The Three P's Collide

People, places and power are all connected to each other because particular people have power over others in specific places. There are certain individuals or groups of people who create certain events to occur. Sometimes these events happen when two or more people or groups of people interact, whether these are pleasant or terrible events. When a number of people have the same ideas and goals, they team up in order to pursue their goals. A group of people or a singular person can be in control of a specific place. Some areas, including countries, regions, cities, neighborhoods, or factories, confine people to that area, or kick out people due to the people in power of that place. People are affected by the places that they live because of the different geographies, cultures, and resources. People, places and resources are often under control of certain people. Many cultures have social statuses and people cannot control which status they were born into or were given. Power can come in the form of religion and culture from groups of people, individuals, economics, or the military.

KEY TERMS:

Push-pull factors are events that force or strongly encourage people to leave an area.
Nomads are people who travel to different places, especially to look for food sources.
Reservations were areas of land put aside for Native Americans by the federal government.
Wounded Knee was the creek that Big Foot, children and women escaped to after the Indian          Bureau in Washington shot chief Sitting Bull for leading the Ghost Dance.
The Dawes Act separated reservation land into individual plots with each Native American family with a head man getting a 160 acre plot of land.
The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 granted alternate areas of public land to the amount of five alternative sections for each mile on the side of the railroads.
The Morrill Land-Grant gave millions of acres of Western land to state governments so that the states could sell the land to collect money in order to build "land grant" colleges that were specifically agriculture and mechanical arts.
Land speculators were people who bought large plots of land to later sell to others to make money.
The Homestead Act was signed by Lincoln in 1862 so that for a small profit, the head of families, American citizens or immigrants that were filing for citizenship received 160 acres of land and small houses to live in for at least 6 months per year.
The Great Plains is a large grassland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains that provided a large number of buffalo in the 1800's.
The Massacre at Wounded Knee was the last place of violence in the Indian Wars where Sitting Bull was shot, along with over 200 Sioux killed.

          The interaction between white settlers and Native Americans in the West created chaos.  White settlers were involved with push-pull factors because they caused the Native Americans lose their homes. (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 488)

           White settlers forced Native Americans out of the West because they had more power than the Native Americans. White soldiers shot Native American women and children. (The "Indian Question", page 216)

            The Great Plains gave the Native Americans opportunities to trade with other places. The French and American fur trade allowed the Native Americans to trade their hides from buffalo for guns in order to make buffalo hunting more efficient. 491) 

The white settlers thought that they would make the Western land more productive. Treaties were made so that settlers would have to buy the Native Americans’ land, but the Native Americans would get little in return and they would be restricted to reservations (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 492). Since the white settlers had more power over the Native Americans, the Native Americans became nomads. Settlers would kill buffalo, divert water supplies, stole land, and attacked Indian camps to force them out of the Western land (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 492). The Great Plains provided plenty of buffalo for the Native Americans to use for meat, hides for shelter, and clothing. With access to the French, they were given more supplies to help hunt for buffalo (Prentice Hall America Pathways to the Past, page 491).  Even though sometimes when different groups of people connect great events happen, in this case when Native Americans and white settlers came across one another in the West, there was confusion and disappointment.