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During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, this law legalized the forced expulsion of Native American peoples living east of the Mississippi River westward towards the reservation territory of Oklahoma in what became known as the Trail of Tears. The Indian Removal Act preceded the more rapid western expansion that would come, but it represented the principle of Manifest Destiny (that white Americans had the support of God to expand an "empire of liberty" to the west) being carried out. This was the first time in American history that national legislation was used against Native Americans to clear land for white expansion.

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The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was an effort by the United States government to subdue and weaken the Native Americans by establishing the reservation system. The reservation system placed the Native Americans in limited territories in Oklahoma or the Dakotas, and crammed in with rival tribes, so that the government could "legally" take Native American land. The establishment of the reservation system set Native Americans up for failure because their disintegrated societies had been reduced to dependency on the family unit, and were not organized enough to provide for all of their people.

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The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed during the Lincoln administration and was meant to encourage white families to settle the west, providing incentives for half a million families by giving 160 acres for just $30.  Unfortunately, the Homestead Act was largely unsuccessful because families struggled to survive due to the dry, infertile lands of the Great Plains, as well as the sly corporations that took thousands of acres of fertile land away from hard working people. In other words, the Homestead Act endorsed white expansion that threatened the futures of the Native Americans, while simultaneously depleting the resources of the dusty plains that were not equipped for the stress of agriculture.

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As whites expanded westward into the remaining lands of the Native Americans, they showed no mercy for the indigenous peoples and would often kill the Native Americans for no reason at all.  The Sand Creek Massacre occurred in eastern Colorado in 1864 when Colonel J.M. Chivington and his men killed 400 Native Americans, including women and children.  The massacre represents the changes to the power dynamics of the west, as whites sought to settle and tame the wild American frontier and use their more advanced weaponry to take out Native Americans in the process.

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Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (1869)

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Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (1869)

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The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 allowed California, which had been at risk of being captured by an enemy imperialistic power, to the rest of the nation. The railroad's construction had been surrounded in corruption, with thousands of Chinese immigrant workers dying in the process as railroad moguls made millions. Nevertheless, the American frontier continued to die with the railroad finished because it improved the accessibility of the west, making it more tame for whites.

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The Battle of Little Bighorn took place in southeast Montana in 1876, when Colonel Custer and his 250 men were slain by the stronger force of 2,500 Sioux warriors. The battle represented a unique victory for the Native Americans, in a time when they were losing more and more rights constantly. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, they were pursued relentlessly by the U.S. Army, and the Nez Perce participants were subdued and sent to a Kansas reservation.

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Prior to the granting of citizenship to the Native Americans in 1924, the Dawes Severalty Act offered them citizenship if they behaved like whites for 25 years by farming a 160 acre plot of land. This law directly attacked the ancestral tribal culture of the Native Americans by encouraging them to behave more like whites because the Native Americans relied upon the social systems of the tribe for their survival. This law assisted the American government in twisting even more land out of Native American possession after their efforts to farm it often failed without the proper resources or government support.

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The Battle of Wounded Knee was the climax of decades of white efforts to make the Native Americans behave more like whites, including efforts to convert them to Christianity and educate them from a white perspective of history. The battle killed 200 men, women, and children in the Black Hills of South Dakota, using the powerful technology of the French Hotchkiss gun (first introduced to America in 1877). The lack of mercy in the battle and the American fears over the Dakota Sioux's cultural "Ghost Dance" show the death of the vibrant indigenous culture of the American west.

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Assimilation can best be argued to have taken shape in 1890 because the Battle of Wounded Knee subdued and crushed Native American rebellious forces once and for all. The Native American population had been reduced to just 3% of its size in 1492 when Europeans first arrived in the Americas, and any of the legacy of the tribal culture or social organization had largely been destroyed by genocide. Although assimilation suggests that the whites and Native Americans would have been able to live in harmony, it really meant that whites had forever asserted their power over the battered fragments of the Native American society.

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United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980)

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United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980)

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The Supreme Court decision of the United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians in 1980 was significant because it declared that the United States had violated the premises of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In that previous treaty, the Sioux Nation had been promised that it would be able to retain the Black Hills of South Dakota, which had been forcibly taken from them. Despite the court's decision that the U.S. government should pay the Sioux Nation up to $1 billion in compensation for the Black Hills, the Sioux Nation remains obstinate these four decades later that it wants its land rather than accept compensation.