American Pageant 16th edition Vocabulary Words and Definitions
*You are responsible for all terms in your readings and assignments as well as the terms below.*
Chapter 26: “The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution”
**You should be familiar with ALL the words on page 354 of the PREP BOOK and the words that
are listed below.
Dawes
Severalty Act
An act that broke up Indian reservations and distributed land to individual households. Leftover land was
sold for money to fund U.S. government efforts to “civilize” Native Americans. Of 130 million acres held in
Native American reservations before the Act, 90 million were sold to non-Native buyers.
Homestead Act A federal law that gave settlers 160 acres of land for about $30 if they lived on it for five years and
improved it by, for instance, building a house on it. The act helped make land accessible to hundreds of
thousands of westward-moving settlers, but many people also found disappointment when their land was
infertile or they saw speculators grabbing up the best land.
Little Bighorn,
Battle of the
A particularly violent example of the warfare between whites and Native Americans in the late nineteenth
century, also known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” In two days, June 25 and 26, 1876, the combined forces of
over 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians defeated and killed more than 250 U.S. soldiers,
including Colonel George Custer. The battle came as the U.S. government tried to compel Native
Americans to remain on the reservations and Native Americans tried to defend territory from white goldseekers. This Indian advantage did not last long, however, as the union of these Indian fighters proved
tenuous and the United States Army soon exacted retribution.
mechanization
of agriculture
The development of engine-driven machines, like the combine, which helped to dramatically increase the
productivity of land in the 1870s and 1880s. This process contributed to the consolidation of agricultural
business that drove many family farms out of existence.
mining industry After gold and silver strikes in Colorado, Nevada, and other Western territories in the second half of the
nineteenth century, fortune seekers by the thousands rushed to the West to dig. These metals were
essential to U.S. industrial growth and were also sold into world markets. After surface metals were
removed, people sought ways to extract ore from underground, leading to the development of heavy
mining machinery. This, in turn, led to the consolidation of the mining industry, because only big
companies could afford to buy and build the necessary machines.
reservation
system
The system that allotted land with designated boundaries to Native American tribes in the west,
beginning in the 1850s and ending with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Within these reservations,
most land was used communally, rather than owned individually. The U.S. government encouraged and
sometimes violently coerced Native Americans to stay on the reservations at all times.
1
Wounded Knee, A battle between the U.S. Army and the Dakota Sioux, in which several hundred Native Americans and
29 U.S. soldiers died. Tensions erupted violently over two major issues: the Sioux practice of the “Ghost
Battle of
Dance,” which the U.S. government had outlawed, and the dispute over whether Sioux reservation land
would be broken up because of the Dawes Act.
2