he piece of information that stuck out to me was the fact that speculators could just blatantly lie to manipulate the market in their favor. I find this hard to comprehend in the 21st century. In the modern day, market manipulation still exists to some degree, but the idea someone can blatantly make up facts about the yield of a product and have no one there to fact-check them is shocking and terrifying to imagine. Now I am very happy the USDA exists, without it, we would have wild market fluctuations on material goods such as food, which seems to be the case during the 1840s and earlier. I think it also shows how unreliable data tracking really was before the creation of the USDA if people could just spread rumors and have that massively affect the market. It kind of reminds me of the market fluctuations you see in cryptocurrencies, where the word of Elon Musk can make the value of a coin drastically inflate or deflate based on what he says.

Given Solnit's definition of technology, I would say that the Ghost dance would fall under the category of technology. In the account taken from Rising Wolf, he states that he is taught the dance by Jack Wilson, and then he and the other men who went to visit Jack taught the rest of their people about the dance. This got entire reservations of people to partake in the dance, which I would argue is a systemic change. The dance itself is not just metaphorical either, as described by Louis Warren and Rising Wolf, but instead was supposed to literally cast out white people from their land and bring back the buffalo. We know this based on how Rising Wolf reacted after dancing for 4 days straight and there still being White army men just outside the border of their camp. So yes, by the definition set by Solnit, the Ghost Dance was a type of technology.

Reading the quote from Richard White was interesting to me, because like you said, when you think of the west you think of the "Wild West", a place of uncontrolled freedom that has very little connection to the government. But with the context provided by the quote, such as a large amount of control federal bureaucrats had with giving out land to people as well as large corporations, it makes the process of colonizing the west seem far more traditionally imperialistic. I have never heard someone refer to the states out west as colonies before, and I think that has given me a new view of what westward expansion was actually like, especially to the native people's who were already living there.