Question

How were white settlers affected by the building of railroads in the Indian Territory?

Answer 1

  Even as the transcontinental railroad brought the new country together, it brought change to the world of Native Americans. The tracks ran through a number of tribal territories, bringing into conflict cultures that held very different views of the land and how it might be used and lived on. The painting The First Train, by Herbert Schuyler, depicts three Indians pointing past their encampment at a train in the far distance. The railroad also brought an increasing number of European Americans west. One consequence of this influx was the depletion of the buffalo herds, a major food source for Plains Indians. European Americans would often shoot buffalo for sport from the train; by 1880, the buffalo were mostly gone and Plains Indians had been gathered onto reservations. Millions of acres of open grassland were being settled by the people moving west. Eventually, much of this land became the farmland that fed a growing nation.  Hope this helped!

Answer 2

Answer:

The building of the railroad system, especially the biggest ones, in the 1800´s, in America, had a lot of positive effects for white settlers; they allowed for the expansion of the frontiers, connected the two coasts and other territories, allowed commerce to grow, people to migrate from the East to the West Coast, allowed settlement into territories that had been out of reach, and permitted development and growth. It also allowed settlers to acquire lands, obtain goods that were not available before, and travel distances that were unthought of. However, they also brought a lot of problems.

With the expansion of the frontiers, and the easier travel, white settlers began to crave more land and space, and they looked towards the new territories, including Indian lands. As the white settlers encroached on Indian territories, they did two things: take away sacred land from the Indians, and also, destroyed their source of sustenance: the buffalo and bison, as white settlers took it as a hunting sports. In the end, the building of railroads, the encroaching on Indian land by whites, brought conflict between the Natives and the white settlers.