| A | B |
|---|
| homesteader | a farmer who is given a plot of public land in return for cultivating it |
| transcontinental railroad | a railroad that crosses a continent |
| Homestead Act | offered farmers 160 acres of public land in the west for free |
| Pacific Railroad Act | called for the building of a railroad to link the Atlantic and Pacific coasts |
| Union Pacific | started in Nebraska an build tracks westward |
| Central Pacific | start in California and lay tracks eastward |
| Chinese laborers | more than 12,000 who worked for the Central Pacific |
| Promontory Point, Utah | 1,800 miles of track met in May 1869 |
| Boomtowns | gold and silver mines brought many many settlers |
| Ghost towns | after gold and silver was no longer available towns became vacant |
| vigilantes | due to lawlessness in many areas, some took the law into their own hands |
| buffalo | were used by native americans for food, shelter and clothing |
| stockyard | a large holding pen where cattle are kept |
| cowboys | young men who herded cattle |
| reservations | lands set aside for native americans to live |
| Sitting Bull | Sioux chief who resisted white settlement |
| Battle of Little Big Horn | the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defeated General Custer and soldiers |
| industrialization | the birth and growth of businesses that make and distribute products through the use of machinery |
| Andrew Carnegie | made money by producing steel |
| Henry Bessemer | process that made steel cheaper to produce and more effective |
| Thomas Edison | inventor of lightbulb, the phonograph, motion picture projector |
| Alexander Graham Bell | inventor of the telephone |
| assembly line | produced more goods per day at less cost |
| corporations | a business that is owned by many investors |
| John D. Rockefeller | made money in the oil business |
| monopoly | a company that controls all production and sales of a particular product or service |
| J.P. Morgan | made money in the banking industry |
| trust | a group of corporations that unite in order to reduce competition and control prices in a business or an industry |
| Wright Brothers | first successful flight - airplane |
| robber barons | people who made money by "crushing" their competitors |
| Henry Ford | improved the assembly line - invented the Model T Ford vehicle |
