Cowboys

          Nowadays people watch and read about the cowboy and think of a strong man that carried a gun and didn't allow anyone to say anything bad about them. People do not realize that a cowboy was on the bottom of social ranking and was low paid. They had nothing special about them and not many people cared about them. They did not carry around weapons and threaten to kill people all the time. Cowboys did not get to go on crazy adventures and be the hero, most of the time they would just get their work done on the farms and go home. Most cowboys just would herd cattle. Most people think of cowboys as glorious heroes but in reality they were just a low paid worker.
           A lot of people decided to move to the west because they thought there would be numerous job opportunities and that it would be the perfect place to start over. When people got to the west a lot of them had trouble finding jobs and even good places to live. Most of the homes were on dirt floors and made of hay. A lot of people that wanted to farm in the west had trouble because the landscape was so crazy, it went from trees everywhere to dry flat deserts. A lot of Chinese people moved to California at this time and this made it extra hard to work because they were taking the jobs. especially minors had trouble jobs and some if they could would go back home.
           People that lived in the East were intrigued about the West and wanted to learn about it without moving there. Art was a big factor in evidence of the West. People would make paintings then would go to the East and show off their work. A lot of people would pay to see these paintings because they were so interested in the landscape. The landscape was so different around the West and people couldn't believe it. There were also book written about the West like "The Virginian" that was still popular into the sixty's. Buffalo Bill was a man that would go around the East and do shows about the East. There were numerous ways people would find out about the West without having to go there.

      Coming into history I thought I knew a lot more about the post Civil War than I did. I knew that there was segregation and President Lincoln was killed. I thought that was the only big things that happened after the war. Now I know all the struggles the blacks faced without having jobs, homes, or their family. At first I thought that that when the John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln that it was good and that Lincoln wasn't trying to help them but wanted to punish them but now I realized it only hurt them in the long run. I also learned that during this time they had a lot of corrupt presidents that picked sides. I am glad we went more into depth this year and helped me see that it wasn't all happy at the end of the Civil War.
      Some people don't understand that history has a lot of use and purpose they say "Why do we need to learn about the past? we live in the present" but what those people don't understand is we don't want to make those mistakes again. You also need to know about what worked and how to make things work with so many people having different opinions. It is especially to know about where you live because you need to know about your ancestors and learn about the mistakes they made. You also need to know the history behind monuments and houses because they were important.

America

America