Topics 6.2 and 6.3 Westward Expansion: the economic, social, and cultural development of the West, federal land policy, and the dispossession of American Indians between 1865 and 1898.

What this topic is asking

Topics 6.2 and 6.3 ask you to explain the settlement of the West: how federal policy, railroads, and private enterprise developed western farming, mining, and ranching, and at what cost to the American Indians who lived there. The exam wants the engines of settlement (the railroad, the Homestead Act, mining and ranching) and the dispossession of American Indians through reservations, the Dawes Act, and the closing of the frontier.

The engines of settlement

The new western economies

The West became a set of booming, specialized economies feeding the industrial nation. Farmers plowed the Great Plains, raising wheat and corn with new machinery, though they struggled with drought, debt, and railroad freight rates. Miners dug gold, silver, and copper. Ranchers drove cattle to railheads for shipment to Chicago's stockyards. These economies were deeply tied to eastern capital and railroads, which is why western farmers later joined the Populist revolt against banks and railroad monopolies.

The dispossession of American Indians

The closing of the frontier

In 1890 the Census announced that the frontier line could no longer be drawn: settlement now reached across the continent. Three years later the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his "Frontier Thesis", arguing that the frontier experience had forged American democracy and individualism and warning that its closing marked the end of an era. Whether or not Turner was right, his thesis shows how deeply the idea of the West shaped the national imagination, and it anticipated the search for new frontiers overseas in Period 7.

Worked example: weighing federal policy as a cause

Try this

Q1. Name the 1887 law that broke up tribal land into individual allotments. [Recall]

• Cue. The Dawes Severalty Act, intended to force the assimilation of American Indians.

Q2. Explain why the destruction of the buffalo was so devastating to Plains peoples. [Short explanation]

• Cue. The buffalo supplied food, clothing, shelter, and trade goods, so its near-extinction by the 1880s, driven by railroads and hide hunters, destroyed the economic and cultural foundation of Plains life and made resistance to the reservation system nearly impossible.