Description
[button link=”https://winterpromise.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/SAMPLE_Sweeping_Into_the_West_2014.pdf” size=”medium” style=”download” bg_color=”#422310″ window=”yes”]Resource Sample[/button]
A History Resource for “American Culture”
Target Age Group: Grades 3rd to 8th
Type of Resource: Non-Consumable
This History Resource
Follow the course of American in the wake of the Civil War. The book begins with the period of Reconstruction after the war and the struggle of African Americans to gain civil rights, especially in the South. Then the story turns west, following homesteaders, railroad agents, stagecoach drivers, cattlemen, and opportunistic merchants along trails to railroad towns and pioneer claims. Students will be there as the Transcontinental Railroad is completed, as cattle are driven from ranches to cow towns, and buffalo are killed by the thousands.
Then students will be asked to look at the plight of disenfranchised Native American tribes. For years, tribes had been pushed off their lands in the east and herded west. As railroad lines moved west, hoards of pioneers pushed into lands once marked as reservations, and the main food source of the plains tribes, the buffalo, was systematically exterminated. In the end, the Plains tribes accepted small reservations or faced total defeat and the loss of their men to the U.S. Cavalry.
This resource follows the tide of people who moved west after the Civil War, and makes it clear how this massive flood of settlement affected the landscape and peoples of the West. It finishes with a look at the wild element that stopped trains, held up stagecoaches, and robbed banks, ensuring that frontier justice would finally tame the Wild West and bring the days of the frontier to a close.
106 pages.
