Chapter 26 Terms and Definitions

Comstock Lode: A massive silver deposit discovered in Nevada in 1859 that touched off a mining rush and helped fund western development.
Mining Frontier: The rapid, boom-and-bust settlement pattern that followed successive gold and silver strikes across the Mountain West.
Long Drive: The practice of driving cattle overland from Texas ranges to railroad towns in Kansas for shipment east, a hallmark of the open-range cattle frontier.
Open Range: Unfenced grazing land on the Great Plains used freely by cattle ranchers until barbed wire and railroads ended the practice in the 1880s.
Homestead Act (1862): A federal law granting 160 acres of public land free to settlers who lived on and improved it for five years, encouraging westward migration.
Sod Houses ("Soddies"): Homes built from blocks of prairie sod by Great Plains homesteaders in a largely treeless landscape lacking traditional building materials.
Plains Indians: Native American nations of the Great Plains, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche, whose way of life depended heavily on the buffalo.
Buffalo Slaughter: The near-extermination of the American bison herds by commercial hunters in the 1870s and 1880s, which devastated the Plains Indians' subsistence economy.
Sitting Bull: A Lakota Sioux leader who helped defeat Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and later toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876): A decisive Sioux and Cheyenne victory over Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Seventh Cavalry, also called "Custer's Last Stand."
Ghost Dance: A spiritual movement among Plains Indians in the late 1880s promising the return of the buffalo and removal of white settlers, which alarmed federal authorities.
Wounded Knee Massacre (1890): The killing of roughly 150–300 Lakota Sioux, many unarmed, by U.S. troops in South Dakota, effectively ending armed Native resistance on the Plains.
Dawes Severalty Act (1887): A federal law breaking up tribal landholdings into individual allotments to encourage assimilation, which resulted in massive losses of Native land.
Helen Hunt Jackson: Author of "A Century of Dishonor" (1881), which exposed the U.S. government's mistreatment of Native Americans and spurred reform efforts.
Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian whose 1893 "frontier thesis" argued that the frontier experience had shaped American democracy, individualism, and character.
Frontier Thesis: Turner's argument that the closing of the frontier, declared by the Census Bureau in 1890, marked the end of a defining era in American development.
The Grange (Patrons of Husbandry): A farmers' organization founded in 1867 that built cooperatives and pushed for state regulation of railroad rates.
Farmers' Alliance: A broader farmers' movement of the 1880s that organized cooperatives and political action across the South and West, feeding into the Populist Party.
Populist (People's) Party: A political party founded in 1892 demanding free silver, a graduated income tax, and government ownership of railroads to relieve struggling farmers.
Free Silver: The demand for unlimited coinage of silver alongside gold, favored by debt-burdened farmers and silver miners as a way to inflate the currency.
William Jennings Bryan: The Democratic-Populist presidential candidate in 1896 whose "Cross of Gold" speech championed free silver against the gold standard.
Cross of Gold Speech (1896): Bryan's electrifying convention address declaring that mankind should not be crucified "upon a cross of gold," which won him the Democratic nomination.