Question | Answer |
Samuel Slater | developed the 1st American factory; brought industrailization here |
Eli Whitney | developed cotton gin & interchangeable parts |
Alexander Graham Bell | invents telephone |
Edwin Drake | used steam engine to drill for oil |
Henry Bessemer | purified iron to make steel. led to a construction & railroad boom, farm machines & great job growth |
Thomas Edison | Great American inventor. Created light bulb, electricity; he changed the nature of the energy we used & travel |
Christopher Sholes | created the typewriter; created more jobs, especially for women |
C. F. Dowd | said the Earth has time zones (divided it up into 24 zones) |
Union Pacific | moved westward from Omaha |
Central Pacific | moved eastward from Sacramento |
Chisholm Trail | major cattle route from San Antonio, Texas through Oklahoma to Kansas |
Joseph McCoy | created the Chisholm Trail |
why did the cattle boom (beef industry grow)begin? | rapidly growing cities; railroads could transfer it faster, & demand for beef increased |
why did the cattle boom end? | over grazing, barbed wire invented (ranchers put it up & blocked off the trails), & bad weather |
Long Drive | 3 month period of animal transport over land (driving cattle) |
main lure for settlers | vast tracts of cheap fertile land |
why land settlement was rapid | federal land policy; completeion of transcontinental railroad lines |
most important technology to the west | railroads |
Homestead Act | government gave land away to encourage settlement in the west |
Century of Dishonor | exposed the governments many broken promises to Native Americans |
Helen Hunt Jackson | wrote a Century of Dishonor |
assimilation | a plan where Native Americans would give up their beliefs & way of life & become part of the white culture |
Dawes Act | broke up reservations & gave some of the reservation land to individual Native Americans; tried to "Americanize" the Native Americans |
Ghost Dance | a Native American ritual dance that was thought would help restore lands; the practice alarmed military leaders |
Morrill Act | gave federal land to the states to help finance agricultural colleges |
Hatch Act | established agricultural experiment stations to inform farmers of new developments |
bonanza farms | enormous single-crop spreads of 15,000 to 50,000 acres |
why did bonanza farms fail? | drought; went bankrupt; couldn't complete with smaller farms that could grow a variety of crops |
1872 | Yellowstone National Park created; started an environmental policy |
1890 | census bureau declared that the country no longer had a continuous frontier line-the frontier no longer existed |
who built the railroads | Civil War Veterans, Irish, Chinese immigrants, African-Americans, & Mexican Americans |