Major Stephen Long's expedition of 1819 and 1820 described the Great Plains as a "great American desert."
Correct Answer
True
True. Long's report helped convince Americans for decades that the Plains were too dry for farming and fit only for Native peoples, a view that changed after the 1840s.
Category: Manifest Destiny and Migration
Question 2
The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed unmarried women to claim land as heads of household.
Correct Answer
True
True. Any head of household or adult over 21, including single women, could file a claim, and some women did establish homesteads on their own.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 3
The Homestead Act required settlers to pay the full market price for their land.
Correct Answer
False
False. Settlers paid only a small filing fee; to earn title to 160 acres they had to live on the land and improve it for five years.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 4
The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
Correct Answer
True
True. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines were joined in Utah in 1869, cutting a trip across the country from months to about a week.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 5
The Union Pacific built its section of the first transcontinental railroad eastward from Sacramento, California.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento; the Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Nebraska.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 6
The Pacific Railway Act gave the railroad companies cash loans but no public land.
Correct Answer
False
False. The act gave the companies land along the route plus government bonds, and both railroads profited from these grants.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 7
Chinese laborers did much of the most dangerous work on the Central Pacific portion of the first transcontinental railroad.
Correct Answer
True
True. Thousands of Chinese workers blasted tunnels and laid track through the Sierra Nevada, often in the most hazardous jobs and for lower pay than White workers.
Category: Chinese and Hispanic Westerners
Question 8
Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote in 1869.
Correct Answer
True
True. Wyoming's territorial legislature gave women the vote in 1869, and Wyoming kept women's suffrage when it became a state in 1890. Several other western states and territories also gave women the vote decades before the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920.
Category: Homesteading Life
Question 9
Steel plows helped Plains farmers cut through the thick, root-bound prairie sod.
Correct Answer
True
True. Older iron and wooden plows stuck in the dense prairie soil, while the steel plows John Deere sold from the late 1830s had polished blades that cut the grass roots cleanly and shed the sticky soil.
Category: Homesteading Life
Question 10
Mining camps of the Gold Rush era had established courts and police from their very first days.
Correct Answer
False
False. Early mining camps often had no formal government and relied on vigilante justice until towns organized order later.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 11
The flood of gold seekers into California brought a catastrophic loss of life among the region's Native peoples.
Correct Answer
True
True. Violence, disease and the loss of land devastated California's Native population after 1848, and some scholars describe what happened as genocide.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 12
Many tools of the American cowboy, such as the lariat and chaps, were adopted from Mexican ranchers.
Correct Answer
True
True. Mexican vaqueros had worked cattle in the region long before Anglo cowboys, and their saddles, ropes and leather leggings shaped cowboy culture.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 13
Dime novels and later Western films understated the amount of violence on the frontier.
Correct Answer
False
False. Popular stories exaggerated Western violence; real bloodshed was more isolated and clustered in mining towns and range disputes.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 14
In the Fence Cutting War in Texas in the 1880s, cowboys and small farmers cut fences that large ranchers had put up across public land.
Correct Answer
True
True. Fencing blocked access to grass and water for cowboys, small ranchers and farmers. In 1884 the Texas legislature made fence cutting a crime and required the removal of fences illegally enclosing public land.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 15
Mining towns usually kept growing after their ore ran out.
Correct Answer
False
False. When the ore was exhausted, many mining towns were abandoned and became ghost towns, though a few, such as Denver, grew into permanent cities.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 16
President Lincoln approved the execution of every Dakota man sentenced to death after the 1862 Dakota War in Minnesota.
Correct Answer
False
False. Of 303 men sentenced to death, Lincoln spared all but 38, who were hanged in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Category: Wars on the Plains
Question 17
Chief Joseph and his band reached safety in Canada after their long retreat in 1877.
Correct Answer
False
False. The army caught Joseph's band in Montana less than fifty miles short of the Canadian border, and he surrendered, declaring he would fight no more forever, though a few hundred other Nez Perce did escape to Canada.
Category: Wars on the Plains
Question 18
Under the Dawes Act, Native American families generally received the most fertile land in their former reservations.
Correct Answer
False
False. Allotments were often the most arid land, while the leftover surplus land was sold to White settlers.
Category: Assimilation Policy
Question 19
Chinese immigrant communities in the late 1800s had roughly equal numbers of men and women.
Correct Answer
False
False. Very few Chinese women came; as late as 1890 fewer than 5 percent of Chinese people in the United States were female.
Category: Chinese and Hispanic Westerners
Question 20
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised U.S. citizenship to Mexicans who stayed in the lands ceded to the United States.
Correct Answer
True
True. The 1848 treaty offered citizenship and promised to protect property and religious freedom, though in practice Hispanic landowners lost much of their land.
Category: Chinese and Hispanic Westerners