Flash-Pack

Laura Welch Bush; 2001 to present

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:48:10 +0000

Born: 1947

When Laura Welch and George W. Bush were introduced at a dinner in Midland, Texas, they proved the theory that opposites attract. She was a reserved 30-year-old schoolteacher and librarian with a passion for books. He was a gregarious 31-year-old oilman who liked a good time. Within three months, they were wed. Like George, Laura had grown up in Midland, where her father was a homebuilder. But while George went east to study, Laura majored in education at SMU, then earned a masters in library science at the University of Texas. She led a largely private life as a wife and mother of twin daughters until her husband’s gubernatorial win thrust her into the public eye.

As First Lady of Texas, Laura Bush focused on the cause of education. She launched an early childhood development initiative to help ready kids for school, and started the annual Texas Book Festival to raise money for public libraries. She used the statehouse to promote family literacy much as her mother-in-law, former First Lady Barbara Bush, used the White House. When George W. entered the 2000 Presidential race, Laura proved an able and popular campaigner, giving the opening address at the GOP convention. In the years since he was first elected, Laura has emerged as a strong, but discreet, First Lady, who wields no small influence as her husband’s most trusted confidante. Calm, quiet and self-possessed, Laura Bush has been called her husband’s “check and balance.”

Forty-Third President
George W. Bush

Testimonial 1

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:39:24 +0000

This past summer, while visiting the St. Louis Arch Museum store, I purchased the Presidents of the United States Flash-Pack. My daughter was fascinated with the presidents and your cards were just the right size for her hands to hold. By the time my daughter was eighteen months old, she had memorized all 43 presidents. Now that she is two, I am looking forward to teaching her the First Ladies and about the American West with your products. I am also purchasing a second pack of presidents because ours have become so dog-eared and worn from constant use! Not only has my child been able to fed her curiosity, but my husband and I have become better informed of our country’s history.

Thank you for such an informative and functional product!

Sincerely,

Corky Mason

John Muir and the Preservation Movement

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:07:42 +0000

By the close of the 19th century, railroads and telegraph lines spanned the American continent. Settlement had spread to such an extent throughout the West that the Census of 1890 announced there was no longer a frontier line. Without the “frontier beyond,” Americans began to view the wilderness differently. It was not, after all, endless and inexhaustible, but finite, shrinking and worthy of protection. The most effective spokesman for the cause of western wilderness preservation in the latter decades of the 19th century was the Scottish-born naturalist, John Muir (1838-1914). After studying at the University of Wisconsin, Muir hiked all over the West, studying and writing about the region’s wild places, especially its mountains, forests and glaciers. In arguing for the preservation of nature in its primeval state, Muir was echoing views expressed earlier by Thoreau and Emerson, but he articulated them with new intensity. Muir was particularly entranced by the beauty of California’s Yosemite Valley and its surrounding Sierra Neva mountains, which he called the “range of light.” At his urging, the area was finally designated a national park in 1890, the nation’s third after Sequoia (1890) and Yellowstone (1872). In 1892, Muir founded the Sierra Club, an organization dedicated to the preservation and enjoyment of the wilderness.

The End of the Open Range

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:06:06 +0000

Between 1865 and 1887, the Great Plains experienced a dramatic faunal change as the vast buffalo herds were eliminated and millions of Texas cattle moved north onto the open ranges of Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Montana. Ranchers rarely bothered to acquire legal title to grazing lands; they simply “squatted” on what was still largely the public domain, creating a unique cattle kingdom. Eventually, the lure of immense cattle profits led to overcrowding and overgrazing, the problem exacerbated by the arrival of sheepherders and homesteaders to the region in the 1880s. As competition for grasslands increased, bitter range wars broke out between sheepherders and cattlemen in Colorado, Wyoming and elsewhere. And violence also erupted between cattlemen and farms, notably in the 1892 Johnson County Cattle War in Wyoming. But nature played the biggest role in bringing the open range cattle era to an end. A summer drought in 1886 was followed by the worst winter on record when blizzards, icy winds and unusually bitter cold blasted through the northern ranges. Millions of cattle, stranded in the snow, unable to paw down to the grass beneath, starved or froze to death. The ranchers who stayed in business after the so-called “Great Die-Up” learned to confine their herds to manageable fenced-in areas equipped with sufficient feed, water and shelter to sustain them year-round.

Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:03:39 +0000

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody experienced the western frontier in its heyday, then recreated its drama and romance on stage. Born in Iowa in 1846 and moved to Kansas Territory the year it was opened for settlement, Cody had already led a colorful life before he was out of his teens. At times a trapper, prospector and rider for the Pony Express, he also fought for the Union in the Civil War and excelled as a frontier Army scout during the Indian Wars. Cody earned his nickname while working as a buffalo hunter supplying meat to railroad construction crews (1867-1868). Edward Z. C. Judson, a writer using the pen name Ned Buntline, realized that Cody’s real life adventures were ideal for fictionalizing in dime novels. Judson made Cody the hero of his novel, then persuaded him to star in his play, The Scouts of the Prairie (1872). Cody remained on the stage thereafter — always playing himself — amid further stints as a hunter and Indian fighter. In 1883 Cody organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized the myths and legends of the vanishing frontier. In addition to cowboys, Indians, horses, buffalo and longhorns, the troupe included at various times sharp shooter Annie Oakley and Chiefs Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Buffalo Bill’s show toured throughout the world, where it was seen by more people in its 30 years than any other single entertainment.

The Hoop is Broken

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:01:19 +0000

The 1876 battle of the Little Bighorn marked the peak of the Sioux resistance; by 1877, the Army had forced the hostiles into exile or surrender. Sitting Bull and Gall fled to Canada with their band, staying several years. Crazy Horse, after brief confinement on a reservation, was killed while under military arrest. The Great Sioux Reservation was reduced; the different sub tribes assigned to different agencies on it. But deprived of freedom and purpose, the Indians adjusted badly to reservation life. In 1883, Sitting Bull returned to the reservation and remained there, except for one year with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as the preeminent leader of his people. In 1890, a new messianic religion spread among the Sioux. Promising that whites would disappear and that buffalo and all the dead Indians would return to the Plains, it called upon Indians to perform the Ghost Dance. The reservation agent, alarmed by the Ghost Dancing, ordered Sitting Bull arrested, but the great Chief was killed in the process. This precipitated a crisis, culminating two weeks later in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. There, while disarming a Sioux band, the Army opened fire on several hundred men, women and children. On recalling that day, Sioux holy man Black Elk would later say, “the nation’s hoop is broken.”

Geronimo and the Chiricahaus

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:59:14 +0000

The last major Indian campaign took place in the Southwest. Kit Carson’s Civil War campaign had subdued the Navajo and the Mescalero Apaches, but the Chiricahua Apaches remained unbroken. Led by Chief Cochise, they terrorized parts of Arizona and New Mexico until the only white man Cochise trusted, Thomas Jeffords, persuaded him to make peace and accept a reservation on traditional Chiricahua land (1872), where Jeffords served as the Indian agent. But the forced transfer of the Chiricahua to the San Carlos reservation two years after Cochise’s death (1874), led to a renewal of raiding, this time under the principal leadership of warrior chief, Geronimo. for nearly a decade, Geronimo and his “renegade Apaches” kept U.S. and Mexican Army units busy, waging skillful guerrilla warfare characterized by rapid movement and carefully-laid ambushes. The number of his pursuers had grown to more than 5,000 before Geronimo finally surrendered his little band of less than 50 in September, 1886 to end the Apache wars. Geronimo and his “hostiles,” together with many “friendly” Chiricahuas, were imprisoned in Florida and then Alabama, before being moved in 1894 to Fort Still, Oklahoma, where Geronimo died in 1909. Despite his status as a “prisoner of war,” Geronimo became a popular figure, making appearances at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 Inaugural Parade.

Chief Joseph’s Long March

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:56:13 +0000

For nearly 70 years, the Nez Perce Indians were friendly to whites, beginning when Lewis and Clark passed through their Northwestern territory en route to the Pacific. But a series of gold rushes in the 1860s led to a treaty dispossessing them of their lands in Oregon’s Wallowa valley and elsewhere and confining them to a reservation in Lapwai, Idaho. In 1877, troops were sent to drive the “non treaty” Nez Perce from the Wallowa area to Lapwai. But the Indians, numbering about 200 warriors and 300 non-combatants under the leadership of Chief Joseph, fled, leading the Army on a 1,300 mile zigzag chase through Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Though heavily outnumbered, Joseph’s band fought off their pursuers several times. Refused sanctuary by other tribes, they headed for safety in Canada but were cornered — cold, starving and exhausted — 30 miles from the border. There, Chief Joseph made his eloquent surrender speech: “It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death… Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” Despite a promise they might go to their reservation, Joseph’s band was shipped to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where many sickened and died. In 1885 some were allowed back to Lapwai, but Joseph, still considered a dangerous influence, was sent to a reservation in Washington state, where he died in 1904.

The Battle of Little Big Horn

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:37:46 +0000

On June 25, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his troops to annihilation in the famous battle of the Little Big Horn. Undistinguished at West Point, Custer won recognition as a bold cavalryman during the Civil War, then went on to head the Seventh Cavalry in campaigns against the Plains Indians. Court-martialed in 1867, his command was suspended for nearly a year. In 1874, Custer led the expedition that confirmed the presence of gold in the sacred Black Hills territory of the Sioux, touching off a white invasion. When the Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government, they were ordered off their unceded lands and onto reservations. Those who resisted were branded “hostiles,” the Army sent to retrieve them. It was such a mission that brought Custer and his 225 men to the valley of the Little Big Horn, or, as the Indians called it, Greasy Grass, River in southern Montana, supposedly to reconnoiter the area. There, unbeknownst to Custer, was the largest Indian army ever assembled, about 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by such chiefs as Crazy Horse, Gall and the revered Sitting Bull. Though his men and horses were exhausted and he had been ordered to await reinforcements, Custer nonetheless ordered the attack that resulted in his own death and that of his men. Critics censured his recklessness, but news of “Custer’s last stand” incited the nation’s wrath against the Sioux.

The Indian Wars of 1865 - 1899

webadmin@brainspiral.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:36:06 +0000

The years and decades after the Civil War witnessed tremendous westward expansion — expansion that was fundamentally incompatible with the traditional lifestyle of the Indians. A final showdown was inevitable and it came in a series of Indian Wars between the so-called “hostiles” — tribes or tribal factions who resisted expropriation of their lands and refused to live on reservations — and the U.S. Army. Between 1865 and 1890, the Army battled many tribes in many places. It fought Apaches in the Southwest, Bannocks, Modocs, Utes and Nez Perce in the Northwest; and on the Plains, Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and largest and most powerful of the Indian tribes, Sioux. With their superior horsemanship and knowledge of terrain, the Indians were not without victories. In 1868, Chief Red Cloud won his two-year campaign to oust the Army from forts along the Bozeman Trail, a route which passed through Sioux hunting grounds in the Powder River country of Wyoming. And, in 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated U.S. troops in battles at the Rosebud and the famous Little Big Horn. But in the end, the Army — superior in numbers and technology — prevailed, aided in part by the destruction of the buffalo, the Plains Indians’ primary source of food.