Write a 500 word Textbook Essay on Hine and Faragher for HISTORY COURSE

User Generated

greenaprxvatngy

Humanities

Description

  • Choose one writing prompt. Write a 500 word essay based on one of the writing prompts below, citing the Hine & Faragher text at least 5 times. Your citation should come from a broad range of pages within Hine & Faragher, not merely one or two pages near each other. As we move through the semester, you may reach back into past chapters to supplement the current lesson if you would like. If you read ahead, you are welcome to cite future chapters. The index in the back of the book will help you add depth to your analysis and breadth to your citation.
    Writing Prompt
    • Choose a place from this lesson's readings. Discuss the importance of this place on the period and regions covered in this lesson. Was this place a site of conflict? If so, were people fighting for control of it, or was it merely where opposing sides happened to encounter one another? Was this place a site of exchange of goods and ideas? Why does this place matter in the scheme of the History of the American West?
      • For example, if the Black Hills were in this lesson's readings, you might examine what the Black Hills meant to various parties. Why did people want to control them or to have access to them? You might explore how conflicts over the Black Hills led to other conflicts. How did the loss of the Hills by one group and the gain of the Hills by another affect their cultures? Landscape has tremendous power in American identity, particularly Western landscapes. Later in the course, a particular place as a factor in local or national identity would be interesting to pursue. (Yellowstone and Yosemite, for example)
    As you write, think in terms of cause and effect, explaining why things happened as they did. Why did people do what they did? Make an argument and back it up with evidence. You may use the primary sources to bolster your essay. Just be sure that at least 5 of your citations come from a broad range of pages from Hine & Faragher. Citation: Use of evidence from Hine & Faragher is worth up to 40% of the score. Citation can be simple parenthetical citations. I simply need to be able to find what you are citing. For example, the following provide the textbook's author and the page number. This is sufficient:
    • (Hine & Faragher, 16)
    • (Hine & Faragher, 25)
    If you are citing outside sources that I have not assigned, please provide a link at the bottom of the page, along with a title that matches the citation. And cite only credible websites. For a quick reference to determining site credibility, see:If you wish to explore the US-Dakota War, which is covered only briefly in our textbook, you are welcome to use the book I translated. It is an open access book and is available for free here: Skarstein, The War with the Sioux (The Digital Press @ UND, 2015).
    Always quote any words that are taken verbatim (word for word) from Hine & Faragher or anyone else in order to prevent plagiarism. Citations go within the essay immediately after the sentence they support. For example, I might say:
    • The Civil War had a dramatic effect on the West in many ways, including an outward migration of African Americans from the South. (Hine & Faragher, 370-373) For example, Hine & Faragher describe "yet another mass exodus to the western promised land" in 1879 when free black Americans moved to western lands. (Hine & Faragher, 370-371)
    This is a formal essay. Formality means that you should write in the third person. You may use first person for the Primary Source Essay, but the Textbook Essay is more formal affair. Spell words out completely so that there are no contractions. For example, write "would not" rather than "wouldn't." Use proper grammar, and avoid informal terms such as "cool" or "crazy." Remember:
    • 500 words
    • Cite the Hine & Faragher text at least 5 times.
    • Cite from a broad range of pagesin Hine & Faragher, not from only a few of pages right next to each other.
    • Connect events, movements, innovations, etc. by showing cause and effect,explaining why people did what they did.

Unformatted Attachment Preview

• Lesson 6 Overview & Checklist Lesson 6: The Power of the Road & The Open Range To the right are James Averell, Ella Watson, a.k.a. Cattle Kate, and their son. Their story - minus the affect on their son - appears on page 327 of your textbook. There is no knowing the truth of this story, but it is valuable nonetheless. While their story is not the norm, it is characteristic of the West in many ways. It is marked by independence, resistance to authority, honor and attacks on honor, vigilantism, conflict over resources, survival in a rugged and largely unforgiving landscape, and acceptance of a little under handed behavior to even the playing field. This lesson's readings cover two of the most emblematic features of Western history: the railroad and cattle. Both involve conflict and community, and both involve the expansion of the power of the United States. This did not go uncontested, of course, as we see in attacks by Cheyenne and Chiricahuas war parties. Some of these attacks were thwarted by Indians from opposing nations. For example, many Pawnee joined army battalions. This kind of alliance with the US has tainted the image of certain Native tribes in the eye of the American public, seeing such Indians as traitors "to their own kind." We see this attitude toward the Crow scouts in the US Army as well. This is the same response that many Americans of all races have when they learn that it was Africans who captured and sold African slaves to European slave traders on the West coast of Africa. This is the sort of grouping that the human brain does unconsciously. It would never occur to Americans to see Vikings who captured and sold Anglo-Saxons into slavery in Arab and Byzantine lands as traitors. This is because we see Europeans and in most cases Asians as having separate nations, truly distinct ethic identities within a continent or a race. Because they are part of our own American background through England, we know that Vikings were their own distinct people, and Anglo-Saxons were their own distinct people. So we do not see one group as betraying the other because we know that they were not part of the same group. However, when we look at Africans selling Africans into slavery, we tend to see them all as Africans. They were not Africans any more than Vikings were Europeans. They were part of distinct tribes and nations. The same is true of North American Indians. Why wouldn't the Crow ally themselves with the US against the Lakota and the Blackfoot. They were enemies of the Crow, and the US could clearly turn the tide in favor of the Crow, which they did. So, why wouldn't the Pawnee ally themselves with the US against the Cheyenne or any of their other enemies? As we move forward, we will continue to see different groups of people making decisions based on their best interests, sometimes in ways like those of James Averell and Cattle Kate. Mullins, who cowboyed in Wyoming during this period, knew "some mighty fine boys carrying little irons” that they used to put their own brand on mavericks. In spite of the law, many cowboys believed that this was only fair play. Hadn't the early ranchers done the same thing in Texas? Although Mullins claimed that he “never in- dulged in this questionable game," he sympathized with the rustlers, pointing out that the cattle barons "had cut off every avenue for advancement." In the words of an old cowboy adage, "If you stole a few cattle you were a rustler. If you stole a few thou- sand you were a cattleman." Such views were widely held. When the association's "stock detectives"brought accused rustlers into court, juries of local citizens refused to convict them. In fact, the rustling charges were really just a cover for the association's attempt to eliminate competition. "The rustler," wrote Asa Mercer in his classic history of the conflict, "is the cattle baron's convenient scarecrow."Failing in the courts, the cattle- men turned to violence. Their first strike came against James Averell and his lover, Ella Watson, who were living on homestead claims that the association considered part of the "open range.” The cattle barons first tried to force them out by spreading rumors that Averell was the leader of a rustler band, and that Watson, known as “Cat- tle Kate," was a notorious prostitute who had built her fine herd by accepting steers for sexual services. Historians still dispute the truth of the charges. The pair refused to be intimidated, however, and Averell published angry denunciations of "land monopolists” in the newspaper. Finally, in 1889 a group of vigilante cattlemen in- vaded their ranch and lynched the couple. Although the murderers were well known, they walked free when the witnesses to the crime mysteriously"disappeared."37 The lynching of Averell and Cattle Kate stirred up animosity toward the cattle- men. The small ranchers organized a competing organization, the Northern Wyoming Farmers and Stockgrowers Association, and in 1892 they arranged to drive-rather than ship-their cattle east, avoiding the big interests and their rail- road connections. Nathan Champion, a trail boss with a tough reputation was to lead the drive. The big interests responded by sending fifty gunmen into Johnson County, where they killed three men and besieged Champion in a cabin along the Powder River. He held them off for twelve hours before the invaders burned him out and murdered him. Outraged Johnson County citizens organized into a vigilante mob of their own and surrounded the invaders, determined to hang them all. But the screams of the cattle magnates were heard as far away as Washington, D.C., and President Benjamin Harrison sent in United States troops to restore order. It is de batable whether federal intervention brought law and justice, for the cases against those who killed Champion and his friends were quietly dropped when the witnesses again disappeared. In the Johnson County War the most powerful political forces in Wyoming stood in opposition not only to the rustler but to any cowboy individual- istic enough to remain on his own. OPEN BANOS 327 11 The Safety Valve Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans were believers in the Jeffersonian promise that ordinary citizens-armed only with courage, stamina, and self-reliance- could move West, stake modest claims to the land, and make a success of it. The promise depended on the availability of western land, boundless, fertile, and cheap, and in post-Civil War America it was underwritten by the Homestead Act. Congress passed this historic legislation in the spring of 1862, as Union and Confederate troops fought and died for control of western Virginia and Tennessee, earlier Wests. But homestead enthusiasts would not allow the dying to spoil their legislative achieve- ment. “We doubt whether any endowment on so magnificent a scale has ever been conferred on the moneyless sons of labor," read one rhapsodic editorial; the Home- stead Act would shape American society "upon ages to come, when the battles on the Potomac and Tennessee will be regarded as mere incidents in history." Before the Homestead Act, the principles of American land policy were embod- ied in a sequence of emendations and elaborations to the foundational Land Ordi- nance of 1785, which opened the western public domain to settlers—but at a price, for the sale of public lands was to constitute a principal source of federal revenue. Over the next fifty years, in response to citizen complaints that the land law favored capitalists and speculators over actual settlers, Congress gradually lowered the price to $1.25 per acre and reduced the size of the minimum purchase from 640 to 40 acres. But what settlers most wanted was the legalization of squatting the right to select and improve lands anywhere on the public domain—even before they were sur- veyed—with the guarantee that when the land was officially "opened" they would be granted the opportunity to buy at the minimum price. In the American vernac- ular this right became known as “preemption." Representative Balie Peyton of Ten- nessee presented the plight of the squatter to Congress in 1835. "He had chosen that 330 spot as the home of his children. He had toiled in hope. He had given it value, and he loved the spot. It was his all. When the public sales were proclaimed, if that poor man attended it, he might bid to the last cent he had in the world, and mortgage the bed he slept on to enable him to do it. He might have his wife and children around him to see him bid; and when he had bid his very last cent, one of those speculators would stand by his side and bid two dollars more. And thus he would see his little home, on which he had toiled for years, where he hoped to rear his children and find a peace ful grave, pass into the hands of a rich moneyed company." A New York editor, by contrast, declared that preemption amounted to "granting bounties to squatters en- gaged in cheating the government out of the best tracts of land." During the presi- dential election of 1840, however, both the Whig and Democratic platforms en- dorsed a preemption law, and in 1841, soon after the election of William Henry Harrison ("Old Tippecanoe") to the presidency, Congress passed what was known as the "Log Cabin Bill," granting preemption rights to all Americans. The land was still not free, however, for sooner or later squatters, like everyone else, had to pay for the acres they tilled. The passage of the Log Cabin Bill set Americans to arguing whether the time had not come for dropping the revenue principle altogether and providing free land for settler families. The most vocal proponent for such a "homestead" law was labor leader George Henry Evans, editor of the New York Working Man's Advocate. Urging the laboring man to "Vote Yourself a Farm," Evans proposed a federal program to grant 160 acres of the public domain in the West to any citizen who was willing to improve it. Free land, he believed, like the "safety valve" on a steam boiler, would "carry off the superabundant labor (of eastern cities) to the salubrious and fertile West." Like many other nineteenth-century reformers, Evans was disturbed by the increasing concentration of land in the hands of wealthy Americans—what his con- temporaries referred to as “land monopoly." Evans urged that strict legal limits be placed on the quantity of public land an individual could acquire. Even more radi- cal proposals to eliminate land monopoly were circulating, Firebrand labor leader Thomas Skidmore argued that the government should confiscate large landed es- tates and redistribute them to ordinary workingfolk. Horrified capitalists de nounced both Skidmore and Evans as "agrarians" a term conservatives had pre- viously used to deride the Shays rebels in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts.? Evans's proposals were rescued from the political fringe by another New Yorker, Horace Greeley, editor of the nationally distributed New York Weekly Tribune, the most influential newspaper in nineteenth-century America. Greeley spoke to a wide constituency that included merchants and manufacturers. "Every smoke that rises in the Great West," he reminded them, "marks a new customer to the counting rooms and warehouses of New York." Western expansion was good for eastern business. Greeley, too, was an avid believer in the notion of a western safety valve, emphasiz- HATITT VALVE 331 Horace Greeley, 1872. Beinecke. 332 SAFETY VALVE
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer

Attached.

Surname; 1

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Topic
Date
History
Western farming highly relied on the restless workers for who at this time did not have
homes or families, and this kind of a labor system had its roots in the California gold rush.
Because their hope to own farms was diminishing with the increase in the price of land and the
equipment, they turned towards unionization. A campaign was therefore launched by Bill
Haywood to organize the harvesters to a new Agricultural Workers Organization which was
associated to Wobblies. Although there was an increase in farm produce, the workers' wages
remained stagnant. Workers argued for an adequate board, increase in the minimum wage to
three dollars a day on top of whic...


Anonymous
I was having a hard time with this subject, and this was a great help.

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Similar Content

Related Tags