Hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. In this video we’re going to keep reviewing Unit 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum by focusing on westward migration after the Civil War. And we talked about that in the last video as well, but there the emphasis was on farming technology and economics. This video is going to be all about the society and culture of those who settled the frontier. So if you’re ready to get them brain cows milked, let’s get to it. So just like in the last video, we’re trying to answer the same question: what were the causes and effects of the settlement of the West from 1877 to 1898. So starting in 1865 many more Americans began pushing westward again, as was the American custom, in hopes of achieving self-sufficiency and independence. And by the time the 19th century drew to a close, the vast frontier of the American continent was basically closed and settled by Americans. Now I mentioned in the last video two things that encouraged such migration: the Homestead Act and the completion of various transcontinental railroads. But once settlers arrived, what was it like? Well, first off, they brought a buttload of cattle with them into the Great Plains region. Construction of railroads into Kansas facilitated the cattle trade in eastern markets. This season of the American West gave birth that romanticized vision we have of the cowboy—out on the plains, saddled upon his horse, driving the cattle, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, until the cancer finally kills him. Anyway, from the 1860s to the 1880s, cowboys did drive massive herds of cattle to market across the plains all romantic like. But there’s nothing to kill the romance like a bunch of scrappy homesteaders getting free government land and throwing up barbed wire fencing around it. The ubiquity of that new fencing technology, which was very much necessary in the plains where building fences from the wood of all the non-existent trees was, well, difficult, ended the days of open cattle drives. Now these homesteaders became known as sodbusters because they were among the first to cut through the soil with their plows. Now, I made it sound like all of these sodbusters settled on the government’s offer of free land, but in reality only about a fifth of them got land this way. Others bought land from the railroad companies, which had gotten it either free or very cheap from the government—good deal for them. But ultimately, as I mentioned in the last video, because of the increasing mechanization of agriculture, many of these small farms folded and the land was consolidated into the hands of larger agri-business outfits. Now, but 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the frontier was officially settled, which came after the Oklahoma territory was opened for settlement. Now just to remind you, the Oklahoma Territory was designated as Indian Territory and many Indians in the east were relocated there due to the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s. And one of the reasons the Oklahoma territory was designated for Indians was because in the 1830s nobody could imagine Americans wanting to settle all the way over there, I mean, that’d be crazy. Anyway, back to that in a moment. First, I need to tell you about the significance of the closing of the frontier in the American mind. And for that, let me introduce you to Fredrick Jackson Turner’s influential essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History published in 1893. In it, he argued that the closing of the frontier was not so much a cause for celebration but rather a cause for concern. Why? Well, remember all that we’ve learned so far in this course. From the moment British colonists stepped foot on this continent, the impulse to move west was impossible to suppress. Americans were always moving west beyond the pale of what was safe or legal. And so Turner argues that the closing of the frontier was troubling because westward expansion had always been a means of releasing American discontent. You know, if things get bad, just move west. Additionally, Turner argued that the frontier had always been nigh unto mythic in its promise of a fresh start, not to mention the west was a democratizing force in that it largely leveled class and social hierarchies. So Turner was worried that once the frontier was gone America would devolve into the same class conflicts that plagued Europeans who had no west to push into. But all of this concern was basically over the woes of white settlers. As you probably know, when Americans moved West, they weren’t moving into virgin, uninhabited lands. In fact, these lands were populated with large populations of Indians, and no one seemed to be thinking about the hardships westward expansion would cause them. So after the completion of the transcontinental railroad facilitated mass migration west, the federal government sought to solve what they had long called the “Indian problem” by developing the reservation system. Indian populations were assigned to live on tracts of land called reservations with strict boundaries. And this didn’t suit many Indian populations who had organized their lives around following buffalo herds throughout the plains. However, all of the sudden, that argument mattered very little because American migrants had all but decimated the buffalo population as they moved west. Railroad workers and train passengers killed these animals indiscriminately, sometimes for food, but mostly for sport. So onto the reservations the Indians went and became official wards of the federal government until they could learn to be more like white people and assimilate into American society. Now it’ll be important for you to know that several Indian peoples resisted this movement of the federal government. In some cases it led to violence as it did in the Sioux Wars beginning in 1886. In this first installment of the Sioux Wars, the Sioux spanked an entire U.S. Army division handily. The effect of this, however, was the federal government making more treaties with the Indians and trying to restrict them to smaller and smaller reservations. But when gold was discovered on their lands, it proved impossible to keep Americans away. Things got worse with the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 which officially ended federal recognition of the sovereignty of Indian nations, and nullified all previous treaties made with them. This led to another war with the Sioux and a war with the Comanches. But despite this resistance, it was a losing battle. The constant pressure of the settlers and the U.S. Army, combined with the virtual extinction of the buffalo herds from the plains, forced the Indians to capitulate to the demands of the American government. And the crowning legislative act in this series of restrictive laws to solve the Indian problem was the Dawes Act of 1887. By enacting this law, the federal government officially abandoned the reservation system and divided reservation lands into 160 acre plots to be farmed by the Indians. And in a dashing display of magnanimity, the Dawes Act allowed Indians to become American citizens on the condition that they settled on that land and assimilated to American culture. Now the assimilationist movement was an attempt to put an end to distinct Indian cultures through education, vocational training, and Christianizing them. So you’re saying all I have to do is abandon the millenia-long traditions and culture of my people and then I get to become part of a nation that will still treat me like a second-class citizen. Where do I sign? But as the final gasps of Indian independence were being heaved, there was one more decisive resistance movement that I should tell you about, namely, the Ghost Dance Movement. The movement was developed by an Indian prophet in the northwest named Wavoka, and it soon spread across the continent. Basically the idea was that if Indians participated in this ritualistic dance, then the ghosts of their ancestors would return and finally drive the white man from their lands. But while this resistance was spreading across the land, the last violent battle of the Indian Wars was taking place at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890. The U.S. Army was attempting to disarm a group of Lakota Indians, and when an old man rose to perform the Ghost Dance, a gun went off, and in the end the Army killed more than 200 men, women, and children, and with that, the period of Indian resistance was effectively brought to an end. Alright, if you need more help for Unit 5, click here to check out the playlist. If you need even more help getting an A in your class and a five on your exam in May, if you want me to keep making these videos, then you can let me know by subscribing. Heimler out.