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A huge amount of silver was found in Nevada, which brought mining and built up the boomtown Virginia City. It later became a ghost town.
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The Homestead Act gave 160 acres of land to anyone willing to live and work there, in an attempt to build up the interior West.
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Angered by the actions of the state government and officials, Dakota fighters massacred over 400 whites, including women and children.
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Chivington, afraid of Cheyenne hostility, attacked the Cheyenne camp along Sand Creek while the men were out hunting and killed over 100 women and children.
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Cowboys were hired to herd cattle and bring them hundreds of miles from the untamed West to the rail lines for transport.
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The Burlingame Treaty set official terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers to America, who were instrumental in working on the transcontinental railroad.
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Grant offered appointments to reformers and introduced a peace policy which included Indian boarding schools to educate native children just as white children were.
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Glidden's invention of barbed wire made it easier for farmers and ranchers to fence in large areas of land, and led to the end of the Long Drive.
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Lieutenant Colonel Custer led his men into Sitting Bull's camp, and the Sioux wiped them all out. This was the last victory of the Plains Indians against the army.
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A group of black communities fled violence and poverty in Mississippi and Louisiana and went to Kansas, part of a mass migration of African-Americans to Kansas and the West.
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Powell told Congress that the 160-acre homestead plan wouldn't work in such dry regions as the West, and argued that the Mormon irrigation methods should be adopted.
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The Dawes Severalty Act was designed to redistribute tribal lands and force Indians onto individual landholdings as a counter to the reservation system. The Act was a failure, giving much more land to whites than to Indians.
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Frightened by the Ghost Dance Movement, the U.S. Army pursued a group of Lakota Sioux who had left their reservation and killed hundreds of them.
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Turner argued in his thesis that the frontier experience had shaped America's national character, and that a Westward-moving line existed between civilization and (Indian) savagery.