nationalbrazerzkidai.blogg.se - The cattle industry became big business

Map of the Indian and Oklahoma territories.

American Indian and Oklahoma Territories Maps.

The Extermination of the American Bison.

Did the Industrial Revolution have anything to do with the cattle business in.

As Some Things Appear on the Plains and Among the Rockies in Mid-Summer The big boom busted, following a pattern that would become familiar in the.

The Old Carreta, Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico, 1890.

Old Mission Church, Los Angeles, California, between 18.

To find additional documents in Loc.gov on topics related to the West, use such keywords as West, ranching, Native Americans, and pioneers, or search using the names of states or cities in the West. Think about these differing views of the history of the West as you examine the documents in this collection. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance. Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a "meeting point between civilization and savagery" in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our views of the West in the late 19th century. Furthermore, the life of the cowboy was far from glamorous, involving long, hard hours of labor, poor living conditions, and economic hardship. The first cowboys were Spanish vaqueros, who had introduced cattle to Mexico centuries earlier.

And the much-romanticized era of the open range was over. The longhorn was being replaced by the Hereford, which is still the world’s most popular breed of cattle. By the mid-1880s, the cattle industry was big business. The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however. As the beef business grew and became organized hierarchically, it also became international in scope. The cowboy became the symbol for the West of the late 19th century, often depicted in popular culture as a glamorous or heroic figure. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white settlers. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, despite occasional victories, seemed doomed to defeat by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. The loss of the bison and growth of white settlement drastically affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were almost wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. Chinese railroad workers further added to the diversity of the region's population. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development.

The American West, 1865-1900 Popular Graphic Arts

Next Section Immigration to the United States, 1851-1900.