Apush Notes: Conquering a Continent 1861-1877

2540 words 11 pages
Cheyanne Ervin
APUSH, Period: 2
Ms. Check
14 January 2013
Chapter 16: Conquering a Continent, 1861-1877:

* Essential Question: What factors helped advance the integration of the national economy after the Civil War?
Section 1: The Republican Vision: * Integrating the National Economy: * Reshaping the former Confederacy after the Civil War supplemented a Republican drive to strengthen the national economy to overcome limitations of market variations that took place under previous Democratic commands. * Failure to fund internal improvements left different regions of the country disconnected, producing the Civil War, Republicans argued. * During the Civil War and after, the Republican-dominated Congress made strong use
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* Federal policies helped to incorporate the trans-Mississippi West. As railroads crossed the country, thousands of homesteaders filed land claims. * To make room for cattle, professional buffalo hunters eliminated the buffalo. * Texas ranchers inaugurated the famous Long Drive, hiring cowboys to herd cattle hundreds of miles north to the railroads that pushed west across Kansas. * As soon as railroads reached the Texas range country during the 1870s, ranchers abandoned the Long Drive. Stockyards appeared beside railroad tracks in large Midwestern cities like Chicago. These places became the center of a new industry, meatpacking. * Sheep raising also became a major enterprise in the high country of the Rockies and the Sierras. * In the late 1850s as California gold panned out, other mineral discoveries helped to develop the Far West in places like Nevada, the Colorado Rockies, South Dakota’s Black Hills, and Idaho. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was a major silver discovery. * At some sites, miners found copper, lead, and zinc that eastern industries demanded. The insatiable material demands of mining triggered economic growth at many far-flung sites, such as Pueblo, Colorado, which smelted ore. * Remote areas turned into a mob scene of prospectors, traders, gamblers, prostitutes, and saloonkeepers; prospectors made their own mining codes and often used them to exclude or discriminate

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