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=**Chapter 16: Conquest of the Far West**=

** Main Ideas: **

 * 1) The varied and vibrant ethnic and racial cultures that characterized the American West and how Anglo-European whites enforced their dominant role by the latter part of the nineteenth century.
 * 2) The transformation of the Far West from a sparsely populated region of Indians and various early settlers of European and Asian background into a part of the nation's capitalistic economy.
 * 3) The closing of the frontier as Indian resistance was eliminated, miners and cowboys spearheaded settlements, and government-subsidized railroads opened the area for intensive development.
 * 4) The development of mining, ranching, and commercial farming as the three major industries of the West.
 * 5) The problems faced by farmers as the agricultural sector entered a relative decline.


 * Essential Questions: **

** Text Resources: **
Sarah Keyes, //"Like a Roaring Lion": The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest//, Journal of American History, Vol. 96 No.1, June 2009. Historical acoustemology. In the essay that won the 2008 Louis Pelzer Award, Sarah Keyes brings a fresh perspective to the story of the Overland Trail by analyzing how sound shaped Native Americans’ and Euro-Americans’ trail experiences and understandings of the trail’s significance. In diaries and memoirs, Euro-Americans portrayed the sounds they made as having the power to subdue the savage wilds and to help transform the West into American territory. Whereas the established narrative of the Overland Trail has downplayed violence between natives and Euro-Americans, overlanders’ depiction of sonic assaults encourages us to reconsider the violence perpetrated by the wagon trains. The sonic component of the trail experience also qualifies historians’ argument that in recent centuries hearing has lost influence to seeing by demonstrating the continued importance of sound in post-Enlightenment Euro-American culture.

PBS video: The White Man's Image - portrays brief background history 1864-1874, mostly Pratt's setting up of the Carlisle School.

Brinkley outline:


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