The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to a head of household who would live on it and improve it for five years.
Missing Word
Homestead
The Homestead Act transferred hundreds of millions of acres of public land to private settlers for only a small filing fee.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 2
The Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory, Utah, where a golden spike marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.
Missing Word
Promontory
Promontory, Utah, was the meeting point of the two lines in 1869, celebrated with a ceremonial golden spike.
Category: Federal Land and Railroads
Question 3
The roughly 2,000-mile Oregon Trail carried emigrant wagons from Missouri to the fertile valleys of the Pacific Northwest.
Missing Word
Oregon
The Oregon Trail ran to the Pacific Northwest, unlike the California Trail and the Santa Fe Trail, which led to other destinations.
Category: Manifest Destiny and Migration
Question 4
African Americans who left the South for Kansas around 1879 to escape violence and poverty became known as Exodusters, a name drawn from the Bible.
Missing Word
Exodusters
The Exodusters compared their flight from the post-Reconstruction South to the biblical exodus from Egypt, and thousands reached Kansas.
Category: Manifest Destiny and Migration
Question 5
Some Plains farmers built windmills, whose turning blades drew water up from deep wells, though drilling was expensive.
Missing Word
windmills
Windmills used the steady prairie wind to pump groundwater, but the cost of drilling and building them kept many farmers from using them.
Category: Homesteading Life
Question 6
The Comstock Lode, found in Nevada in 1859, was the first major silver strike in the United States.
Missing Word
Comstock
The Comstock Lode, named for prospector Henry Comstock, yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in silver and helped Nevada reach statehood in 1864.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 7
Strikes in Arizona and Montana produced copper, a metal in rising demand for electrical and telegraph wire.
Missing Word
copper
Copper conducts electricity well, so western copper mines grew in importance as electrical wiring and the telegraph spread.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 8
The hardy, half-wild Texas breed of cattle named for its very wide horns was the longhorn.
Missing Word
longhorn
Millions of longhorns roamed Texas at the end of the Civil War, and railroads made it profitable to drive them north for shipment east.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 9
Cattleman Joseph McCoy built stockyards, a hotel and a bank in Abilene, Kansas, turning it into a busy shipping point for Texas cattle.
Missing Word
Abilene
Abilene sat on a railroad line, and McCoy promoted it to drovers so that herds from Texas could be loaded onto trains for eastern markets.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 10
The 1862 Dakota War broke out in Minnesota after promised annuity payments failed to arrive and Dakota families went hungry.
Missing Word
Minnesota
In Minnesota, unpaid annuities, hunger and settler encroachment drove the Dakota to war; afterward 38 Dakota men were hanged and families were banished from the state.
Category: Wars on the Plains
Question 11
Colonel John Chivington led the Colorado militia that massacred Black Kettle's peaceful Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek in 1864.
Missing Word
Chivington
Chivington's militia attacked a camp flying both the American flag and a white flag, killing many women and children; army investigators later condemned the raid.
Category: Wars on the Plains
Question 12
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was killed along with many of his 7th Cavalry troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Missing Word
Custer
Custer's 7th Cavalry was overwhelmed by Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, the army's worst defeat of the Plains Indian Wars.
Category: Wars on the Plains
Question 13
The Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania became the model for boarding schools that took Native children far from their families.
Missing Word
Carlisle
Carlisle and the schools patterned on it pressed students to give up their languages, dress and customs as part of the Americanization policy.
Category: Assimilation Policy
Question 14
Gold found in 1848 at a sawmill owned by John Sutter at Coloma, California, set off the rush of prospectors to the region.
Missing Word
Sutter
Workers building John Sutter's mill, led by carpenter James Marshall, found gold there in January 1848, and the rush that followed brought tens of thousands of newcomers and overran Sutter's own lands.
Category: Mining and Ranching
Question 15
In 1885, White miners at Rock Springs, in Wyoming Territory, attacked their Chinese coworkers in a riot that killed more than two dozen Chinese immigrants.
Missing Word
Wyoming
The Rock Springs riot in Wyoming was one of the deadliest anti-Chinese attacks in the West; White miners who resented competition from Chinese workers burned the town's Chinese quarter.
Category: Chinese and Hispanic Westerners