Westward Expansion Jeopardy

This term describes the widespread 19th-century belief that America was destined to expand across the continent.

What is Manifest Destiny?

This 1803 land deal with France roughly doubled the size of the United States overnight.

What is the Louisiana Purchase?

This 1846 treaty with Britain set the boundary between US and British territory along the 49th parallel in the Pacific Northwest.

What is the Oregon Treaty?

This war, fought from 1846 to 1848, ended with Mexico ceding a huge swath of land including California and the Southwest to the United States.

What is the Mexican-American War?

This 1848 treaty ended the Mexican-American War and set the terms of the massive Mexican land cession.

What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?

This roughly 2,000-mile trail carried hundreds of thousands of settlers from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest starting in the 1840s.

What is the Oregon Trail?

This heavy canvas-covered vehicle, pulled by oxen, carried families and their belongings along the overland trails.

What is a covered wagon?

This trail branched off the main overland route toward the Great Salt Lake and became the route of a persecuted religious group in 1847.

What is the Mormon Trail?

This mountain range, crossed by wagon trains via South Pass, presented the most difficult natural barrier on the way to Oregon and California.

What are the Rocky Mountains?

This desperate fate met a snowbound group of California-bound settlers trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847.

Who are the Donner Party?

Gold was discovered at this California mill in January 1848, setting off a massive rush of prospectors the following year.

What is Sutter's Mill?

This nickname was given to the flood of gold-seekers who rushed to California in 1849.

Who are the forty-niners?

This booming, chaotic city grew almost overnight from a small port town into California's largest city because of the Gold Rush.

What is San Francisco?

This simple, often solitary mining method used a shallow dish to separate heavy gold flakes from river gravel and sand.

What is panning?

California's rapid population growth from the Gold Rush let it skip territorial status and enter the Union directly as this kind of state in 1850.

What is a free state?

This 1862 law granted land and loans to companies willing to build a railroad connecting the eastern United States to California.

What is the Pacific Railway Act?

This company built the eastern section of a transcontinental line, laying track westward from Nebraska.

What is the Union Pacific?

This company built the western section of a transcontinental line, laying track eastward from California through the Sierra Nevada.

What is the Central Pacific?

Many workers who blasted tunnels and laid track through the Sierra Nevada for the western railroad company were recent immigrants from this country.

What is China?

This term describes the free or cheap land grants railroad companies received from the government along their routes, which they then sold to settlers.

What is a land grant?

This Sioux leader led forces that defeated Custer's Seventh Cavalry at a famous 1876 battle in Montana Territory.

Who is Sitting Bull?

This 1830s forced relocation march of the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes to Indian Territory killed thousands along the way.

What is the Trail of Tears?

This nomadic Plains animal was central to the culture, food, and economy of many Native nations, and was hunted to near extinction by settlers and the US Army.

What is the buffalo?

This 1876 battle, also called Custer's Last Stand, was a major Native American victory over the US Army in Montana Territory.

What is the Battle of the Little Bighorn?

This 1890 massacre of Lakota men, women, and children by US troops in South Dakota is often cited as the end of the Plains Wars.

What is the Wounded Knee Massacre?

This 1862 law offered 160 acres of free land to settlers who agreed to live on and farm it for five years.

What is the Homestead Act?

This treeless, grass-covered region of the central United States challenged farmers with its lack of building material and unpredictable rainfall.

What is the Great Plains?

With few trees available for lumber, many Great Plains settlers built homes out of this thick, root-bound turf cut from the prairie.

What is sod?

This barbed invention, patented in 1874, let Great Plains farmers cheaply fence land that had almost no natural timber for fencing.

What is barbed wire?

This device, using wind-driven pumps, let homesteaders draw water up from deep underground on the arid Great Plains.

What is a windmill?