Having imagined the West as a Pristine land awaiting civilization,
many Americans tried to mold the region to fit
the image that they had of it. That meant insuring
that the Indian tribes would not remain obstacles, to the spread of white society.
The traditional policy at the federal government was to regard the tribes
simultaneously,
as independent nations and to negotiate treaties,
which were ratified by the Senate. However, treaties are agreements with the
tribe seldom survived the pressure
of white settlers eager for access to Indian lands.
Thus, the relations between the
United States and the Native Americans was one of endless broken treaties.
And by the 1850's in the face of white demands
for access to Indian land, the idea of establishing one great reservation on
which many tribes could live,
was developed. It was called concentration and each tribe was
was assigned to a defined reservation confirmed by separate treaties.
The policy of concentration divided the tribes from one another and it made
them easier to control.
It also allow the government to force tribes into scattered locations
and to take over the most desirable lands for white settlement.
The plan, however, did not work very well mostly because Indian tribes resisted
the assignment to these reservations. In 1867,
after a series of bloody conflicts between Indians and white settlers,
Congress establish something called the Indian Peace Commission.
The Indian Peace Commission was made up of soldiers and civilians,
and it's job was to recommend a new policy of dealing with Native Americans in the
West.
The Commission recommended replacing Concentration
Policy with a plan to move all the Plains Indians in the two large
reservations.
One would be in Indian Territory or modern-day
Oklahoma and the other would be in the Dakota
Territory. Of course, this solution hardly worked any better than the previous ideas
and management of the reservations and Native American policy
was entrusted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was a branch of the
Department of Interior.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs were responsible for distributing the land
to the tribes, for making payments and supervising shipments of supplies.
It's record to say the least was appalling,
and many of the leadership positions were filled with incompetent
and or dishonest men. Worsening the fate of the tribes was the
Anglo-American relentless slaughtering
of the buffalo herds that supported the tribes where life as we've already
talked about.
After the Civil War, the demand for buffalo hides became a national
phenomenon.
It became all the rage in the east to have a buffalo
hide. So, railroad companies
also aided in this slaughtering of the buffalo
when they hired riflemen such as, William Buffalo Bill Cody,
to arrange these large shooting expeditions in order to kill
large numbers of buffalo. It was an attempt by the railroads to thin out the herds,
because
they were becoming an obstruction to the
railroad traffic. So, gangs of professional hunters began swarming over the plains
to shoot these huge animals. The army and the agents for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs condoned and even encouraged
the killing of the buffalo. For instance, General
Philip Sheridan of civil war fame, declared
quote, "Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated
as it is the only way to bring about lasting peace and allow civilization to
advance."
So, as a result by the mid 1880's,
only a few hundred of the estimated 13 million buffalo
in the 1850's still existed. Destroying the buffalo herds,
also destroyed the Indian source of food and supplies. It contributed to a climate in
which
Indian warriors also felt the need to fight to preserve their way of life
and so this is when you'll see a lot of Indian wars erupt.
And there was almost constant fighting between whites and Indians from
the 1850's up until the 1880's,
as many Native American tribes struggled against the growing threat
onto their civilization. Indian warriors began attacking wagon trains,
stage coaches, and isolated ranches.
And as the US Army became more deeply involved in the fighting,
the tribes began to focus most to their attacks on
white soldiers.
In 1862, the starving Dakota Sioux went on the attack
under Chief Little Crow. Before US troops could subdue
the uprising Sioux, they killed more than
700 white settlers in Minnesota.
And at the same time, fighting flared up in eastern Colorado,
where the Arapaho and Cheyenne were coming into conflict with white miners
in the
in the region. Bands of Indians attack stagecoach lines
and settlements to regain lost territory.
In response, whites called up the militia,
the Governor of Colorado urged friendly Indians to congregate
at the Army post for protection and so
some Arapahoe and Cheyenne groups under
the leadership of Chief Black Kettle respond to this
invitation from the governor and they camped near Fort Lyon
on Sand Creek. In November 1864 at Sand Creek,
Colonel John Chivington and his local Colorado militia
savagely killed 270 Cheyenne,
primarily old men, women and children.
Black Kettle himself escaped the Sand Creek Massacre,
but was eventually killed by some of George Custer's men
a few years later. Gold fever further fueled conflict between Indians and white
settlers on the northern plains.
The US government in 1868 negotiated,
what was called the Treaty of Fort Laramie, with the Cheyenne and the Sioux
which guaranteed Indians control of their sacred land in the Black Hills of the
Dakotas.
Yet, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills led the federal government to break its
promise,
and they were going to preserve the land for the Indians.
Miners and the Northern Pacific Railroad workers began to invade the region.
The Sioux rebelled in 1875 and they left the reservation.
Under the leadership of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull,
the Sioux Tribes mounted a resistance and won a crushing victory
against Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in 1876
at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The tribal warriors had surprised Custer and
his two hundred sixty four
members of his regiment. They surrounded them and they killed every man.
The Chiefs had gathered as many as twenty-five hundred warriors
and this was one of the largest Indian armies ever assembled at one time.
But the Indians did not have the political organization nor did they have
the supplies
to keep all these troops united. And so their leaders Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull
were eventually forced back to the reservations.
Later, incidentally Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were both killed
by reservation police.
Facing the extinction of their traditional ways of life,
different groups of Indians responded in different ways in the waning decades
of the 19th century. And probably one of the most dramatic episodes in Native
American history occurred in Idaho
in 1877. The Nez Perce,
under the leadership of Chief Joseph were small and relatively peaceful tribe.
And under pressure from white settlers, the government had forced them on a
reservation.
They instead attempted to flee to Canada to escape confinement
on this reservation. After covering
a thousand miles in about 75 days,
they were caught just short of the Canadian border.
Chief Joseph was weary and he was discouraged. He told the American general,
quote, "I'm tired; my heart is sick and sad.
From where the Sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
The last Indians to maintain organized resistance against the whites
were the Chiricahua
Apaches, who fought intermittently from the 1860's
to the late 1880's. The Apache tribes resorted to
armed resistance and perfected a hit-and-run Guerrilla warfare that
terrorized white settlers
and US soldiers in the 1870's and 1880's.
In the 1880's, their leader Geronimo repeatedly led the Apache
warrior raiding parties off the reservation, but even
the Apaches were eventually forced to surrender.
The government arrested nearly 500 Apaches, though fewer than three dozen
had ever been hostile
and they sent them as prisoners to Florida, more than a
quarter of them died.
In 1892, the Apaches were moved to Fort Sill in Oklahoma
and then later to New Mexico.
Another tragic encounter that occurred in the 1890,
was a result of religious revival among the Sioux.
Many tribes had turned to a visionary religion called the Ghost Dance,
as a means of preserving their native culture.
Inspired by a prophet named Wovoka, the Ghost Dance promised a day, when the land
and the water would swallow up
all white civilization, all implements white civilization would be buried
and all Indians would be united and they would reclaim the earth.
The government became alarmed at the possibility of renewed Indian uprising
as a result
of the Ghost Dance, so it began to arrest Ghost Dancers.
The Seventh Cavalry
was dispatched to South Dakota to apprehend some of the Sioux Ghost Dancers,
who were believed to be armed for revolt.
The Cavalry caught up with the Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.
And during the encounter, the troops opened fire and 200 men, women and
children
were killed. Sitting Bull had joined the Ghost Dancers and he was shot and killed
later on by Indian agencies, they tried to arrest him at his cabin
on the Standing Rock reservation. Although, the massacre at Wounded Knee did not end
the story of Native Americans,
it did bring an end to a way of life.
Now even before the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee tragedy,
the federal government had moved to forever destroy the tribal structure.
The practice of relocating the Indians onto reservations
lost momentum by the 1880's. In favor of a new policy,
designed to encourage assimilation through farming and the
ownership of private property. Eastern advocates of
Indian rights began to voice their disgust with government policies.
A woman by the name of Helen Hunt Jackson, published a book in 1881, called
"A Century of Dishonor"
and she documented all the dealings with the US government with
the Indians, the shameful practices that had been
taking place and Jackson's book will arouse
public indignation and people will begin calling for new legislation.
Supporters of the new policies believed they were acting for the good at the
Indians, whom they consider to be a vanishing race.
Partly in response to critics at the reservation policy,
Congress ended up passing, what was known as the Dawes Act
in 1887, which provided for the gradual elimination
of tribal land ownership. It permitted the President to divide the land
of any tribe and grant 160 acres to
each head of the family. Now, this was a mood to try to Americanize
Indians by dealing with them as individuals rather than tribes.
The government under the Dawes Act would hold the land in trust for 25 years,
after which the owner would win full title.
Indian rights groups viewed the Dawes Act as a positive initiative,
but the act essentially stripped the Indians of their culture
and it reduced their land from 138 million
acres to just 48 million.
So, while the image of the Mythic West has often obscured the more ruthless
features of
Western expansion. By the turn of the century,
the thriving farms, ranches, mines and cities
would help to transform the United States into a thriving nation.