Discover how European American settlers drove Native Americans and bison from the Midwest and transformed the land
Learn how European American settlers drove Native Americans and bison from the Midwest and transformed the land.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: At the Holiday Folk Fair in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, people from all over the region gather to celebrate their heritage.
Their ancestors came from many countries.
Here they share their crafts,
enjoy ethnic foods,
[Music out]
and learn about each other's traditions.
As in every region of the United States, the first people who lived in the Midwest were the Native Americans.
Their tribal names were Kickapoo [music in], Sac, Potawatomie, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Illinois, Miami, Huron, Dakota, Sioux.
The land they lived on looked very different from the way it does today. The interior plains were vast grasslands. The Indians hunted buffalo and other large animals that roamed the wide prairies.
The first Europeans in the Midwest were explorers and trappers who traded with the Indians and learned about the land from them.
In the middle 1800s European immigrants and homesteaders pushed their way up the Mississippi and across the Great Plains.
The Europeans came to farm. They plowed under the grasslands and cut down the forests.
They chased away the buffalo with their plows and guns.
With the buffalo went the Indians, forced off their lands or killed by disease and war.
[Music out]
During the next one hundred years towns and cities grew in the region.
Their industries attracted new people to the region, many of them African Americans from the rural South.
From the cities
[Music in]
to the farms,
the people of the Midwest transformed the region and called it home.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: At the Holiday Folk Fair in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, people from all over the region gather to celebrate their heritage.
Their ancestors came from many countries.
Here they share their crafts,
enjoy ethnic foods,
[Music out]
and learn about each other's traditions.
As in every region of the United States, the first people who lived in the Midwest were the Native Americans.
Their tribal names were Kickapoo [music in], Sac, Potawatomie, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Illinois, Miami, Huron, Dakota, Sioux.
The land they lived on looked very different from the way it does today. The interior plains were vast grasslands. The Indians hunted buffalo and other large animals that roamed the wide prairies.
The first Europeans in the Midwest were explorers and trappers who traded with the Indians and learned about the land from them.
In the middle 1800s European immigrants and homesteaders pushed their way up the Mississippi and across the Great Plains.
The Europeans came to farm. They plowed under the grasslands and cut down the forests.
They chased away the buffalo with their plows and guns.
With the buffalo went the Indians, forced off their lands or killed by disease and war.
[Music out]
During the next one hundred years towns and cities grew in the region.
Their industries attracted new people to the region, many of them African Americans from the rural South.
From the cities
[Music in]
to the farms,
the people of the Midwest transformed the region and called it home.
[Music out]
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