Wyoming Land Rush

While gazing over the new York Times website, I was intrigued by the article "A Land Rush in Wyoming Spurred by Wind Power." The previous day we had watched an epic film of Tom Cruise racing to snatch his piece of land in the Oklahoma land rush. I visualized a whole swarm of cars racing out to Wyoming to stake out their piece of land and set up wind turbines that would produce electricity for their home and town. In actuality, the Wyoming land rush was a little more subtle than that. There are companies searching for "wind-rich land" who spotted a few counties in Wyoming where the land could be made into "wind farms." Since there are people who own these windy lands, the wind companies are not going to snatch there piece of land for free like those in the 1889 land rush. But, hold on. I thought in the 1889 land rush the Indians owned that land. That was until the federal government said it was open to the public. Why is it that the Indians are always being pushed out of where they have settled from?

I was so upset to hear the tragedies the Indians went through during the Westward Expansion, the mass killings, and the treaties that were broken. Even though I am only one-sixteenth Creek Indian, I felt the pain that some of my ancestors went through. I had an opportunity while reading Zinn to see the asterisk of the Indians. I got a glimpse of how the Indians felt when they were being betrayed by the "white society." While watching the epic land rush of 1889, I noticed the Indians on the side, watching their land being taken from them, only to be moved into an unknown new land.