Frontier Family Life

Background Information:

 

What were the dreams that impelled men and women to hazard great dangers and hardships to seek a new home in the Far West during the nineteenth century?  By 1800 the land east of the Mississippi was rapidly filling up with migrants to the first great American West – beyond the Appalachian Mountains.  They had followed the Wilderness Road blazed by Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap in 1769 and formed new settlements in Kentucky, western Virginia, Tennessee and the Ohio River Valley. 

            Far ranging trappers and traders pushed into new territory, returning with tales of fortunes to be made in gold, furs, land and other natural resources.  Enthusiastic explorers and pioneers encourage migration to the areas they had opened to Anglo settlement:  Stephen Austin in Texas, Jason Lee in Oregon, Jedediah Smith, who found the South Pass that provided a route for wagons across the Rocky Mountains.  Popular culture glorified the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and painted vivid pictures of a frontier experience that was larger than life, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo to nineteenth century dime novels, captivity stories, Wild West shows and romantic Currier and Ives prints of an idyllic West dotted with scenic wonders and “noble savages”…

            Those who settled the Great Plains had to improvise shelter from “bricks” of sod, or make dugouts with turf facades, as there was little wood or stone for building.  Streams were scarce, and wells had to be dug to pump water for household use and livestock.  Extremes of weather included blizzards, torrential rains, wind storms, even tornadoes, while summer’s heat was relentless, unrelieved by the breezes of coastal regions.  Families arrived with little or no livestock, apart from the oxen that pulled their wagon trains, so farm animals had to be bred or purchased on the spot – milk cows, hunting dogs, poultry, pigs and horses and mules…

            Despite the great diversity of people and circumstances on the frontier, the nineteenth-century pioneers all shared one common experience: change.  Shelter, food and water were their first priorities, and these were closely followed by issues relating to family health and basic safety.  Many of the settlers had taken such necessities for granted before they undertook frontier life.  Isolation, too, was a shock to most of those who settled remote ranches and homesteads.

 

-          from Frontier Family Life: A Photographic Chronicle of the Old West by Marianne Bell

 

OBJECTIVES

 

SWBAT – Evaluate historical photographs to gain knowledge of the time period.

SWBAT – List and describe the conditions under which frontier families lived.

 

ANTICIPATORY SET (10 minutes)

 

Begin with a quick, open discussion using the following questions:

 

Could you imagine living in a home made of sod or mud?

How would you feel about living under such conditions?

What would motivate you to live under those kinds of conditions?

 

INSTRUCTIONAL INPUT (20 minutes)

 

A short lecture on the kinds of conditions westward migrants faced once they began to set up homesteads.  Bring up the issue of different kinds of ‘families’: extended, various ethnicities, mixed marriages, etc.

 

Refer to maps (on overheads) to point out to students where white settlers concentrated,  pointing out how these concentrations affected Native American populations (as discussed yesterday) and how climate conditions and landscape may have affected settlers in those regions.

 

MODELING (5 minutes)

 

Show overheads with historical photographs to emphasize and illustrate the lecture.

 

CHECKING FOR UNDERSTANDING

 

Understanding will be assessed in later classroom discussions.

 

GUIDED PRACTICE (55 minutes)

 

Students will break into groups to answer questions related to frontier family life for 15 minutes.

 

Lesson in Photography – Students will stay together as a classroom.  I will pass out the handout “On Photography’s Importance to Western Immigrants” and “Specific Questions for Analyzing Historical Photographs”.  We will read and discuss this as a class.  Following this, I will display more of the photographs from Marianne Bell’s book and we will discuss “observations and inferences” in each one.

 

INDEPENDENT PRACTICE

 

Homework – A historical photograph worksheet will be handed out to students (see attached) which requires them to find some old photograph, analyze and answer questions related to it based on the readings handed out in class.