Why did attempts in the late 1800

Many female Christian missionaries played a central role in cultural reeducation programs that attempted to not only instill Protestant religion but also impose traditional American gender roles and family structures. Fieldwork, the traditional domain of white males, was primarily performed by Native women, who also usually controlled the products of their labor, if not the land that was worked, giving them status in society as laborers and food providers.

Christian missionaries performed much as secular federal agents had. Few American agents could meet Native Americans on their own terms. Most viewed reservation Indians as lazy and thought of Native cultures as inferior to their own.

The views of J. They seem to take no thought about provision for the future, and many of them would not work at all if they were not compelled to do so. They would rather live upon the roots and acorns gathered by their women than to work for flour and beef. If the Indians could not be forced through kindness to change their ways, most agreed that it was acceptable to use force, which Native groups resisted.

In Texas and the Southern Plains, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and their allies had wielded enormous influence. The Comanche in particular controlled huge swaths of territory and raided vast areas, inspiring terror from the Rocky Mountains to the interior of northern Mexico to the Texas Gulf Coast. But after the Civil War, the U. The American military first sent messengers to the Plains to find the elusive Comanche bands and ask them to come to peace negotiations at Medicine Lodge Creek in the fall of But terms were muddled: American officials believed that Comanche bands had accepted reservation life, while Comanche leaders believed they were guaranteed vast lands for buffalo hunting.

Comanche bands used designated reservation lands as a base from which to collect supplies and federal annuity goods while continuing to hunt, trade, and raid American settlements in Texas.

Confronted with renewed Comanche raiding, particularly by the famed war leader Quanah Parker, the U. Cold and hungry, with their way of life already decimated by soldiers, settlers, cattlemen, and railroads, the last free Comanche bands were moved to the reservation at Fort Sill, in what is now southwestern Oklahoma. On the northern Plains, the Sioux people had yet to fully surrender. White prospectors flooded the territory. Caring very little about Indian rights and very much about getting rich, they brought the Sioux situation again to its breaking point.

Aware that U. Initial clashes between U. In late June , a division of the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was sent up a trail into the Black Hills as an advance guard for a larger force. Cries for a swift American response filled the public sphere, and military expeditions were sent out to crush Native resistance. The Sioux splintered off into the wilderness and began a campaign of intermittent resistance but, outnumbered and suffering after a long, hungry winter, Crazy Horse led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May Other bands gradually followed until finally, in July , Sitting Bull and his followers at last laid down their weapons and came to the reservation.

Indigenous powers had been defeated. The Plains, it seemed, had been pacified. Plains peoples were not the only ones who suffered as a result of American expansion. Faced with a shrinking territorial base, members of these two groups often joined the U. Conflicts between the U. By , General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and end their threat to U.

Carleton selected a dry, almost treeless site in the Bosque Redondo Valley, three hundred miles from the Navajo homeland. Those who resisted would be shot.

Thus began a period of Navajo history called the Long Walk, which remains deeply important to Navajo people today. The Long Walk was not a single event but a series of forced marches to the reservation at Bosque Redondo between August and December Conditions at Bosque Redondo were horrible. Provisions provided by the U. Army were not only inadequate but often spoiled; disease was rampant, and thousands of Navajos died. By , it had become clear that life at the reservation was unsustainable.

General William Tecumseh Sherman visited the reservation and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were essentially kept as prisoners, but lack of cost-effectiveness was the main reason Sherman recommended that the Navajo be returned to their homeland in the West. The attacks on Native nations in California and the Pacific Northwest received significantly less attention than the dramatic conquest of the Plains, but Native peoples in these regions also experienced violence, population decline, and territorial loss.

They fought a guerrilla war for eleven months in which at least two hundred U. Despite appeals from settlers acquainted with the Modoc, the federal government hanged Kintpuash and three others leaders in a highly choreographed and publicized public execution. Four years later, in the Pacific Northwest, a branch of the Nez Perce who, generations earlier, had aided Lewis and Clark in their famous journey to the Pacific Ocean refused to be moved to a reservation and, under the leadership of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to settlers and American readers as Chief Joseph, attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U.

The outnumbered Nez Perce battled across a thousand miles and were attacked nearly two dozen times before they succumbed to hunger and exhaustion, surrendered, were imprisoned, and removed to a reservation in Indian Territory. Army officer, became a landmark of American rhetoric.

My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. The treaties that had been signed with numerous Native nations in California in the s were never ratified by the Senate. Over one hundred distinct Native groups had lived in California before the Spanish and American conquests, but by , the Native population of California had collapsed from about , on the eve of the gold rush to a little less than 20, A few reservation areas were eventually set up by the U.

Aside from agriculture and the extraction of natural resources—such as timber and precious metals—two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads. Railroads made the settlement and growth of the West possible.

By the late nineteenth century, maps of the Midwest were filled with advertisements touting how quickly a traveler could traverse the country. No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination—or federal support—as the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States.

Constructed from the west by the Central Pacific and from the east by the Union Pacific, the two roads were linked in Utah in to great national fanfare. But such a herculean task was not easy, and national legislators threw enormous subsidies at railroad companies, a part of the Republican Party platform since Between and alone, railroad companies received more than ,, acres of public land, an area larger than the state of Texas.

Investors reaped enormous profits. If railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, they also created enormous labor demands. By , approximately four hundred thousand men—or nearly 2. Much of the work was dangerous and low-paying, and companies relied heavily on immigrant labor to build tracks. Companies employed Irish workers in the early nineteenth century and Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century. By , over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States.

Once the rails were laid, companies still needed a large workforce to keep the trains running. Much railroad work was dangerous, but perhaps the most hazardous work was done by brakemen.

Speed was necessary, and any slip could be fatal. Brakemen were also responsible for coupling the cars, attaching them together with a large pin. It was easy to lose a hand or finger and even a slight mistake could cause cars to collide.

The railroads boomed. In , there were 9, miles of railroads in the United States. In there were ,, including several transcontinental lines. Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most spectacular.

It grew from two hundred inhabitants in to over a million by By it and the region from which it drew were completely transformed. Chicago became the most important western hub and served as the gateway between the farm and ranch country of the Great Plains and eastern markets. Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter, where they were then processed into packaged meats and shipped by refrigerated rail to New York City and other eastern cities. Such hubs became the central nodes in a rapid-transit economy that increasingly spread across the entire continent linking goods and people together in a new national network.

This national network created the fabled cattle drives of the s and s. The first cattle drives across the central Plains began soon after the Civil War. Railroads created the market for ranching, and for the few years after the war that railroads connected eastern markets with important market hubs such as Chicago, but had yet to reach Texas ranchlands, ranchers began driving cattle north, out of the Lone Star state, to major railroad terminuses in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Ranchers used well-worn trails, such as the Chisholm Trail, for drives, but conflicts arose with Native Americans in the Indian Territory and farmers in Kansas who disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their own hunting, ranching, and farming lands.

This photochrom print a new technology in the late nineteenth century that colorized images from a black-and-white negative depicts a cattle round-up in Cimarron, a crossroads of the late nineteenth-century cattle drives. Detroit Photographic Co. Cattle drives were difficult tasks for the crews of men who managed the herds.

Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the late-nineteenth century to be between twelve thousand and forty thousand. Much about the American cowboys evolved from Mexican vaqueros : cowboys adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo , bronco , and lasso.

While most cattle drivers were men, there are at least sixteen verifiable accounts of women participating in the drives. Soon, the development of Pullman sleeping cars and dining cars made rail travel comfortable and more enjoyable for passengers. In , the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and led to rapid settlement of the western United States. It also made it much easier to transport goods over long distances from one part of the country to another. This enormous railroad expansion resulted in rail companies and their executives receiving lavish amounts of money and land—up to million acres, by some estimates—from the United States government.

In many cases, politicians cut shady backroom deals and helped create railroad and shipping tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.

Railroad tycoons were just one of many types of so-called robber barons that emerged in the Gilded Age. These men used union busting, fraud, intimidation, violence and their extensive political connections to gain an advantage over any competitors.

Robber barons were relentless in their efforts to amass wealth while exploiting workers and ignoring standard business rules—and in many cases, the law itself. They soon accumulated vast amounts of money and dominated every major industry including the railroad, oil, banking, timber, sugar, liquor, meatpacking, steel, mining, tobacco and textile industries.

Some wealthy entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie , John D. Rockefeller and Henry Frick are often referred to as robber barons but may not exactly fit the mold. Some tried to improve life for their employees, donated millions to charities and nonprofits and supported their communities by providing funding for everything from libraries and hospitals to universities, public parks and zoos.

The Gilded Age was in many ways the culmination of the Industrial Revolution , when America and much of Europe shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Millions of immigrants and struggling farmers arrived in cities such as New York , Boston , Philadelphia, St.

Louis and Chicago , looking for work and hastening the urbanization of America. By , about 40 percent of Americans lived in major cities. Most cities were unprepared for rapid population growth. Housing was limited, and tenements and slums sprung up nationwide.

Heating, lighting, sanitation and medical care were poor or nonexistent, and millions died from preventable disease. Many immigrants were unskilled and willing to work long hours for little pay. Gilded Age plutocrats considered them the perfect employees for their sweatshops, where working conditions were dangerous and workers endured long periods of unemployment, wage cuts and no benefits. Homes of the Gilded Age elite were nothing short of spectacular.

The home had 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, a dairy, a horse barn and beautiful formal and informal gardens.

It was the summer home of railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Italian-Renaissance style home has 70 rooms, a stable and a carriage house. Rosecliff , also in Newport, was completed in Whitehall , located in Palm Beach, Florida , was the neoclassical winter retreat of oil tycoon Henry Flagler and his wife Mary. The , square foot, room mansion was completed in and is now a popular museum.

The industrialists of the Gilded Age lived high on the hog, but most of the working class lived below poverty level. As time went on, the income inequality between wealthy and poor became more and more glaring.

While the wealthy lived in opulent homes, dined on succulent food and showered their children with gifts, the poor were crammed into filthy tenement apartments, struggled to put a loaf of bread on the table and often accompanied their children to a sweatshop each morning where they faced a hour or longer workday. Some moguls used Social Darwinism to justify the inequality between the classes. Satirical cartoon in 'Judge' about a journalist named Muckraker and his campaign against trusts and capitalists, circa Muckrakers is a term used to describe reporters who exposed corruption among politicians and the elite.

In , reporter and photographer Jacob Riis brought the horrors of New York slum life to light in his book, How the Other Half Lives , prompting New York politicians to pass legislation to improve tenement conditions.

Another journalist, Ida Tarbell , spent years investigating the underhanded rise of oilman John D. In , activist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose horrendous working conditions in the meatpacking industry. Much of the violence, however, was between the workers themselves as they struggled to agree on what they were fighting for.

Some simply wanted increased wages and a better working environment, while others also wanted to keep women, immigrants and blacks out of the workforce. Although the first labor unions occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increased number of unskilled and unsatisfied factory workers. On July 16, , the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company announced a percent pay cut on its railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia , the second cut in less than eight months.

The strike spread among other railroads, sparking violence across America between the working class and local and federal authorities. At its peak, over , railroad workers were on strike. Many of the Robber Barons feared an aggressive, all-out revolution against their way of life.

Instead, the strike—later known as the Great Upheaval—ended abruptly and was labeled a dismal failure. As the working class continued to use strikes and boycotts to fight for higher wages and improved working conditions, their bosses staged lock-outs and brought in replacement workers known as scabs. They also created blacklists to prevent active union workers from becoming employed elsewhere. City services had a difficult time keeping up with the tremendous population growth.

Cities in the late s and early s often lacked central planning. There were few sewer systems or clean water. Many roads were not yet paved. There were few building codes in place to protect the people living in them, and fire and police services were limited.

Cities were rife with political corruption and disease. As a result of the negative consequences of urbanization, many Progressives began to push for urban reforms. Progressives organized settlement houses in urban areas to provide help for immigrants and the urban poor. They supported passage of laws that would improve living conditions in the inner cities.

Progressives also advocated legislation that would reduce the power of city bosses and get rid of corruption within city politics.