Deck 15: The West Opening the West

Question 1

Which event forced the Lakota Indians to give up their land in the Black Hills during the 1870s?

A) The decimation of the bison population
B) The discovery of gold
C) The Battle of Little Bighorn
D) The arrival of white homesteaders

Answer 1

The discovery of gold

Question 2

What was the intent of the Treaty of Fort Laramie?

A) To preserve designated areas of the Plains for Indian habitation
B) To open the Plains to white settlers
C) To turn over the area's mining rights to white prospectors
D) To destroy Indian hunting grounds

Answer 2

To preserve designated areas of the Plains for Indian habitation

Question 3

What was the result of Native American children's education in white reformers' schools?

A) They were unable to fit comfortably in either the white world or the Indian world.
B) Reformed Native Americans were well prepared for the industrialized workforce.
C) Educated Native Americans became leaders of their tribes on return to the reservations.
D) They were unprepared to fulfill the gender expectations associated with European American social and family life.

Answer 3

They were unable to fit comfortably in either the white world or the Indian world.

Question 4

To complete the project, in 1869 the two crews who built the transcontinental railroad met at

A) Promontory Point, Utah.
B) Council Bluffs, Iowa.
C) Fort Laramie, Wyoming.
D) Carson City, Nevada.

Question 5

Why did African American men choose to enlist in the U.S. army to serve in the West after the Civil War?

A) They shared white Americans' disdain for Indians.
B) They wanted to prove their patriotism after emancipation.
C) They hoped to achieve a better quality of life.
D) They had a better chance of serving in an integrated unit in the West.

Question 6

Most Native American tribes did not believe in the private ownership of

A) tools.
B) horses.
C) shelters.
D) land.

Question 7

Why did Native Americans oppose private ownership of land?

A) They believed that humans are tied to the natural world around them.
B) They privately owned neither land nor property.
C) They did not want white Americans to venture west and make claims to tribal lands.
D) They believed that the natural environment belonged to animals and birds, not humans.

Question 8

Pueblo Indians foreshadowed modern American practices in their

A) irrigation methods.
B) approach to big-game hunting.
C) weapons and strategies of armed warfare.
D) housing construction.

Question 9

Between the arrival of the first Europeans and the end of the Civil War, the Indian population of North America dropped from one million to about

A) 750,000.
B) 500,000.
C) 350,000.
D) 200,000.

Question 10

Which of the following American towns is the oldest?

A) Jamestown
B) Santa Fe
C) New York
D) Boston

Question 11

Who of the following shared General William Tecumseh Sherman's view that "hostile" Indians should be either destroyed or subjugated?

A) George Armstrong Custer
B) Richard Henry Pratt
C) Helen Hunt Jackson
D) Annie Oakley

Question 12

What did Indians have to do to receive 160 acres of land and American citizenship under the Dawes Act of 1887?

A) Give up traditional religious and cultural practices.
B) Stop performing the Ghost Dance.
C) Apologize for the killing of George Armstrong Custer.
D) Appear in native dress at pageants and Wild West shows.

Question 13

The economic exploitation of the far West after the Civil War relied heavily on

A) European investors.
B) Indian labor.
C) Russian miners.
D) Canadian lumberjacks.

Question 14

The corrupt practices of Union Pacific railroad developers-which resulted in a congressional investigation-included the creation of a fake company called

A) Comstock Lode.
B) Crédit Mobilier.
C) Amalgamated Copper.
D) Equitable Trust.

Question 15

In the nineteenth century, who theorized that all cultures evolved from savagery to civilization?

A) Richard Henry Pratt
B) Helen Hunt Jackson
C) Lewis Morgan
D) Henry Dawes

Question 16

What incited the Indian wars of the 1860s?

A) The Battle of Little Bighorn
B) The Wounded Knee Massacre
C) The Sand Creek Massacre
D) The relocation of the Nez Percé

Question 17

Which of the following characterizes the role of gender differences in Native American hunting societies?

A) Men were the hunters and therefore considered superior to women.
B) Women were the hunters and therefore considered superior to men.
C) Women did not hunt, but they did work, producing food, clothing, and shelter for their tribes.
D) Women were passive consumers of the goods men provided.

Question 18

Senator Henry Dawes's belief that following Puritan values would allow Indians to integrate into white society showed a lack of understanding of

A) Native Americans' communitarian values.
B) the diversity of Native American tribes.
C) the history of rivalry and wars among Native Americans.
D) Native Americans' lack of interest in farming.

Question 19

The landscape and climate of the Great Plains encouraged the establishment of

A) lumber companies.
B) cattle ranches.
C) small farms.
D) Indian reservations.

Question 20

Charles Dana Wilber's vision for the settlement of Nebraska was inspired by

A) Thomas Jefferson.
B) John Wesley Powell.
C) Chief Joseph.
D) Sitting Bull.

Question 21

On what conditions did the Homestead Act let settlers claim 160 acres of prairie farmland for free?

A) They had to turn a profit within 10 years.
B) They had to make improvements to the land within 5 years.
C) They had to eradicate all bison on their land.
D) They had to kill Indians on sight.

Question 22

During the late 1860s, the majority of cowboys were

A) Confederate veterans of the Civil War.
B) Union veterans of the Civil War.
C) former slaves.
D) Mexicans.

Question 23

How many homesteaders in the Prairie West eventually picked up and left for a nearby city?

A) Hardly any
B) One out of ten
C) Roughly half
D) The overwhelming majority of them

Question 24

Who were the women who homesteaded alone in the Dakotas in the 1870s?

A) They were older women of New England stock with years of experience in solitary farming.
B) They were women eager to escape the brutality of Jim Crow in the South.
C) They were women eager to take advantage of women's voting rights in the West.
D) They were often widows who had to provide for their children after their husbands' deaths.

Question 25

Of the early individual prospectors who flocked to the Comstock Lode, approximately what percentage were foreign-born?

A) 10 percent
B) 25 percent
C) 50 percent
D) 75 percent

Question 26

How did mining towns differ from older eastern cities?

A) Mining towns were not as ethnically diverse as eastern cities.
B) Mining towns did not have the social and religious organizations that existed in the East.
C) Mining towns did not suffer from overcrowding or poor sanitation.
D) Mining towns had a disproportionate concentration of young men.

Question 27

The Great Plains became the center of the American cattle industry because

A) ranchers benefited from the economic incentives provided by the Homestead Act.
B) new immigrants from Northern Europe were unwilling to settle there.
C) ranches could be established without relocating the Indian population.
D) the dry climate limited the productivity of small farms.

Question 28

In what state did women win the right to vote and run for office in local elections in 1887?

A) Colorado
B) Kansas
C) Utah
D) Minnesota

Question 29

The cowboys' "Long Drive" of cattle along the Chisholm Trail started in Texas and ended in

A) Oklahoma.
B) Kansas.
C) South Dakota.
D) Illinois.

Question 30

Which country produced a strain of wheat that was able to withstand the fluctuating climate west of the Mississippi?

A) Germany
B) Sweden
C) Czechoslovakia
D) Russia

Question 31

In popular culture, the cowboy has come to represent the

A) American spirit of independence.
B) ethnic and racial diversity of the American West.
C) aggressor in violent conflicts.
D) type of man who took advantage of women's innocence.

Question 32

Why did the number of prostitutes in Virginia City decline around 1880?

A) Prostitution had been made illegal.
B) A large company had taken control of the local mines.
C) Miners' salaries had been cut.
D) Supplies of gold and silver were dwindling.

Question 33

Mark Twain's experience in Nevada was an example of the individual prospector who

A) got rich quick and retired.
B) failed to strike it rich and returned home.
C) became employed with an industrial mining operation.
D) was sidelined after being injured in a mining accident.

Question 34

Before 1900, how many Great Plains settlers came directly from another country?

A) Half
B) One-third
C) One-fifth
D) One-tenth

Question 35

How did the depth at which gold and silver deposits were buried impact the mining process?

A) It took much longer for individual prospectors to get rich than they had anticipated.
B) Big businesses with access to industrial mining equipment displaced individual prospectors.
C) Individual prospectors quickly gave up mining and returned to their homes.
D) The federal government took control of the mining industry.

Question 36

What caused a dramatic increase in rainfall on the normally arid Great Plains during the 1880s?

A) A sudden and permanent change in the climate
B) A long-term cycle of alternating periods of precipitation and drought
C) The impact of new technological developments on the environment
D) The growth of human activity on the Plains

Question 37

Efforts to enforce segregation among cowboys were impeded by

A) the tradition of equal pay for white, black, and Mexican men.
B) the lack of racial discrimination in work assignments and promotions.
C) the need for cooperation and mutual support to survive life on the open range.
D) the fact that whites were in the minority.

Question 38

In what year was gold discovered in California?

A) 1848
B) 1851
C) 1863
D) 1876

Question 39

Frontier women's activism during the 1880s was motivated, in part, by

A) loneliness and isolation.
B) economic hardship.
C) a desire to curb men's alcohol consumption.
D) frustration with tedious domestic labor.

Question 40

Why did the cattle industry experience tremendous growth in the late nineteenth century?

A) Ranchers were able to exploit black and Mexican cowhands.
B) A large number of male easterners became interested in experiencing the cowboy life.
C) The invention of the refrigerated railroad car allowed for meat to be shipped to eastern consumers without spoiling.
D) Foreign cattle producers stopped sending their beef to the United States.

Question 41

Participation in the temperance movement inspired many frontier women to

A) divorce alcohol-dependent husbands.
B) convert to Mormonism.
C) campaign for the right to vote.
D) move their families back to the East.

Question 42

Nineteenth-century critics of Mormon polygamy compared the practice to

A) prostitution.
B) slavery.
C) imprisonment.
D) rape.

Question 43

The Mormon Church eventually abandoned polygamy in response to

A) the protests of Mormon women.
B) the opposition of the women's suffrage movement.
C) legislation that instituted harsh punishment for polygamous men.
D) an anti-polygamy pronouncement by Brigham Young.

Question 44

Based on Map 15.1, The American West, 1860-1900, which of the following transcontinental railroads relied most heavily on railroad land grants?

A) The Central Pacific from Sacramento to Promontory Point
B) The Southern Pacific Railroad from Los Angeles to El Paso
C) The Oregon Short Line from Ogden to Seattle
D) The Great Northern from Duluth to Spokane

Question 45

Californios were granted U.S. citizenship under the

A) Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
B) Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
C) Dawes Act.
D) Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Question 46

Which of the following beliefs did Mormons and Native Americans share?

A) Polygamy was a valid form of marriage.
B) Land use should be communal.
C) Human beings are not superior to other living things.
D) The buffalo had spiritual significance.

Question 47

White working-class men in California responded to the influx of Chinese laborers in the 1870s by

A) encouraging Chinese workers to join labor unions to guarantee fair wages for all.
B) asking employers to pay the Chinese lower wages because the Chinese were considered inferior workers.
C) advocating laws to restrict Chinese labor and boycotting Chinese-made goods.
D) demanding that the immigrants be restricted to working in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Question 48

Which group migrated to the United States partly in response to the British Opium Wars?

A) English
B) Chinese
C) Mexican
D) Irish

Question 49

What motivated Nevada rancher Juan José Herrera to organize the vigilante group known as the White Caps?

A) He was dissatisfied with the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
B) He believed the government was denying Mexican Americans their citizenship rights.
C) He was angry that the local railroad refused to hire Mexican American workers.
D) He was trying to keep Anglo-American ranchers from stealing land owned by Mexican Americans.

Question 50

Which of the following groups used vigilantism in an attempt to punish white ranchers and business owners for their mistreatment of Mexican Americans in the Southwest?

A) The Workingmen's Party
B) The White Caps
C) Californio landowners
D) The Apache Indians

Question 51

The construction of sod houses on the western plains was a response to the

A) absence of trees and timber.
B) need for running water.
C) massive snow accumulation in winter.
D) invasion of grasshoppers in the late 1870s.