitted which two groups against each other?
Your answer:
cattlemen and farmers
cowboys and Indians
Mexican bandits and Anglo farmers
blacks and Chinese
renegade soldiers and Indians
- The mythic frontiersman appeared as a hero in the
Your answer:
novels of James Fenimore Cooper.
novels of Henry James.
dime novels of the 1860s and 1870s.
reports of John Wesley Powell.
both a and c.
- Which of these individuals--a president, a painter, and a writer--were deeply influenced by the frontier myth, enjoyed the physical challenges of the West, and rejected the constraints of the genteel urban world of their youth?
Your answer:
Franklin Roosevelt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Henry James
Grover Cleveland, Jackson Pollock, Helen Hunt Jackson
Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Remington, Owen Wister
Rutherford B. Hayes, Asher Durand, Theodore Dreiser
Benjamin Harrison, Frederic Church, Hamlin Garland
- Who was Frederick Jackson Turner?
Your answer:
a painter of American western landscapes
a historian who put forth the thesis that the frontier was the key to the American character
author of Ramona, a tale of doomed love set on a California Spanish-Mexican ranch
a one-armed veteran of the Civil War who charted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
author of Roughing It, a mining novel
- What did mining, cattle ranching, and wheat farming have in common?
Your answer:
Most people who tried their hand at them made money.
Slow economic growth made them safe investments.
Boom and bust economic cycles affected them.
The work itself was not hard.
They depended on massive government subsidies.
- The conservation movement
Your answer:
destroyed the old legend of the western frontier as the seedbed of American virtues.
emphasized the abundance of western land.
was an attempt to educate the public about the rapacious destruction of the environment.
was a reaction to the continual flooding of the Sacramento River.
was secretly funded by entrepreneurs anxious to avert government legislation.