Cowboys ca. 1905
Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

Questions to consider
1. How important was the role of the federal government in aiding the process of westward expansion?
2. What was the role of the West in the economic development of the US between 1865 and 1920?
3. What was the role of the idea of the "frontier" in American culture in this period?
4. Describe and explain the relationship between federal government Indian policy and white attitudes to Native Americans in this period.
5. To what extent and with what success did Indians resist white domination between 1865 and 1920?
6. How should we explain the "ghost dance movement"?

Primary sources
"The Frontier Prospector", 1883 from The Overland Monthly. 2:2 (1883). 125-130
Sitting Bull (courtesy of the American Memory site at the Library of Congress)
Introduction and preface to "The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill"
Mrs. Z. A. Parker, description of a Ghost Dance observed on White Clay creek at Pine Ridge reservation, Dakota Territory, June 20, 1890. (from PBS website)
An Account of Sitting Bull's Death by James McLaughlin (1891)
Testimony of Indian Chiefs

Introductory reading
Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence", from the Oxford History of the American West, pp.393-425
Hine and Farragher, The American West: An Interpretative History, ch. 10 "Open Range", pp. 301-329 TEACHING COLLECTION MAIN 3296
Richard White, "Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age," Journal of American History 99: 1 (2003): 19-43
Alexander Saxton, "Organizing the West" in The rise and fall of the white republic: class politics and mass culture in nineteenth-century America (1990), pp. 269-291

Further reading
Gregory Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest, chapter 6, "Indians and the Enclosing Frontier"
Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, pp. 58-85
Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox (2007)
Frederick Jackson Turner, The frontier in American history (1920)
Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978)
Richard White, 'It's your misfortune and none of my own': a history of the American West (1991)
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The legacy of conquest: the unbroken past of the American West (1987)
John Mack Faragher, "The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West," American Historical Review 98:1 (1993): 106-117
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, Charles E. Rankin (eds) Trails: toward a new western history (1991).
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)