The fact that "weather profits" existed and made fun of the government when they were wrong is such an interesting and funny point in history. I had no idea how disorganized weather predictions were back then. I could imagine the reactions of society over the arguments between the federal government and weather profits. Other than that, it's astonishing how they used telegraphs to spread information about weather solely because it was faster than the speed of weather itself and that it traveled from west to east. I never knew that it was so simple for someone in the west to use a telegraph to tell someone in the east what the weather is like where they are.

I believe that Rising Wolf and Warren’s descriptions confirm Solnit’s argument that the Ghost Dance is a form of technology. In River of Shadows, Solnit believes that the best definition of technology should be “a practice, a technique” and compares the Ghost Dance to the way photography “seemed to cheat death” (115). Solnit illustrates how photography, a form of technology, was a way for the dead to come back to life and change the way we perceive the world. In relation to Rising Wolf’s description, he notes “we prayed to the great Spirits to destroy the white man and bring back the buffalo” (299). His description of the Ghost Dance resembles Solnit’s description of the dance as a technology because this practice aims to achieve the goal of bringing back the dead and altering their experience of the world. Likewise, when Warren describes how they performed the dance to “bring on the new earth faster,” he complements Solnit’s argument that this technology aims to change their experience and perception of the world. Moreover, I agree with Solnit that the Ghost Dance was essentially a technology because despite our existing knowledge that technology can only be machinery, technology could be any practice that has a clear and set goal to achieve an objective. Photography, for example, aims to permanently capture life, objects, events, and more. Likewise. the Ghost Dance aims to recapture what was lost. These two practices change people's existing knowledge of the world and create a new experience whether it be looking back at pictures of dead family members or bringing back the bison and dead tribe members.

Throughout the video I have been thinking about the effect of this railroad expansion on indigenous tribes and lands and how careless the government acted during this period. As these railroads expanded into the west, they would encounter indigenous land and forced them to relocate or murdered them just to place railroad tracks. Moreover, it's not surprising when the video lecture talked about how the federal government would freely "grant" these lands to railroad companies and glorify the westward expansion. In other words, Americans paint this expansion as a new age and a "Manifest Destiny" when in reality they justified the stealing of other people's land by "exploring" the west.