HOME ON THE RANGE bussongs/songs/home_on_the_range.php

2. HOME ON THE RANGE http://bussongs.com/songs/home_on_the_range.php Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam,Where the deer and the antelope play,Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,And the skies are not cloudy all day. Chorus:Home, home on the range,Where the deer and the antelope play,Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,And the skies are not cloudy all day. How often at night when the heavens are brightWith the light of the glittering stars,Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazedIf their glory exceeds that of ours Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sandFlows leisurely down the stream;Where the graceful white swan goes gliding alongLike a maid in a heavenly dream.

4. Aim: Did the development of the West lead to the downfall of the Native Americans?

5. I. Gold Fever and the Mining West • California gold 1849 • Comstock Lode, NV -1859 • Mining Towns • Boomtowns • Many different races • No women • Crime rampant • Vigilantes

7. For half a century after Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the Great Plains aroused little interest in the young nation. The plains were too dry for agriculture, people said. They were barren, forever a wasteland at the center of the continent. These ideas began to change in the years leading up to the Civil War. As the railroads were built westward, Americans realized how wrong they had been about the plains. Settlers in Kansas found no desert, but millions of acres of fertile soil. Cattlemen saw an open range for millions of cattle, a land of opportunity larger than even the Lone Star State. Of course, the plains were already inhabited by buffalo and Indians. But these meant little to the newcomers. Civilization, they believed, demanded that both be swept away and the land turned to “useful” purposes. How this came about is one of the saddest chapters in our history. . . . Source: Albert Marrin, Cowboys, Indians, and Gunfighters, Atheneum

10. II. GO WEST!!!!!!!!!! • Gov’t land grants to RR’s – leads to OPEN MARKETS • Morrill-Land Grant College Act • Homestead Act – 1862 • Migration WEST after the Civil War • Impact of Native Americans:

13. In her novel, O Pioneers!, Willa Cather gave an accurate portrayal of what life was like for those people who moved West and settled the Great Plains.On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house in which John Bergson was dying….In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man….Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairie-dog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Tim and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had a last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land.

14. III. Ranchers, Cowboys, Commercial Farming • “Long Drive” of cattle to RR then to Chicago. • Barbed Wire: revolutionized cattle business. • Impact on Native Americans:

16. Socioeconomic ladder: Cattle Kings and Cowboys Agribusiness: farming as a big business

17. IV. Frederick Jackson Turner Thesis • Based on 1890 census the frontier no long existed – completely settled • Frontier had shaped “American” Character • Promoted: Equality, Individualism, Inventiveness

18. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

19. It was with a shock of abhorrence, therefore, that they discovered in 1871 the presence of railroad surveyors running a line through the valley of the Yellowstone. With Sitting Bull’s approval, the young warriors immediately began a campaign of harassment, first letting the intruders know that they were not wanted there, and then driving them away. The reason the surveyors had come into this area was that the owners of the Northern Pacific Railroad had decided to change its route, abandoning the line through previously ceded lands and invading unceded lands without any consultation with the Indians. In 1872, the surveyors accompanied by a small military force came back to the Yellowstone country, and again Sitting Bull’s followers drove them away. . . . Source: Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, Henry Holt and Co.

23. V. How did U.S. violate Native American’s 14th Amendment? • Reservation System 1. Andrew Jackson • Transcontinental RR destroys the indians. • Indian Wars 1. Nearly 400 treaties broken

24. Indian Wars continued a. 1864 – Sand Creek Massacre b. 1866 – Red Cloud War c. 1876 – Battle of Little Big Horn d. 1890 – Battle of Wounded Knee 1) Ghost Dance

25. The Sioux Wars

26. The Dawes Act (1887) An act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use…the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized…to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows: To each head of family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section

27. D. Dawes Severalty Act 1887 • Attempt to Americanize Indians • Broke up tribes, gave 160 acres on 25 years probation then citizenship • Reduced size of Indian population • Led to poverty

28. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan described his procedure for taking the children from their families. He said: “I would…use the Indian police if necessary. I would withhold from [the Indian adults] rations and supplies…and when every other means was exhausted…I would send a troop of United States soldiers, not to seize them, but simply be present as an expression of the power of the government. Then I would say to these people, ‘Put your children in school;’ and they would do it.” Sun Elk, from Taos Pueblo, told of his experiences at Carlisle in 1890: “They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word, too. It means ‘be like the white man.’ I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indian ways were wrong. But they kept teaching us for seven years. And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen when men do that to Indians. We all wore white man’s clothes and ate whit man’s food and went to white man’s churches and spoke white man’s talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances. I tried to learn the lessons and after seven years I came home.” Indian Boarding Schools

29. E. Carlisle Indian Schools • Forced Native Americans to assimilate to American ways

30. HELEN HUNT JACKSON: A CENTURY OF DISHONOR Helen Hunt Jackson was a woman ahead of her time. Born Helen Fiske in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts, Hunt-Jackson was a novelist whose work raised eyebrows of controversy as she questioned the actions of the American government in regards to the Native Americans and also fought and petitioned for their rights. “There is not among these three hundred bands of Indians one which has not suffered cruelly at the hands either of the Government or of white settlers. The poorer, the more insignificant, the more helpless the band, the more certain the cruelty and outrage to which they have been subjected.” “The testimony of some of the highest military officers of the United States is on record to the effect that, in our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white man. . . . Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed and palliated. Every offense committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it. Against such influences as these are the people of the United States need to be warned.”

31. F. Helen Hunt Jackson “A Century of Dishonor” • Exposed to the public the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans

32. G. INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT, 1924 "BE IT ENACTED by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property. (Approved June 2, 1924)"