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The War and Westward Expansion (U.S. National Park Service)

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On February 13, 1861, word of secession and the specter of civil war troubled a young U.S. Army captain. "I myself come from a Union loving State," Virginia's George Pickett wrote his commander on February 13 from San Juan Island, a remote Washington Territory encampment in the extreme northwestern corner of the United States, "but matters are taking such phase at present that she and the other border territory States .

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National Park Service

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History & Culture - Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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Gateway Textbook

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John Louis O'Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, articulated the long-standing American belief in the God-given mission of the United States to lead the world in the peaceful transition to democracy. In a little-read essay printed in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, O'Sullivan outlined the importance of annexing Texas to the United States:

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. John Louis O'Sullivan ((John O'Sullivan, "Annexation," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no.1 (July-August 1845), 5-10.))

O'Sullivan and many others viewed expansion, particularly to the West, as necessary to achieve America's destiny and protect American interests. The antebellum period saw the quasi-religious call to spread democracy coupled with the reality of thousands of settlers pressing westward. The precepts of manifest destiny, grounded in the twin beliefs of virtuous American institutionalism and the uplifting effects of agrarian republicanism, rode the wagon trails westward in advance of the destinarian belief in American greatness - the proverbial city on the hill of the colonial period began its move westward.

Although called into name in 1845, manifest destiny was a widely held but vaguely defined belief system that embraced several core beliefs from at least the founding of the nation. First, many Americans believed that the strength of American values and institutions justified moral claims to hemispheric leadership. Second, the lands on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River (and later into the Caribbean) were destined for political and agricultural improvement helmed by American example. Third, Americans who supported expansion believed that God and the Constitution (the political manifestation of divine perfection) ordained an irrepressible destiny to accomplish redemption and democratization throughout the world. All three of these claims pushed many Americans, whether they uttered the words 'manifest destiny' or not, to actively seek the expansion of the democracy in both word and action to the great detriment of those, most notably American Indians, already occupying the physical lands in question. The new religion of American democracy spread on the feet and in the wagons of those who moved west and sought to reconfigure their social worlds to the new realities of a new landscape, imbued with the hope that their success would be the nation's success.

The Young America movement, strongest among members of the Democratic Party but spanning the political spectrum, downplayed divisions over slavery and ethnicity by embracing national unity and emphasizing American exceptionalism, territorial expansion, democratic participation, and economic interdependence. Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the political outlook of this new generation in a speech he delivered in 1844 entitled "The Young American":

In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American? Ralph Waldo Emerson

However, many Americans, including Emerson, disapproved of aggressive expansion. For opponents of manifest destiny, the lofty rhetoric of the Young Americans was nothing other than a kind of American imperialism, of imperial policies that the American Revolution was supposed to have repudiated. Many members of the Whig Party (and later the Republican Party) argued that the United States' mission was to lead by example, not by conquest. Abraham Lincoln summed up this criticism with a fair amount of sarcasm during a speech in 1859:

He (the Young American) owns a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of wanting it, and intending to have it...Young America had "a pleasing hope - a fond desire - a longing after" territory. He has a great passion - a perfect rage - for the "new"; particularly new men for office, and the new earth mentioned in the revelations, in which, being no more sea, there must be about three times as much land as in the present. He is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom. He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land...As to those who have no land, and would be glad of help from any quarter, he considers they can afford to wait a few hundred years longer. In knowledge he is particularly rich. He knows all that can possibly be known; inclines to believe in spiritual trappings, and is the unquestioned inventor of "Manifest Destiny." Abraham Lincoln

But Lincoln and other anti-expansionists would struggle to win popular opinion and the nation, fueled by the principles of manifest destiny, would continue westward, battling native peoples and foreign nations and claiming territory to the very edges of the continent. But westward expansion did not come without a cost. It exacerbated the slavery question, pushed Americans toward civil war, and, ultimately, threatened the United States' promises to the peoples of the world.

After the War of 1812, Americans settled the Great Lakes region rapidly thanks in part to aggressive land sales by the federal government. Missouri's admission as a slave state presented the first major crisis over westward migration and American expansion in the antebellum period. Farther north, lead and iron ore mining spurred development in Wisconsin. By the 1830s and 1840s, increasing numbers of German and Scandinavian immigrants joined easterners in settling the Upper Mississippi watershed. Little settlement occurred west of Missouri as migrants viewed the Great Plains as a barrier to farming, the Rocky Mountains as undesirable to all but fur traders, and the region's American Indians as too powerful to allow for white expansion.

"Do not lounge in the cities!" commanded publisher Horace Greeley in 1841, "There is room and health in the country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory." The New York Tribune often argued that American exceptionalism required the United States to benevolently conquer the continent as the prime means of spreading both economic and political democracy. However, the vast west was not empty. American Indians controlled much of the land east of the Mississippi River and almost all the West. Expansion hinged on a federal policy of Indian removal.

The harassment and dispossession of American Indians - whether driven by official U.S. government policy or the actions of individual Americans and their communities - depended on manifest destiny's belief in the divinely ordained process of putting land to its best use. Of course, a fair bit of racism was part of the equation as well. The political and legal processes of expansion always hinged on the belief that white Americans could best use new lands and opportunities. This belief rested upon the belief that only Americans embodied the democratic ideals of yeoman agriculturalism extolled by Thomas Jefferson and expanded under Jacksonian democracy. Florida was an early test case for the Americanization of new lands as the territory held strategic value for the young nation's growing economic and military interests in the Caribbean. The most important factors that led to the annexation of Florida included anxieties over runaway slaves, Spanish neglect of the region, and the desired defeat of Native American tribes who controlled large portions of lucrative farm territory.

During the early 19th century, Spain wanted to increase productivity in Florida and encouraged migration of mostly Southern slave owners. By the second decade of the 1800s, Anglo settlers occupied plantations along the St. Johns River, from the border with Georgia to Lake George 100 miles upstream. Spain began to lose control of the sparsely European-populated Florida as the area quickly became a haven for slave smugglers bringing illicit human cargo into the U.S. for lucrative sale to Georgia planters. Plantation owners grew apprehensive about the growing numbers of slaves running to the swamps and American Indian controlled areas of Florida. American slave owners pressured the U.S. government to confront the Spanish authorities. Southern slave owners refused to quietly accept the continued presence of armed blacks in Florida. During the War of 1812, a ragtag assortment of Georgia slave owners joined by a plethora of armed opportunists seized Fernandina and raided Spanish and British-owned plantations along the St. Johns River. These private citizens received U.S. government help on July 27, 1816, when U.S. army regulars attacked the Negro Fort (established as an armed outpost during the war by the British and located about 60 miles south of the Georgia border). The raid killed 270 blacks as a result of a direct hit on the fort's gun powder stores and set the stage for General Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida in 1817 and the beginning of the First Seminole War.

Americans also held that Creek and Seminole Indians, occupying the area from the Apalachicola River to the wet prairies and hammock islands of central Florida, were dangers in their own right. These tribes, known to the Americans collectively as "Seminoles," migrated into the region over the course of the 18th century and established settlements, tilled fields, and tended herds of cattle in the rich floodplains and grasslands that dominated the northern third of the Florida peninsula. Envious eyes looked upon these lands. After bitter conflict that often pitted Americans against a collection of Native Americans and former slaves, Spain eventually agreed to transfer the territory to the U.S. in exchange for $5 million and other territorial concessions as part of the Adams-Onís Treaty.

After the purchase, planters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia entered Florida. However, the influx of settlers into the Florida territory was temporarily halted in the mid-1830s by the outbreak of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Free-blacks and escaped slaves also occupied the Seminole district; a situation that deeply troubled slave owners and constituted one of the major causes of the three Seminole Wars, between 1817 and 1858. Indeed, General Thomas Sidney Jesup, U.S. commander during the early stages of the Second Seminole War, labeled that conflict "a negro, not an Indian War," fearful as he was that if the revolt, "was not speedily put down, the South will feel the effect of it on their slave population before the end of the next season." Florida became a state in 1845 and settlement expanded into the former Indian lands.

The Florida template - a simultaneous hope of seizing American Indians' eastern lands, controlling slave populations, reducing lands available for runaway slaves, and killing entirely or removing the American Indian problem farther west - became more widely implemented. Presidents, since at least Thomas Jefferson, had long discussed removal, but President Andrew Jackson took the most dramatic action. Jackson believed, "It [speedy removal] will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters." Desires to remove American Indians from valuable farmland motivated state and federal governments to cease trying to assimilate Indians and instead plan for forced removal.

Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, thereby granting the president authority to begin treaty negotiations that would give American Indians land in the West for their lands east of the Mississippi. Many advocates of removal, including President Jackson, paternalistically believed that it would protect Indian communities from outside influences that jeopardized their chances of becoming "civilized" farmers. Jackson emphasized this paternalism-the belief that the government was acting in the best interest of Native peoples- in his 1830 State of the Union Address. "It [removal] will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites...and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community."

The experience of the Cherokee was particularly brutal. Despite many tribal members adopting some Euro-American ways, including intensified agriculture, slave ownership, and Christianity; state and federal governments pressured the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations to sign treaties and surrender land. Many of these tribal nations used the law in hopes of preventing the seizing of their lands. Most notable among these efforts was the Cherokee Nation's attempt to sue the state of Georgia to protect their lands.

Beginning in 1826, Georgian officials asked the federal government to negotiate with the Cherokee to secure lucrative lands. The Adams' administration resisted the state's request, but harassment from local settlers against the Cherokee forced the Adams and then Jackson administrations to begin serious negotiations with the Cherokees. Georgia grew impatient with the process of negotiation and abolished existing state agreements with the Cherokee that had guaranteed rights of movement and jurisdiction of tribal law. Andrew Jackson penned a letter soon after taking office that encouraged the Cherokee, among others, to voluntarily relocate to the West. The discovery of gold in Georgia in the fall of 1829 further antagonized the situation.

Beginning in 1828, the Cherokee defended themselves against Georgia's laws by citing treaties signed with the United States that guaranteed the Cherokee nation both their land and independence. The Cherokee appealed to the Supreme Court against Georgia to prevent dispossession. The Court, while sympathizing with the Cherokees' plight, ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case ( Cherokee Nation v. Georgia - 1831). In an associated case, Worcester v. Georgia 1832, The Supreme Court ruled that Georgia laws did not apply within Cherokee territory. Regardless of these rulings, the state government ignored the Supreme Court and did little to prevent conflict between settlers and the Cherokee.

Jackson wanted a solution that might preserve peace and his reputation. He sent Secretary of War Lewis Cass to offer title to western lands and the promise of tribal governance in exchange for relinquishing of the Cherokee's eastern lands. These negotiations opened a rift within the Cherokee nation that pitted John Ridge and his treaty-supporting faction against another Cherokee official, John Ross, and his Cherokee national faction - a group supportive of peace but refusing any removal treaty. The Jackson administration refused any deal that fell short of large-scale removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, thereby fueling a devastating and violent intra-tribal battle between the two factions. Eventually tensions grew to the point that several treaty advocates were assassinated by members of the national faction.

In 1835, a portion of the Cherokee Nation hoping to prevent further tribal bloodshed signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding lands in Georgia for five million dollars and, the signatories hoped, limiting future conflicts between the Cherokee and white settlers. However, most of the tribe refused to adhere to the terms, viewing the treaty as illegitimately negotiated and signed by John Ridge. In response, John Ross pointed out the U.S. government's hypocrisy. "You asked us to throw off the hunter and warrior state: We did so-you asked us to form a republican government: We did so. Adopting your own as our model. You asked us to cultivate the earth, and learn the mechanic arts. We did so. You asked us to learn to read. We did so. You asked us to cast away our idols and worship your god. We did so. Now you demand we cede to you our lands. That we will not do."

President Martin van Buren, in 1838, decided to press the issue beyond negotiation and court rulings and used the New Echota Treaty provisions to order the army to forcibly remove those Cherokee not obeying the Treaty's cession of territory. Sixteen thousand Cherokee began the journey, but harsh weather, poor planning, and difficult travel resulted in between 3,000-4,000 deaths on what became known as the Trail of Tears. Not every instance was as treacherous as the Cherokee example and some tribes resisted removal. But over 60,000 Indians were forced west by the opening of the Civil War.

Indian removal also took place to a lesser degree in northern lands; the allure of manifest destiny encouraged expansion regardless of terrain or locale. In the Old Northwest, Odawa and Ojibwe communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, resisted removal as many lived on land north of desirable farming land. Moreover, some Ojibwe and Odawa individuals purchased land independently. They formed successful alliances with missionaries to help advocate against removal, as well as some traders and merchants who depended on trade with Native peoples. Yet, Indian removal occurred in the North as well-the "Black Hawk War" in 1832, for instance, led to the removal of many Sauk to Kansas.

Despite the disaster of removal, tribal nations slowly rebuilt their cultures and in some cases even achieved prosperity in Indian Territory. Tribal nations blended traditional cultural practices, including common land systems, with western practices including constitutional governments, common school systems, and an elite slaveholding class.

The forced-migration of American Indian nations to the near West and ongoing conflicts between white settlers and those newly arrived migrants was not the only contest for power between indigenous populations and easterners. Beginning in the late eighteenth-century, the Comanche rose to power in the Southern Plains region of what is now the southwestern United States. By quickly adapting to horse culture first introduced by the Spanish, the Comanche transitioned from a foraging economy into a mixed hunting and pastoral society. While the new Mexican nation-state, after 1821, claimed the region as part of the Northern Mexican frontier, they had little control. Instead, the Comanche controlled the power and economy of the Southern Plains. A flexible political structure allowed the Comanche to dominate other Indian groups as well as Mexican and American settlers.

In the 1830s, the Comanche launched raids into northern Mexico, ending what had been an unprofitable but peaceful diplomatic relationship with Mexico. At the same time, they forged new trading relationships with Anglo-American traders in Texas. Throughout this period, the Comanche and several other independent Native groups, particularly the Kiowa, Apache, and Navajo engaged in thousands of violent encounters with Northern Mexicans. Collectively, these encounters comprised an ongoing war during the 1830s and 1840s as tribal nations vied for power and wealth. By the 1840s, Comanche power peaked with an empire that controlled a vast territory in the trans-Mississippi west known as Comancheria. By trading in Texas and raiding in Northern Mexico, the Comanche controlled the flow of commodities, including captives, livestock, and trade goods. They practiced a fluid system of captivity and captive trading, rather than a rigid chattel system. The Comanche used captives for economic exploitation but also adopted captives into kinship networks. This allowed for the assimilation of diverse peoples in the region into the empire. The ongoing conflict in the region had sweeping consequences on both Mexican and American politics. The U.S.-Mexican War, beginning in 1846, can be seen as a culmination of this violence.

In the Great Basin region, Mexican Independence also escalated patterns of violence. This region, on the periphery of the Spanish empire, was nonetheless integrated in the vast commercial trading network of the West. Mexican officials and Anglo-American traders entered the region with their own imperial designs. New forms of violence spread into the homelands of the Paiute and Western Shoshone as traders, settlers, and Mormon religious refugees, aided by U.S. officials and soldiers, committed daily acts of violence and laid the groundwork for violent conquest. This expansion of the American state into the Great Basin region meant groups such as the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapahoe had to compete over land, resources, captives, and trade relations with Anglo-Americans. Eventually, white incursion and ongoing Indian Wars resulted in traumatic dispossession of land and struggle for subsistence.

The federal government attempted more than relocation of Americans Indians. Policies to "civilize" Indians coexisted along with forced removal and served an important "Americanizing" vision of expansion that brought an ever-increasing population under the American flag and sought to balance aggression with the uplift of paternal care. Thomas L. McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade from 1816 to 1822 and the Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1824 to 1830, served as the main architect of the "civilization policy." He asserted that American Indians were morally and intellectually equal to whites and advocated for the establishment of a national Indian school system as an extension of the factory system coupled with an embrace of American ingenuity and perseverance.

Congress rejected McKenney's plan but instead passed the Civilization Fund Act in 1819. This act offered a $10,000 annual annuity to be allocated towards societies that funded missionaries to establish schools among Indian tribes. However, providing schooling for American Indians under the auspices of the Civilization program also allowed the federal government to further justify taking more land. Treaties, such as the 1820 Treaty of Doak's Stand made with the Choctaw nation, often included land cessions as requirements for education provisions. Removal and Americanization reinforced Americans sense of cultural dominance.

After removal in the 1830s, the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw began to collaborate with missionaries to build school systems of their own. Leaders hoped education would help ensuing generations to protect political sovereignty. In 1841, the Cherokee Nation opened a public school system that within two years included eighteen schools. By 1852, the system expanded to twenty-one schools with a national enrollment of 1,100 pupils. Many of the students educated in these tribally controlled schools later served their nations as teachers, lawyers, physicians, bureaucrats, and politicians.

The dream of creating a democratic utopia in the West ultimately rested on those who picked up their possessions and their families and moved west. Western settlers usually migrated as families and settled along navigable and potable rivers. Settlements often coalesced around local traditions, especially religion, carried from eastern settlements. These shared understandings encouraged a strong sense of cooperation among western settlers that forged communities on the frontier.

Before the Mexican War, the West for most Americans still referred to the fertile area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River with a slight amount of overspill beyond its banks. With soil exhaustion and land competition increasing in the East, most early western migrants sought a greater measure of stability and self-sufficiency by engaging in small scale farming. Boosters of these new agricultural areas along with the U.S. government encouraged perceptions of the West as a land of hard-built opportunity that promised personal and national bounty.

Women migrants bore the unique double burden of travel while also being expected to conform to restrictive gender norms. Societal standards such as "the cult of true womanhood," which emphasized piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness as the key virtues of women, along with the concept of "separate spheres," which focused on the proper roles of women in the home, often accompanied men and women as they traveled west to begin their new lives.

While many of these societal standards endured, there often existed an openness of frontier society that resulted in modestly more opportunities for women. Husbands needed partners in setting up a homestead and working in the field to provide food for the family. Suitable wives were often in short supply, enabling some to informally negotiate more power in their households.

Americans debated the role of government in westward expansion. This debate centered on the proper role of the U.S. government in paying for the internal improvements that soon became necessary to encourage and support economic development. Some saw frontier development as a self-driven undertaking that necessitated private risk and investment devoid of government interference. Others saw the federal government's role as providing the infrastructural development needed to give migrants the push toward engagement with the larger national economy. In the end, federal aid proved essential for the conquest and settlement of the region.

Economic busts constantly threatened western farmers and communities. As the economy worsened after the panic of 1819, farmers were unable to pay their loans due to falling prices and over-farming. The dream of subsistence and stability abruptly ended as many migrants lost their land and felt the hand of the distant market economy forcing them even farther west to escape debt. As a result, the federal government consistently sought to increase access to land in the West, including efforts to lower the amount of land required for purchase. Smaller lots made it easier for more farmers to clear land and begin farming faster.

More than anything else, new roads and canals provided conduits for migration and settlement. Improvements in travel and exchange fueled economic growth in the 1820s and 1830s. Canal improvements expanded in the East, while road building prevailed in the West. Congress continued to allocate funds for internal improvements. Federal money pushed the National Road, begun in 1811, farther west every year. Laborers needed to construct these improvements increased employment opportunities and encouraged non-farmers to move to the West. Wealth promised by engagement with the new economy was hard to reject. However, roads were expensive to build and maintain and some Americans strongly opposed spending money on these improvements.

The use of steamboats grew quickly throughout the 1810s and into the 1820s. As water trade and travel grew in popularity, local and state governments along with the federal government all allocated funds for the improvement and connecting of rivers and streams. Hundreds of miles of new canals cut through the eastern landscape. The most notable of these early projects was the Erie Canal. That project, completed in 1825, linked the Great Lakes to New York City. The profitability of the canal helped New York outpace its east coast rivals to become the center for commercial import and export in the United States.

Early railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio line hoped to link mid-Atlantic cities with lucrative western trade routes. Railroads encouraged the rapid growth of towns and cities all along their routes through the encouragement of boosterism in search of speculative profits. Not only did rail lines promise to move commerce faster, but the rails also encouraged the spreading of towns farther away from traditional locations along waterways. Technological limitations, constant repairs, conflicts with American Indians, and political disagreements, all hampered railroading and kept canals and steamboats as integral parts of the transportation system. Nonetheless, this early establishment of railroads enabled a rapid expansion after the Civil War.

Economic chains of interdependence stretched over hundreds of miles of land and through thousands of contracts and remittances. America's manifest destiny became wedded not only to territorial expansion, but also to economic development.

The debate over slavery became one of the prime forces behind the Texas revolution and that republic's annexation to the United States. After gaining its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico hoped to attract new settlers to its northern areas in order to create a buffer between it and the expanding western populations of the United States. New immigrants, mostly from the southern United States, poured into Texas. Over the next twenty-five years, concerns over growing Anglo influence and possible American designs on Texas produced great friction between Mexican and American populations. In 1829, Mexico, hoping to quell both anger and immigration, outlawed slavery and required all new immigrants to convert to Catholicism. American immigrants, eager to expand their agricultural fortunes, largely ignored these requirements. In response, Mexican authorities closed their territory to any new immigration in 1830 - a prohibition ignored by Americans who often squatted on public lands.

In 1834, an internal conflict between federalists and centralists in the Mexican government led to the political ascendency of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Santa Anna, governing as a dictator, repudiated the federalist Constitution of 1824, pursued a policy of authoritarian central control, and crushed several revolts throughout Mexico. Texian (as they called themselves) settlers opposed Santa Anna's centralizing policies and met in November. They issued a statement of purpose that emphasized their commitment to the Constitution of 1824 and declared Texas to be a separate state within Mexico. After the Mexican government angrily rejected the offer, Texian leaders soon abandoned their fight for the Constitution of 1824 and declared independence on March 2, 1836. The Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 was a successful secessionist movement in the northern district of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas that resulted in an independent Republic of Texas.

At the Alamo and Goliad, Santa Anna crushed smaller rebel forces and massacred hundreds of Texian prisoners. The Mexican army pursued the retreating Texian army deep into East Texas, spurring a mass panic and evacuation by American civilians known as the "Runaway Scrape." The confident Santa Anna consistently failed to make adequate defensive preparations; an oversight that eventually led to a surprise attack from the outnumbered Texian army led by Sam Houston on April 21, 1836. The battle of San Jacinto lasted only eighteen minutes and resulted in a decisive victory for the Texians, who retaliated for previous Mexican atrocities by killing fleeing and surrendering Mexican soldiers for hours after the initial assault. Santa Anna was captured in the aftermath and compelled to sign the Treaty of Velasco on May 14, 1836, by which he agreed to withdraw his army from Texas and acknowledged Texas independence. Although a new Mexican government never recognized the Republic of Texas, the United States and several other nations gave the new country diplomatic recognition.

Texas annexation had remained a political landmine since the Republic declared independence from Mexico in 1836. American politicians feared that adding Texas to the Union would provoke a war with Mexico and re-ignite sectional tensions by throwing off the balance between free and slave states. However, after his expulsion from the Whig party, President John Tyler saw Texas statehood as the key to saving his political career. In 1842, he began work on opening annexation to national debate. Harnessing public outcry over the issue, Democrat James K. Polk rose from virtual obscurity to win the presidential election of 1844. Polk and his party campaigned on promises of westward expansion, with eyes toward Texas, Oregon, and California. In the final days of his presidency, Tyler at last extended an official offer to Texas on March 3, 1845. The republic accepted on July 4, becoming the twenty-eighth state.

Mexico denounced annexation as "an act of aggression, the most unjust which can be found recorded in the annals of modern history." Beyond the anger produced by annexation, perhaps the most important tangible conflict between Mexico and the United States, at this point, was a narrow strip of land to which both countries now laid claim. Mexico drew the southwestern border of Texas at the Nueces River, but Texans claimed that the border lay roughly 150 miles further west at the Rio Grande. Neither claim was realistic since the sparsely populated area, known as the Nueces strip, was in fact controlled by independent American Indian tribes.

In November of 1845, President Polk secretly dispatched John Slidell to Mexico City in order to attempt a purchase of the Nueces strip along with large sections of New Mexico and California. The mission was an empty gesture, designed largely to pacify those in Washington who insisted on diplomacy before war. Predictably, officials in Mexico City refused to receive Slidell. In preparation for the assumed failure of the negotiations, Polk preemptively sent a 4,000 man army under General Zachary Taylor to Corpus Christi, Texas, just northeast of the Nueces River. Upon word of Slidell's rebuff in January 1846, Polk ordered Taylor to cross into the disputed territory. The President hoped that this show of force would push the lands of California onto the bargaining table as well. Unfortunately, he badly misread the situation. After losing Texas, the Mexican public strongly opposed surrendering any more ground to the United States. Popular opinion left the shaky government in Mexico City without room to negotiate. On April 24, Mexican cavalrymen attacked a detachment of Taylor's troops in the disputed territory just north of the Rio Grande, killing eleven U.S. soldiers.

It took two weeks for the news to reach Washington. Polk sent a message to Congress on May 11 that summed up the assumptions and intentions of the United States.

Instead of this, however, we have been exerting our best efforts to propitiate her good will. Upon the pretext that Texas, a nation as independent as herself, thought proper to unite its destinies with our own, she has affected to believe that we have severed her rightful territory, and in official proclamations and manifestoes has repeatedly threatened to make war upon us for the purpose of reconquering Texas. In the meantime we have tried every effort at reconciliation. The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier of the Del Norte. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war. James Knox Polk ((James K. Polk, "President Polk's Mexican War Message," quoted in Statemen's Manual: The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States, Inaugural, Annual, and Special, from 1789 to 1846: With a Memoir of Each of the Presidents and a History of Their Administrations; Also the Constitution of the United States, and a Selection of Important Documents and Statistical Information, Volume 2, (New York: Edward Walker, 1847), 1489.))

The cagey Polk knew that since hostilities already existed, political dissent would be dangerous - a vote against war became a vote against supporting American soldiers under fire. Congress passed a declaration of war on May 13. Only a few members of both parties, notably John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun, opposed the measure. Upon declaring war in 1846, Congress issued a call for 50,000 volunteer soldiers. Spurred by promises of adventure and conquest abroad, thousands of eager men flocked to assembly points across the country. However, opposition to "Mr. Polk's War" soon grew.

In the early fall of 1846, the U.S. Army invaded Mexico on multiple fronts and within a year's time General Winfield Scott's men took control of Mexico City. However, the city's fall did not bring an end to the war. Scott's men occupied Mexico's capital for over four months while the two countries negotiated. In the United States, the war had been controversial from the beginning. Embedded journalists sent back detailed reports from the front lines, and a divided press viciously debated the news. Volunteers found that war was not as they expected. Disease killed seven times as many American soldiers as combat. Harsh discipline, conflict within the ranks, and violent clashes with civilians led soldiers to desert in huge numbers. Peace finally came on February 2, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The new American Southwest attracted a diverse group of entrepreneurs and settlers to the commercial towns of New Mexico, the fertile lands of eastern Texas, and the famed gold deposits of California and the Rocky Mountain chains. This postwar migration built upon migration to the region dating back to the 1820s, when the lucrative Santa Fe trade enticed merchants to New Mexico and generous land grants brought numerous settlers to Texas. The Gadsden Purchase of 1854 further added to American gains north of Mexico.

The U.S.-Mexican War had an enormous impact on both countries. The American victory helped set the United States on the path to becoming a world power, elevated Zachary Taylor to the presidency, and served as a training ground for many of the Civil War's future commanders. Most significantly, however, Mexico lost roughly half of its territory. Yet, the United States' victory was not without danger. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an outspoken critic, predicted ominously at the beginning of the conflict, "We will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." Indeed, the conflict over whether or not to extend slavery into the newly won territory pushed the nation ever closer to disunion and civil war.

California, belonging to Mexico prior to the war, was at least three arduous months travel from the nearest American settlements. There was some sparse settlement in the Sacramento valley and missionaries made the trip occasionally. The fertile farmland of Oregon, like the black dirt lands of the Mississippi valley, attracted more settlers than California. Dramatized stories of Indian attack filled migrants with a sense of foreboding, although the majority of settlers encountered no violence and often no American Indians at all. The slow progress, disease, human and oxen starvation, poor trails, terrible geographic preparations, lack of guidebooks, threatening wildlife, vagaries of weather, and general confusion were all more formidable and frequent than American Indian attacks. Despite the harshness of the journey, by 1848 there were approximated 20,000 Americans living west of the Rockies, with about three-fourths of that number in Oregon.

Many who moved nurtured a romantic vision of life, attracting more Americans who sought more than agricultural challenges and familial responsibilities. The rugged individualism and military prowess of the West, encapsulated for some by service in the Mexican war, drew a growing new breed west of the Sierra Nevada to meet with the Californians already there; a breed of migrants different from the modest agricultural communities of the near-west.

If the great draw of the West served as manifest destiny's kindling, then the discovery of gold in California was the spark that set the fire ablaze. The vast majority of western settlers sought land ownership, but the lure of getting rich quick drew younger single male participants (with some women) to gold towns throughout the West. These adventurers and fortune-seekers then served as magnets for the arrival of others providing services associated with the gold rush. Towns and cities grew rapidly throughout the West, notably San Francisco whose population grew from about 500 in 1848 to almost 50,000 by 1853. Lawlessness, predictable failure of most fortune seekers, conflicts with native populations of the area - including Mexican, Spanish, American Indian, Chinese, and Japanese populations - and the explosion of the slavery question all demonstrated the danger of manifest destiny's promise.

On January 24, 1848 James W. Marshall, a contractor hired by John Sutter, discovered gold on Sutter's sawmill land in the Sacramento valley area of the California Territory. Throughout the 1850s, Californians beseeched Congress for a transcontinental railroad to provide service for both passengers and goods from the Midwest and the East Coast. The potential economic benefits for communities along proposed railroads made the debate over the railroad's route rancorous. Growing dissent over the slavery issue also heightened tensions. For their part, the economic boom ushered in by the gold rush allowed the state government of California to begin work on a state rail system in the Sacramento Valley in 1854.

The great influx of diverse people clashed in a combative and aggrandizing atmosphere of individualistic pursuit of fortune. Linguistic, cultural, economic, and racial conflict roiled both urban and rural areas. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexican immigrants made up 1/5th of the mining population in California. The ethnic patchwork of these frontier towns belied a clearly defined socio-economic arrangement that saw whites on top as landowners and managers with poor whites and ethnic minorities working the mines and assorted jobs. The competition for land, resources, and riches furthered individual and collective abuses particularly against American Indians and older Mexican communities. California's towns, as well as those dotting the landscape throughout the West, such as Coeur D'Alene in Idaho and Tombstone in Arizona, struggled to balance security with economic development and the protection of civil rights and liberties.

The expansion of influence and territory off the continent became an important corollary to westward expansion. One of the main goals of the U.S. government was the prevention of outside involvement of European countries in the affairs of the western hemisphere. Therefore, American policymakers sought an outlet for the domestic assertions of manifest destiny in the nation's early foreign policy decisions of the antebellum period.

As Secretary of State for President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams held the responsibility for the satisfactory resolution of ongoing border disputes in different areas of North America between the United States, England, Spain, and Russia. Adams' view of American foreign policy was put into clearest practice in the Monroe Doctrine, which he had great influence in crafting.

Increasingly aggressive incursions from Russians in the Northwest, ongoing border disputes with the British in Canada, the remote possibility of Spanish reconquest of South America, and British abolitionism in the Caribbean all forced a U.S. response. Despite the philosophical confidence present in the Monroe administration's decree, the reality of limited military power kept the Monroe Doctrine as an aspirational assertion. In a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4th, 1821, Secretary of State Adams acknowledged the American need for a robust foreign policy that simultaneously protected and encouraged the nation's growing and increasingly dynamic economy.

America...in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own...She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all...She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . . Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice. John Quincy Adams ((John Quincy Adams, "Mr. Adams Oration, July 21, 1821," quoted in Niles' Weekly Register, Volume 20, (Baltimore: H. Niles, 1821), 332.))

Adams' great fear was not territorial loss. He had no doubt that Russian and British interests in North America could be arrested. Adams held no reason to antagonize the Russians with grand pronouncements nor was he generally called upon to do so. He enjoyed a good relationship with the Russian Ambassador and stewarded through Congress most-favored trade status for the Russians in 1824. Rather, Adams worried gravely about the ability of the United States to compete commercially with the British in Latin America and the Caribbean. This concern deepened with the valid concern that America's chief Latin American trading partner, Cuba, dangled perilously close to outstretched British claws. Cabinet debates surrounding establishment of the Monroe Doctrine and geopolitical events in the Caribbean focused attention on that part of the world as key to the future defense of U.S. military and commercial interests; the main threat to those interests being the British. Expansion of economic opportunity and protection from foreign pressures became the overriding goals of U.S. foreign policy.

Bitter disagreements over the expansion of slavery into what became the Mexican Cession territory began even before the Mexican War ended. Many Northern businessmen and Southern slave owners supported the idea of expansion of American power and slavery into the Caribbean as a useful alternative to continental expansion, since slavery already existed in these areas. While some were critical of these attempts, seeing them as evidence of a growing slave-power conspiracy, many supported attempts at expansion, like those previously seen in East Florida, even if these attempts were of an extra-legal variety. Filibustering, as it was called, was privately financed schemes of varying degrees of operational reality directed at capturing and occupying foreign territory without the approval of the U.S. government.

Filibustering adventures took greatest hold in the imagination of Americans as they looked toward Cuba. Fears of racialized revolution in Cuba (as in Haiti and Florida before it) as well as the presence of an aggressive British abolitionary influence in the Caribbean energized the movement to annex Cuba and encouraged filibustering as expedient alternatives to lethargic official negotiations. Despite filibustering's seemingly chaotic planning and destabilizing repercussions, those intellectually and economically guiding the effort saw in their efforts a willing and receptive Cuban population and an agreeable American business class. In Cuba, manifest destiny for the first time sought territory off the continent and hoped to put a unique spin on the story of success in Mexico. Yet, the annexation of Cuba, despite great popularity and some military attempts led by Narciso Lopez, a Cuban dissident, never succeeded.

Other filibustering expeditions were launched elsewhere, including two by William Walker, a former American soldier. Walker seized portions of the Baja peninsula in Mexico and then later took power and established a slaving regime in Nicaragua. Eventually Walker was executed in Honduras. These missions violated the laws of the United States, but wealthy Americans financed various filibusters and less-wealthy adventurers were all too happy to sign up. Filibustering enjoyed its brief popularity into the late 1850s, at which point slavery and concerns over session came to the fore. By the opening of the Civil War most saw these attempts as simply territorial theft and muscular articulations of individual desires toward profit and dominance.

Debates over expansion, economics, diplomacy, and manifest destiny exposed some of the weaknesses of the American system. The chauvinism of policies like Native American removal, the Mexican War, and filibustering, existed alongside growing anxiety. Manifest destiny attempted to make a virtue of America's lack of history and turn it into the very basis of nationhood. To locate such origins, John O'Sullivan and other champions of manifest destiny grafted biological and territorial imperatives - common among European definitions of nationalism - onto American political culture. The United States was the embodiment of the democratic ideal, they said. Democracy had to be timeless, boundless, and portable. New methods of transportation and communication, the rapidity of the railroad and the telegraph, the rise of the international market economy, and the growth of the American frontier provided shared platforms to help Americans think across local identities and reaffirm a national character.
This chapter was edited by Gregg Lightfoot, with content contributions by Ethan Bennett, Michelle Cassidy, Jonathan Grandage, Gregg Lightfoot, Jose Juan Perez Melendez, Jessica Moore, Nick Roland, Matthew K. Saionz, Rowan Steinecker, Patrick Troester, and Ben Wright.

Recommended citation: Ethan Bennett et al., "Manifest Destiny," Gregg Lightfoot, ed., in The American Yawp, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., last modified August 1, 2016, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

Recommended Reading

John A. Andrew, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001).

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, (New York: Knopf, 2014).

James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003).

James G. Cusick, The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Will Fowler, Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom, (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2011).

Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Kenneth L. Holmes, Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001).

Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006).

Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002).

Frederick Merk, Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).

Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999).

Daniel K Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Ronald E. Shaw, Canals For A Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790-1860, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

Joel H. Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

David E. Wilkins, Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

Notes

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John Louis O'Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, articulated the long-standing American belief in the God-given mission of the United States to lead the world in the peaceful transition to democracy.

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Native Americans long dominated the vastness of the American West. Linked culturally and geographically by trade, travel, and warfare, various indigenous groups controlled most of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the nineteenth century. Spanish, French, British, and later American traders had integrated themselves into many regional economies, and American emigrants pushed ever westward, but no imperial power had yet achieved anything approximating political or military control over the great bulk of the continent. But then the Civil War came and went and decoupled the West from the question of slavery just as the United States industrialized and laid down rails and pushed its ever-expanding population ever farther west.

Indigenous Americans had lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, perhaps as many as 250,000 Natives still inhabited the American West. But then unending waves of American settlers, the American military, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered all. The United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, controlled the enormity of land between the two oceans.

The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is many-sided. Tragedy for some, triumph for others, the many intertwined histories of the American West marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the United States.

In the decades after the Civil War, Americans poured across the Mississippi River in record numbers. No longer simply crossing over the continent for new imagined Edens in California or Oregon, they settled now in the vast heart of the continent.

Many of the first American migrants had come to the West in search of quick profits during the midcentury gold and silver rushes. As in the California rush of 1848-1849, droves of prospectors poured in after precious-metal strikes in Colorado in 1858, Nevada in 1859, Idaho in 1860, Montana in 1863, and the Black Hills in 1874. While women often performed housework that allowed mining families to subsist in often difficult conditions, a significant portion of the mining workforce were single men without families dependent on service industries in nearby towns and cities. There, working-class women worked in shops, saloons, boardinghouses, and brothels. Many of these ancillary operations profited from the mining boom: as failed prospectors found, the rush itself often generated more wealth than the mines. The gold that left Colorado in the first seven years after the Pikes Peak gold strike-estimated at $25.5 million-was, for instance, less than half of what outside parties had invested in the fever. The 100,000-plus migrants who settled in the Rocky Mountains were ultimately more valuable to the region's development than the gold they came to find.

Others came to the Plains to extract the hides of the great bison herds. Millions of animals had roamed the Plains, but their tough leather supplied industrial belting in eastern factories and raw material for the booming clothing industry. Specialized teams took down and skinned the herds. The infamous American bison slaughter peaked in the early 1870s. The number of American bison plummeted from over ten million at midcentury to only a few hundred by the early 1880s. The expansion of the railroads allowed ranching to replace the bison with cattle on the American grasslands.

The nearly seventy thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly called Mormons) who migrated west between 1846 and 1868 were similar to other Americans traveling west on the overland trails. They faced many of the same problems, but unlike most other American migrants, Mormons were fleeing from religious persecution.

Many historians view Mormonism as a "uniquely American faith," not just because it was founded by Joseph Smith in New York in the 1830s, but because of its optimistic and future-oriented tenets. Mormons believed that Americans were exceptional-chosen by God to spread truth across the world and to build utopia, a New Jerusalem in North America. However, many Americans were suspicious of the Latter-Day Saint movement and its unusual rituals, especially the practice of polygamy, and most Mormons found it difficult to practice their faith in the eastern United States. Thus began a series of migrations in the midnineteenth century, first to Illinois, then Missouri and Nebraska, and finally into Utah Territory.

Once in the west, Mormon settlements served as important supply points for other emigrants heading on to California and Oregon. Brigham Young, the leader of the Church after the death of Joseph Smith, was appointed governor of the Utah Territory by the federal government in 1850. He encouraged Mormon residents of the territory to engage in agricultural pursuits and be cautious of the outsiders who arrived as the mining and railroad industries developed in the region.

It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West. Family farms were the backbone of the agricultural economy that expanded in the West after the Civil War. In 1862, northerners in Congress passed the Homestead Act, which allowed male citizens (or those who declared their intent to become citizens) to claim federally owned lands in the West. Settlers could head west, choose a 160-acre surveyed section of land, file a claim, and begin "improving" the land by plowing fields, building houses and barns, or digging wells, and, after five years of living on the land, could apply for the official title deed to the land. Hundreds of thousands of Americans used the Homestead Act to acquire land. The treeless plains that had been considered unfit for settlement became the new agricultural mecca for land-hungry Americans.

The Homestead Act excluded married women from filing claims because they were considered the legal dependents of their husbands. Some unmarried women filed claims on their own, but single farmers (male or female) were hard-pressed to run a farm and they were a small minority. Most farm households adopted traditional divisions of labor: men worked in the fields and women managed the home and kept the family fed. Both were essential.

Migrants sometimes found in homesteads a self-sufficiency denied at home. Second or third sons who did not inherit land in Scandinavia, for instance, founded farm communities in Minnesota, Dakota, and other Midwestern territories in the 1860s. Boosters encouraged emigration by advertising the semiarid Plains as, for instance, "a flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams." Western populations exploded. The Plains were transformed. In 1860, for example, Kansas had about 10,000 farms; in 1880 it had 239,000. Texas saw enormous population growth. The federal government counted 200,000 people in Texas in 1850, 1,600,000 in 1880, and 3,000,000 in 1900, making it the sixth most populous state in the nation.

The "Indian wars," so mythologized in western folklore, were a series of sporadic, localized, and often brief engagements between U.S. military forces and various Native American groups. The more sustained and more impactful conflict, meanwhile, was economic and cultural. The vast and cyclical movement across the Great Plains to hunt buffalo, raid enemies, and trade goods was incompatible with new patterns of American settlement and railroad construction. Thomas Jefferson's old dream that Indian groups might live isolated in the West was, in the face of American expansion, no longer a viable reality. Political, economic, and even humanitarian concerns intensified American efforts to isolate Indians on reservations. Although Indian removal had long been a part of federal Indian policy, following the Civil War the U.S. government redoubled its efforts. If treaties and other forms of persistent coercion would not work, more drastic measures were deemed necessary. Against the threat of confinement and the extinction of traditional ways of life, Native Americans battled the American army and the encroaching lines of American settlement.

In one of the earliest western engagements, in 1862, while the Civil War still consumed the nation, tensions erupted between Dakota Sioux and white settlers in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. The 1850 U.S. census recorded a white population of about 6,000 in Minnesota; eight years later, when it became a state, it was more than 150,000. The influx of American farmers pushed the Sioux to the breaking point. Hunting became unsustainable and those Sioux who had taken up farming found only poverty. Starvation wracked many. Then, on August 17, 1862, four young men of the Santees, a Sioux tribe, killed five white settlers near the Redwood Agency, an American administrative office. In the face of an inevitable American retaliation, and over the protests of many members, the tribe chose war. On the following day, Sioux warriors attacked settlements near the Agency. They killed thirty-one men, women, and children. They then ambushed a U.S. military detachment at Redwood Ferry, killing twenty-three. The governor of Minnesota called up militia and several thousand Americans waged war against the Sioux insurgents. Fighting broke out at New Ulm, Fort Ridgely, and Birch Coulee, but the Americans broke the Indian resistance at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, ending the so-called Dakota War, also known as the Sioux Uprising.

More than two thousand Sioux had been taken prisoner during the fighting. Many were tried at federal forts for murder, rape, and other atrocities. Military tribunals convicted 303 Sioux and sentenced them to hang. At the last minute, President Lincoln commuted all but thirty eight of the sentences. Terrified Minnesota settlers and government officials insisted not only that the Sioux lose much of their reservation lands and be removed farther west, but that those who had fled be hunted down and placed on reservations as well. The American military gave chase and, on September 3, 1863, after a year of attrition, American military units surrounded a large encampment of Dakota Sioux. American troops killed an estimated three hundred men, women, and children. Dozens more were taken prisoner. Troops spent the next two days burning winter food and supply stores to starve out the Sioux resistance, which would continue to smolder. Farther south, tensions flared in Colorado. In 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie had secured right-of-way access for Americans passing through on their way to California and Oregon. But a gold rush in 1858 drew approximately 100,000 white gold seekers, and they demanded new treaties be made with local Indian groups to secure land rights in the newly created Colorado Territory. Cheyenne bands splintered over the possibility of signing a new treaty that would confine them to a reservation. Settlers, already wary of raids by powerful groups of Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Comanches, meanwhile read in their local newspapers sensationalist accounts of the Sioux uprising in Minnesota. Militia leader John M. Chivington warned settlers in the summer of 1864 that the Cheyenne were dangerous savages, urged war, and promised a swift military victory. Sporadic fighting broke out. Although Chivington warned of Cheyenne savagery, the aged Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, believing that a peace treaty would be best for his people, traveled to Denver to arrange for peace talks. He and his followers traveled toward Fort Lyon in accordance with government instructions, but on November 29, 1864, Chivington ordered his seven hundred militiamen to move on the Cheyenne camp near Fort Lyon at Sand Creek. The Cheyenne tried to declare their peaceful intentions but Chivington's militia cut them down. It was a slaughter. About two hundred men, women, and children were killed.

The Sand Creek Massacre was a national scandal, alternately condemned and applauded. News of the massacre reached other Native groups and the American frontier erupted into conflict. Americans pushed for a new "peace policy." Congress, confronted with these tragedies and further violence, authorized in 1868 the creation of an Indian Peace Commission. The commission's study of American Indians decried prior American policy and galvanized support for reformers. After the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant the following spring, Congress allied with prominent philanthropists to create the Board of Indian Commissioners, a permanent advisory body to oversee Indian affairs and prevent the further outbreak of violence. The board effectively Christianized American Indian policy. Much of the reservation system was handed over to Protestant churches, which were tasked with finding agents and missionaries to manage reservation life. Congress hoped that religiously minded men might fare better at creating just assimilation policies and persuading Indians to accept them. Historian Francis Paul Prucha believed that this attempt at a new "peace policy . . . might just have properly been labelled the 'religious policy.'"

Many female Christian missionaries played a central role in cultural reeducation programs that attempted to not only instill Protestant religion but also impose traditional American gender roles and family structures. They endeavored to replace Indians' tribal social units with small, patriarchal households. Women's labor became a contentious issue because few tribes divided labor according to the gender norms of middle- and upper-class Americans. Fieldwork, the traditional domain of white males, was primarily performed by Native women, who also usually controlled the products of their labor, if not the land that was worked, giving them status in society as laborers and food providers. For missionaries, the goal was to get Native women to leave the fields and engage in more proper "women's" work-housework. Christian missionaries performed much as secular federal agents had. Few American agents could meet Native Americans on their own terms. Most viewed reservation Indians as lazy and thought of Native cultures as inferior to their own. The views of J. L. Broaddus, appointed to oversee several small Indian tribes on the Hoopa Valley reservation in California, are illustrative: in his annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1875, he wrote, "The great majority of them are idle, listless, careless, and improvident. They seem to take no thought about provision for the future, and many of them would not work at all if they were not compelled to do so. They would rather live upon the roots and acorns gathered by their women than to work for flour and beef."

If the Indians could not be forced through kindness to change their ways, most agreed that it was acceptable to use force, which Native groups resisted. In Texas and the Southern Plains, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and their allies had wielded enormous influence. The Comanche in particular controlled huge swaths of territory and raided vast areas, inspiring terror from the Rocky Mountains to the interior of northern Mexico to the Texas Gulf Coast. But after the Civil War, the U.S. military refocused its attention on the Southern Plains.

The American military first sent messengers to the Plains to find the elusive Comanche bands and ask them to come to peace negotiations at Medicine Lodge Creek in the fall of 1867. But terms were muddled: American officials believed that Comanche bands had accepted reservation life, while Comanche leaders believed they were guaranteed vast lands for buffalo hunting. Comanche bands used designated reservation lands as a base from which to collect supplies and federal annuity goods while continuing to hunt, trade, and raid American settlements in Texas.

Confronted with renewed Comanche raiding, particularly by the famed war leader Quanah Parker, the U.S. military finally proclaimed that all Indians who were not settled on the reservation by the fall of 1874 would be considered "hostile." The Red River War began when many Comanche bands refused to resettle and the American military launched expeditions into the Plains to subdue them, culminating in the defeat of the remaining roaming bands in the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle. Cold and hungry, with their way of life already decimated by soldiers, settlers, cattlemen, and railroads, the last free Comanche bands were moved to the reservation at Fort Sill, in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.

On the northern Plains, the Sioux people had yet to fully surrender. Following the troubles of 1862, many bands had signed treaties with the United States and drifted into the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies to collect rations and annuities, but many continued to resist American encroachment, particularly during Red Cloud's War, a rare victory for the Plains people that resulted in the Treaty of 1868 and created the Great Sioux Reservation. Then, in 1874, an American expedition to the Black Hills of South Dakota discovered gold. White prospectors flooded the territory. Caring very little about Indian rights and very much about getting rich, they brought the Sioux situation again to its breaking point. Aware that U.S. citizens were violating treaty provisions, but unwilling to prevent them from searching for gold, federal officials pressured the western Sioux to sign a new treaty that would transfer control of the Black Hills to the United States while General Philip Sheridan quietly moved U.S. troops into the region. Initial clashes between U.S. troops and Sioux warriors resulted in several Sioux victories that, combined with the visions of Sitting Bull, who had dreamed of an even more triumphant victory, attracted Sioux bands who had already signed treaties but now joined to fight.

In late June 1876, a division of the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was sent up a trail into the Black Hills as an advance guard for a larger force. Custer's men approached a camp along a river known to the Sioux as Greasy Grass but marked on Custer's map as Little Bighorn, and they found that the influx of "treaty" Sioux as well as aggrieved Cheyenne and other allies had swelled the population of the village far beyond Custer's estimation. Custer's 7th Cavalry was vastly outnumbered, and he and 268 of his men were killed.

Custer's fall shocked the nation. Cries for a swift American response filled the public sphere, and military expeditions were sent out to crush Native resistance. The Sioux splintered off into the wilderness and began a campaign of intermittent resistance but, outnumbered and suffering after a long, hungry winter, Crazy Horse led a band of Oglala Sioux to surrender in May 1877. Other bands gradually followed until finally, in July 1881, Sitting Bull and his followers at last laid down their weapons and came to the reservation. Indigenous powers had been defeated. The Plains, it seemed, had been pacified.

Plains peoples were not the only ones who suffered as a result of American expansion. Groups like the Utes and Paiutes were pushed out of the Rocky Mountains by U.S. expansion into Colorado and away from the northern Great Basin by the expanding Mormon population in Utah Territory in the 1850s and 1860s. Faced with a shrinking territorial base, members of these two groups often joined the U.S. military in its campaigns in the southwest against other powerful Native groups like the Hopi, the Zuni, the Jicarilla Apache, and especially the Navajo, whose population of at least ten thousand engaged in both farming and sheep herding on some of the most valuable lands acquired by the United States after the Mexican War.

Conflicts between the U.S. military, American settlers, and Native populations increased throughout the 1850s. By 1862, General James Carleton began searching for a reservation where he could remove the Navajo and end their threat to U.S. expansion in the Southwest. Carleton selected a dry, almost treeless site in the Bosque Redondo Valley, three hundred miles from the Navajo homeland.

In April 1863, Carleton gave orders to Colonel Kit Carson to round up the entire Navajo population and escort them to Bosque Redondo. Those who resisted would be shot. Thus began a period of Navajo history called the Long Walk, which remains deeply important to Navajo people today. The Long Walk was not a single event but a series of forced marches to the reservation at Bosque Redondo between August 1863 and December 1866. Conditions at Bosque Redondo were horrible. Provisions provided by the U.S. Army were not only inadequate but often spoiled; disease was rampant, and thousands of Navajos died.

By 1868, it had become clear that life at the reservation was unsustainable. General William Tecumseh Sherman visited the reservation and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were essentially kept as prisoners, but lack of cost-effectiveness was the main reason Sherman recommended that the Navajo be returned to their homeland in the West. On June 1, 1868, the Navajo signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, an unprecedented treaty in the history of U.S.-Indian relations in which the Navajo were able to return from the reservation to their homeland.

The destruction of Indian nations in California and the Pacific Northwest received significantly less attention than the dramatic conquest of the Plains, but Native peoples in these regions also experienced violence, population decline, and territorial loss. For example, in 1872, the California/Oregon border erupted in violence when the Modoc people left the reservation of their historic enemies, the Klamath Indians, and returned to an area known as Lost River. Americans had settled the region after Modoc removal several years before, and they complained bitterly of the Natives' return. The U.S. military arrived when fifty-two remaining Modoc warriors, led by a man called Captain Jack, refused to return to the reservation and holed up in defensive positions along the state border. They fought a guerrilla war for eleven months in which at least two hundred U.S. troops were killed before they were finally forced to surrender. Four years later, in the Pacific Northwest, a branch of the Nez Percé (who, generations earlier, had aided Lewis and Clark in their famous journey to the Pacific Ocean) refused to be moved to a reservation and, under the leadership of Chief Joseph, attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U.S. Cavalry. The outnumbered Nez Percé battled across a thousand miles and were attacked nearly two dozen times before they succumbed to hunger and exhaustion, surrendered, and were forced to return. The flight of the Nez Percé captured the attention of the nation, and a transcript of Chief Joseph's surrender, as recorded by a U.S. Army officer, became a landmark of American rhetoric. "Hear me, my chiefs," Joseph was supposed to have said, "I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

The history of Indian-American relations in California typified the decline of the western Indians. The treaties that had been signed with numerous Native nations in California in the 1850s were never ratified by the Senate. Over one hundred distinct Native groups had lived in California before the Spanish and American conquests, but by 1880, the Native population of California had collapsed from about 150,000 on the eve of the gold rush to a little less than 20,000. A few reservation areas were eventually set up by the U.S. government to collect what remained of the Native population, but most were dispersed throughout California. This was partly the result of state laws from the 1850s that allowed white Californians to obtain both Native children and adults as "apprentice" laborers by merely bringing the desired laborer before a judge and promising to feed, clothe, and eventually release them after a period of "service" that ranged from ten to twenty years. Thousands of California's Natives were thus pressed into a form of slave labor that supported the growing mining, agricultural, railroad, and cattle industries.

As Native peoples were pushed out, American settlers poured in. Aside from agriculture and the extraction of natural resources-such as timber and precious metals-two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads. Both developed in connection with each other and both shaped the collective American memory of the post-Civil War "Wild West."

As one booster put it, "the West is purely a railroad enterprise." No economic enterprise rivaled the railroads in scale, scope, or sheer impact. No other businesses had attracted such enormous sums of capital, and no other ventures ever received such lavish government subsidies (business historian Alfred Chandler called the railroads the "first modern business enterprise"). By "annihilating time and space"-by connecting the vastness of the continent-the railroads transformed the United States and made the American West.

No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination-or federal support-as the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States. Constructed from the west by the Central Pacific and from the east by the Union Pacific, the two roads were linked in Utah in 1869 to great national fanfare. But such a herculean task was not easy, and national legislators threw enormous subsidies at railroad companies, a part of the Republican Party platform since 1856. The 1862 Pacific Railroad Act gave bonds of between $16,000 and $48,000 for each mile of construction and provided vast land grants to railroad companies. Between 1850 and 1871 alone, railroad companies received more than 175,000,000 acres of public land, an area larger than the state of Texas. Investors reaped enormous profits. As one congressional opponent put it in the 1870s, "If there be profit, the corporations may take it; if there be loss, the Government must bear it."

If railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, they also created enormous labor demands. By 1880, approximately four hundred thousand men-or nearly 2.5 percent of the nation's entire workforce-labored in the railroad industry. Much of the work was dangerous and low-paying, and companies relied heavily on immigrant labor to build tracks. Companies employed Irish workers in the early nineteenth century and Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century. By 1880, over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States. Once the rails were laid, companies still needed a large workforce to keep the trains running. Much railroad work was dangerous, but perhaps the most hazardous work was done by brakemen. Before the advent of automatic braking, an engineer would blow the "down brake" whistle and brakemen would scramble to the top of the moving train, regardless of the weather conditions, and run from car to car manually turning brakes. Speed was necessary, and any slip could be fatal. Brakemen were also responsible for coupling the cars, attaching them together with a large pin. It was easy to lose a hand or finger and even a slight mistake could cause cars to collide.

The railroads boomed. In 1850, there were 9,000 miles of railroads in the United States. In 1900 there were 190,000, including several transcontinental lines. To manage these vast networks of freight and passenger lines, companies converged rails at hub cities. Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most spectacular. It grew from two hundred inhabitants in 1833 to over a million by 1890. By 1893 it and the region from which it drew were completely transformed. The World's Columbian Exposition that year trumpeted the city's progress and broader technological progress, with typical Gilded Age ostentation. A huge, gleaming (but temporary) "White City" was built in neoclassical style to house all the features of the fair and cater to the needs of the visitors who arrived from all over the world. Highlighted in the title of this world's fair were the changes that had overtaken North America since Columbus made landfall four centuries earlier. Chicago became the most important western hub and served as the gateway between the farm and ranch country of the Great Plains and eastern markets. Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter, where they were then processed into packaged meats and shipped by refrigerated rail to New York City and other eastern cities. Such hubs became the central nodes in a rapid-transit economy that increasingly spread across the entire continent linking goods and people together in a new national network.

This national network created the fabled cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s. The first cattle drives across the central Plains began soon after the Civil War. Railroads created the market for ranching, and for the few years after the war that railroads connected eastern markets with important market hubs such as Chicago, but had yet to reach Texas ranchlands, ranchers began driving cattle north, out of the Lone Star state, to major railroad terminuses in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Ranchers used well-worn trails, such as the Chisholm Trail, for drives, but conflicts arose with Native Americans in the Indian Territory and farmers in Kansas who disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their own hunting, ranching, and farming lands. Other trails, such as the Western Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and the Shawnee Trail, were therefore blazed.

Cattle drives were difficult tasks for the crews of men who managed the herds. Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the late-nineteenth century to be between twelve thousand and forty thousand. Perhaps a fourth were African American, and more were likely Mexican or Mexican American. Much about the American cowboys evolved from Mexican vaqueros: cowboys adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo, bronco, and lasso."

While most cattle drivers were men, there are at least sixteen verifiable accounts of women participating in the drives. Some, like Molly Dyer Goodnight, accompanied their husbands. Others, like Lizzie Johnson Williams, helped drive their own herds. Williams made at least three known trips with her herds up the Chisholm Trail.

Many cowboys hoped one day to become ranch owners themselves, but employment was insecure and wages were low. Beginners could expect to earn around $20-$25 per month, and those with years of experience might earn $40-$45. Trail bosses could earn over $50 per month. And it was tough work. On a cattle drive, cowboys worked long hours and faced extremes of heat and cold and intense blowing dust. They subsisted on limited diets with irregular supplies.

But if workers of cattle earned low wages, owners and investors could receive riches. At the end of the Civil War, a steer worth $4 in Texas could fetch $40 in Kansas. Although profits slowly leveled off, large profits could still be made. And yet, by the 1880s, the great cattle drives were largely done. The railroads had created them, and the railroads ended them: railroad lines pushed into Texas and made the great drives obsolete. But ranching still brought profits and the Plains were better suited for grazing than for agriculture, and western ranchers continued supplying beef for national markets.

Ranching was just one of many western industries that depended on the railroads. By linking the Plains with national markets and rapidly moving people and goods, the railroads made the modern American West.

As the rails moved into the West, and more and more Americans followed, the situation for Native groups deteriorated even further. Treaties negotiated between the United States and Native groups had typically promised that if tribes agreed to move to specific reservation lands, they would hold those lands collectively. But as American westward migration mounted and open lands closed, white settlers began to argue that Indians had more than their fair share of land, that the reservations were too big, that Indians were using the land "inefficiently," and that they still preferred nomadic hunting instead of intensive farming and ranching.

By the 1880s, Americans increasingly championed legislation to allow the transfer of Indian lands to farmers and ranchers, while many argued that allotting Indian lands to individual Native Americans, rather than to tribes, would encourage American-style agriculture and finally put Indians who had previously resisted the efforts of missionaries and federal officials on the path to "civilization."

Passed by Congress on February 8, 1887, the Dawes General Allotment Act splintered Native American reservations into individual family homesteads. Each head of a Native family was to be allotted 160 acres, the typical size of a claim that any settler could establish on federal lands under the provisions of the Homestead Act. Single individuals over age eighteen would receive an eighty-acre allotment, and orphaned children received forty acres. A four-year timeline was established for Indian peoples to make their allotment selections. If at the end of that time no selection had been made, the act authorized the secretary of the interior to appoint an agent to make selections for the remaining tribal members. To protect Indians from being swindled by unscrupulous land speculators, all allotments were to be held in trust-they could not be sold by allottees-for twenty-five years. Lands that remained unclaimed by tribal members after allotment would revert to federal control and be sold to American settlers.

Americans touted the Dawes Act as an uplifting humanitarian reform, but it upended Indian lifestyles and left Indian groups without sovereignty over their lands. The act claimed that to protect Indian property rights, it was necessary to extend "the protection of the laws of the United States . . . over the Indians." Tribal governments and legal principles could be superseded, or dissolved and replaced, by U.S. laws. Under the terms of the Dawes Act, Native groups struggled to hold on to some measure of tribal sovereignty.

The stresses of conquest unsettled generations of Native Americans. Many took comfort from the words of prophets and holy men. In Nevada, on January 1, 1889, Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka experienced a great revelation. He had traveled, he said, from his earthly home in western Nevada to heaven and returned during a solar eclipse to prophesy to his people. "You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always," he exhorted. And they must, he said, participate in a religious ceremony that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. If the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, their ancestors would rise from the dead, droughts would dissipate, the whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains.

Native American prophets had often confronted American imperial power. Some prophets, including Wovoka, incorporated Christian elements like heaven and a Messiah figure into indigenous spiritual traditions. And so, though it was far from unique, Wovoka's prophecy nevertheless caught on quickly and spread beyond the Paiutes. From across the West, members of the Arapaho, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Shoshone nations, among others, adopted the Ghost Dance religion. Perhaps the most avid Ghost Dancers-and certainly the most famous-were the Lakota Sioux.

The Lakota Sioux were in dire straits. South Dakota, formed out of land that had once belonged by treaty to the Lakotas, became a state in 1889. White homesteaders had poured in, reservations were carved up and diminished, starvation set in, corrupt federal agents cut food rations, and drought hit the Plains. Many Lakotas feared a future as the landless subjects of a growing American empire when a delegation of eleven men, led by Kicking Bear, joined Ghost Dance pilgrims on the rails westward to Nevada and returned to spread the revival in the Dakotas.

The energy and message of the revivals frightened Indian agents, who began arresting Indian leaders. Then Chief Sitting Bull and with several other whites and Indians, were killed in December 1890 during a botched arrest, convincing many bands to flee the reservations to join the fugitive bands farther west, where Lakota adherents of the Ghost Dance were preaching that the Ghost Dancers would be immune to bullets.

Two weeks later, an American cavalry unit intercepted a band of 350 Lakotas, including over 100 women and children, under Chief Spotted Elk (later known as Bigfoot). They were escorted to Wounded Knee Creek, where they camped for the night. The following morning, December 29, the American cavalrymen entered the camp to disarm Spotted Elk's band. Tensions flared, a shot was fired, and a skirmish became a massacre. The Americans fired their heavy weaponry indiscriminately into the camp. Two dozen cavalrymen had been killed by the Lakotas' concealed weapons or by friendly fire, but when the guns went silent, between 150 and 300 Native men, women, and children were dead.

Wounded Knee marked the end of sustained, armed Native American resistance in the West. Individuals continued to resist the pressures of assimilation and preserve traditional cultural practices, but sustained military defeats, the loss of sovereignty over land and resources, and the onset of crippling poverty on the reservations marked the final decades of the nineteenth century as a particularly dark era for America's western tribes. But for Americans, it became mythical.

"The American West" conjures visions of tipis, cabins, cowboys, Indians, farm wives in sunbonnets, and outlaws with six-shooters. Such images pervade American culture, but they are as old as the West itself: novels, rodeos, and Wild West shows mythologized the American West throughout the post-Civil War era.

In the 1860s, Americans devoured dime novels that embellished the lives of real-life individuals such as Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid. Owen Wister's novels, especially The Virginian, established the character of the cowboy as a gritty stoic with a rough exterior but the courage and heroism needed to rescue people from train robbers, Indians, and cattle rustlers. Such images were later reinforced when the emergence of rodeo added to popular conceptions of the American West. Rodeos began as small roping and riding contests among cowboys in towns near ranches or at camps at the end of the cattle trails. In Pecos, Texas, on July 4, 1883, cowboys from two ranches, the Hash Knife and the W Ranch, competed in roping and riding contests as a way to settle an argument; this event is recognized by historians of the West as the first real rodeo. Casual contests evolved into planned celebrations. Many were scheduled around national holidays, such as Independence Day, or during traditional roundup times in the spring and fall. Early rodeos took place in open grassy areas-not arenas-and included calf and steer roping and roughstock events such as bronc riding. They gained popularity and soon dedicated rodeo circuits developed. Although about 90 percent of rodeo contestants were men, women helped popularize the rodeo and several popular female bronc riders, such as Bertha Kaepernick, entered men's events, until around 1916 when women's competitive participation was curtailed. Americans also experienced the "Wild West"-the mythical West imagined in so many dime novels-by attending traveling Wild West shows, arguably the unofficial national entertainment of the United States from the 1880s to the 1910s. Wildly popular across the country, the shows traveled throughout the eastern United States and even across Europe and showcased what was already a mythic frontier life. William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the first to recognize the broad national appeal of the stock "characters" of the American West-cowboys, Indians, sharpshooters, cavalrymen, and rangers-and put them all together into a single massive traveling extravaganza. Operating out of Omaha, Nebraska, Buffalo Bill launched his touring show in 1883. Cody himself shunned the word show, fearing that it implied an exaggeration or misrepresentation of the West. He instead called his production "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." He employed real cowboys and Indians in his productions. But it was still, of course, a show. It was entertainment, little different in its broad outlines from contemporary theater. Storylines depicted westward migration, life on the Plains, and Indian attacks, all punctuated by "cowboy fun": bucking broncos, roping cattle, and sharpshooting contests.

Buffalo Bill, joined by shrewd business partners skilled in marketing, turned his shows into a sensation. But he was not alone. Gordon William "Pawnee Bill" Lillie, another popular Wild West showman, got his start in 1886 when Cody employed him as an interpreter for Pawnee members of the show. Lillie went on to create his own production in 1888, "Pawnee Bill's Historic Wild West." He was Cody's only real competitor in the business until 1908, when the two men combined their shows to create a new extravaganza, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Great Far East" (most people called it the "Two Bills Show"). It was an unparalleled spectacle. The cast included American cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, Native Americans, Russian Cossacks, Japanese acrobats, and an Australian aboriginal.

Cody and Lillie knew that Native Americans fascinated audiences in the United States and Europe, and both featured them prominently in their Wild West shows. Most Americans believed that Native cultures were disappearing or had already, and felt a sense of urgency to see their dances, hear their song, and be captivated by their bareback riding skills and their elaborate buckskin and feather attire. The shows certainly veiled the true cultural and historic value of so many Native demonstrations, and the Indian performers were curiosities to white Americans, but the shows were one of the few ways for many Native Americans to make a living in the late nineteenth century.

In an attempt to appeal to women, Cody recruited Annie Oakley, a female sharpshooter who thrilled onlookers with her many stunts. Billed as "Little Sure Shot," she shot apples off her poodle's head and the ash from her husband's cigar, clenched trustingly between his teeth. Gordon Lillie's wife, May Manning Lillie, also became a skilled shot and performed as "World's Greatest Lady Horseback Shot." Female sharpshooters were Wild West show staples. As many as eighty toured the country at the shows' peak. But if such acts challenged expected Victorian gender roles, female performers were typically careful to blunt criticism by maintaining their feminine identity-for example, by riding sidesaddle and wearing full skirts and corsets-during their acts.

The western "cowboys and Indians" mystique, perpetuated in novels, rodeos, and Wild West shows, was rooted in romantic nostalgia and, perhaps, in the anxieties that many felt in the late nineteenth century's new seemingly "soft" industrial world of factory and office work. The mythical cowboy's "aggressive masculinity" was the seemingly perfect antidote for middle- and upper-class, city-dwelling Americans who feared they "had become over-civilized" and longed for what Theodore Roosevelt called the "strenuous life." Roosevelt himself, a scion of a wealthy New York family and later a popular American president, turned a brief tenure as a failed Dakota ranch owner into a potent part of his political image. Americans looked longingly to the West, whose romance would continue to pull at generations of Americans.

In 1893, the American Historical Association met during that year's World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "frontier thesis," one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."

Turner looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a tsunami of war and plunder and industry, waves of "civilization" that washed across the continent. A frontier line "between savagery and civilization" had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon. Turner invited his audience to "stand at Cumberland Gap [the famous pass through the Appalachian Mountains], and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file-the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer-and the frontier has passed by."

Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization out of the frontier, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe. Moreover, the style of history Turner called for was democratic as well, arguing that the work of ordinary people (in this case, pioneers) deserved the same study as that of great statesmen. Such was a novel approach in 1893.

But Turner looked ominously to the future. The Census Bureau in 1890 had declared the frontier closed. There was no longer a discernible line running north to south that, Turner said, any longer divided civilization from savagery. Turner worried for the United States' future: what would become of the nation without the safety valve of the frontier? It was a common sentiment. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner that his essay "put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely."

The history of the West was many-sided and it was made by many persons and peoples. Turner's thesis was rife with faults, not only in its bald Anglo-Saxon chauvinism-in which nonwhites fell before the march of "civilization" and Chinese and Mexican immigrants were invisible-but in its utter inability to appreciate the impact of technology and government subsidies and large-scale economic enterprises alongside the work of hardy pioneers. Still, Turner's thesis held an almost canonical position among historians for much of the twentieth century and, more importantly, captured Americans' enduring romanticization of the West and the simplification of a long and complicated story into a march of progress.
Chief Joseph on Indian Affairs (1877, 1879) A branch of the Nez Percé tribe, from the Pacific Northwest, refused to be moved to a reservation and attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U.S. Cavalry, attacked, and forced to return. The following is a transcript of Chief Joseph's surrender, as recorded by Lieutenant Wood, Twenty-first Infantry, acting aide-de-camp and acting adjutant-general to General Oliver O. Howard, in 1877. William T. Hornady on the Extermination of the American Bison (1889) William T. Hornady, Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, wrote a detailed account of the near-extinction of the American bison in the late-nineteenth century. Chester A. Arthur on American Indian Policy (1881) The following is extracted from President Chester A. Arthur's First Annual Message to Congress, delivered December 6, 1881. Frederick Jackson Turner, "Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893) Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner's address to the American Historical Association on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow "the closing of the frontier." Tom Torlino (1882, 1885) Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, entered the Carlisle Indian School, a Native American boarding school founded by the United States government in 1879, on October 21, 1882 and departed on August 28, 1886. Torlino's student file contained photographs from 1882 and 1885. Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief (1916) American anthropologist and ethnographer Frances Densmore records the Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief in 1916 for the Bureau of American Ethnology.
This chapter was edited by Lauren Brand, with content contributions by Lauren Brand, Carole Butcher, Josh Garrett-Davis, Tracey Hanshew, Nick Roland, David Schley, Emma Teitelman, and Alyce Webb.

Recommended citation: Lauren Brand et al., "Conquering the West," Lauren Brand, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

Aarim, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Andrews, Thomas. Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Cahill, Cathleen. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Gordan, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Hine, Robert V. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Johnson, Benjamin Heber. Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton, 1999.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Marks, Paula Mitchell. In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Schulten, Susan. The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. New York: Norton, 1999.

Warren, Louis S. Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York: Knopf, 2005.

White, Richard. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Notes

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Native Americans long dominated the vastness of the American West. Linked culturally and geographically by trade, travel, and warfare, various indigenous groups controlled most of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the nineteenth century.

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Manifest Destiny (You Will Love History)

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Sand Creek Massacre

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Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, called it "one of the most disgraceful moments in American history." About 700 U.S. army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near Big Sandy Creek in Colorado, slaughtering scores of women and children. This episode became known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

In the Spring of 1864, a wing of the Cheyenne tribe unleashed attacks on white settlers, which prompted John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister who had become Colorado's military commander and was eager to become a member of Congress, to call for volunteer Indian fighters for 100-day enlistments. On November 29, 1864, the colonel and his volunteers rode into the Arapaho-Cheyenne reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set up a camp weeks earlier. A white flag and an American flag flew above Black Kettle's tepee.

After unleashing cannon fire into the village, the volunteers swept the Creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing children. "Kill them big and small," Chivington reportedly said, "nits become lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). After six hours, about 150 Indians, a quarter of the camp's population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.

Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Lt. Joseph Cranmer described "a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives." Capt. Silas Soule, who was assassinated after testifying at a congressional inquiry, said, "it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized." A joint congressional committee concluded that Chivington "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre, which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were victims of his cruelty."

In response to the massacre, President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor. A Congressional inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were promised reparations in an 1865 treaty, but none were paid.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, called it "one of the most disgraceful moments in American history." About 700 U.S. army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near Big Sandy Creek in Colorado, slaughtering scores of women and children.

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On November 29, 1864, peaceful band of Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Native Americans are massacred by Colonel John Chivington's Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek, Colorado.

The causes of the Sand Creek massacre were rooted in the long conflict for control of the Great Plains of eastern Colorado. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 guaranteed ownership of the area north of the Arkansas River to the Nebraska border to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. However, by the end of the decade, waves of Euro-American miners flooded across the region in search of gold in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, placing extreme pressure on the resources of the arid plains. By 1861, tensions between new settlers and Native Americans were rising.
READ MORE: Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: A Timeline
On February 8 of that year, a Cheyenne delegation, headed by Chief Black Kettle, along with some Arapahoe leaders, accepted a new settlement with the Federal government. The Native Americans ceded most of their land but secured a 600-square mile reservation and annuity payments. The delegation reasoned that continued hostilities would jeopardize their bargaining power. In the decentralized political world of the tribes, Black Kettle and his fellow delegates represented only part of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes. Many did not accept this new agreement, called the Treaty of Fort Wise.

The new reservation and Federal payments proved unable to sustain the tribes. During the Civil War, tensions again rose and sporadic violence broke out between Anglos and Native Americans. In June 1864, John Evans, governor of the territory of Colorado, attempted to isolate recalcitrant Native Americans by inviting "friendly Indians" to camp near military forts and receive provisions and protection. He also called for volunteers to fill the military void left when most of the regular army troops in Colorado were sent to other areas during the Civil War.

In August 1864, Evans met with Black Kettle and several other chiefs to forge a new peace, and all parties left satisfied. Black Kettle moved his band to Fort Lyon, Colorado, where the commanding officer encouraged him to hunt near Sand Creek. In what can only be considered an act of treachery, Chivington moved his troops to the plains, and on November 29, they attacked the unsuspecting Native Americans, scattering men, women, and children and hunting them down. The casualties reflect the one-sided nature of the fight. Nine of Chivington's men were killed; 148 of Black Kettle's followers were slaughtered, more than half of them women and children. The Colorado volunteers returned and killed the wounded, mutilated the bodies, and set fire to the village.

The atrocities committed by the soldiers were initially praised, but then condemned as the circumstances of the massacre emerged. Chivington resigned from the military and aborted his budding political career. Black Kettle survived and continued his peace efforts. In 1865, his followers accepted a new reservation in Indian Territory.
READ MORE: Native American History Timeline

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On November 29, 1864, peaceful band of Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Native Americans are massacred by Colonel John Chivington's Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek, Colorado. The causes of the Sand Creek massacre were rooted in the long conflict for control of the Great Plains of eastern Colorado.

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In 2007, National Park Service officials dedicated the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site with the assistance of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. This video details many of the important aspects of the site and its impact on the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

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Photos & Multimedia - Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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In 2007, National Park Service officials dedicated the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site with the assistance of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. This video details many of the important aspects of the site and its impact on the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

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The Sand Creek Massacre was a violent incident in late 1864 in which volunteer cavalry soldiers, commanded by a fanatical hater of Native Americans, rode up to a camp and murdered more than 150 Cheyennes who had been assured of their safety. The incident was denounced at the time, though the perpetrators of the massacre escaped any serious punishment.

To most Americans, the massacre in a remote corner of Colorado was overshadowed by the ongoing carnage of the Civil War. However, on the western frontier the killings at Sand Creek resonated, and the massacre has gone down in history as a notorious act of genocide against Native Americans.

Fast Facts: The Sand Creek Massacre

Background

A war between Native American tribes and American troops broke out on the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Colorado territory in the summer of 1864. The spark of the conflict was the killing of a chief of the Cheyenne, Lean Bear, who had played the role of peacemaker and had even traveled to Washington and met with President Abraham Lincoln a year earlier.

Following the meeting with Lincoln at the White House, Lean Bear and other leaders of the Southern Plains tribes had posed for a remarkable photograph in the White House conservatory (on the site of the present day West Wing). Back on the plains, Lean Bear was shot from his horse during a buffalo hunt by U.S. cavalry soldiers.

The attack on Lean Bear, which was unprovoked and came without warning, was apparently encouraged by Colonel John M. Chivington, the commander of all federal troops in the region. Chivington had reportedly instructed his troops, "Find Indians wherever you can and kill them."

Chivington was born on a farm in Ohio. He received little education, but had a religious awakening and became a Methodist minister in the 1840s. He and his family traveled westward as he was assigned by the church to lead congregations. His anti-enslavement pronouncements prompted threats from pro-enslavement citizens of Kansas when he lived there, and he became known as the "Fighting Parson" when he preached in his church wearing two pistols.

In 1860, Chivington was sent to Denver to lead a congregation. Besides preaching, he became involved with a Colorado volunteer regiment. When the Civil War broke out, Chivington, as a major of the regiment, led troops in a western engagement of the Civil War, the 1862 battle at Glorieta Pass in New Mexico. He led a surprise attack on Confederate forces and was hailed as a hero.

Returning to Colorado, Chivington became a prominent figure in Denver. He was appointed commander of the military district of the Colorado Territory, and there was talk of him running for Congress when Colorado became a state. But as tensions increased between White people and Native Americans, Chivington persisted in making inflammatory comments. He repeatedly said that Native Americans would never adhere to any treaty, and he advocated killing any and all Native Americans.

It is believed that Chivington's genocidal comments encouraged the soldiers who murdered Lean Bear. And when some of the Cheyenne seemed intent on avenging their leader, Chivington was presented with an excuse to kill more Native Americans.

The Attack on the Cheyenne

The chief of the Cheyenne, Black Kettle, attended a peace conference with the governor of Colorado in the fall of 1864. Black Kettle was told to take his people and camp along the Sand Creek. The authorities assured him the Cheyenne with him would be given safe passage. Black Kettle was encouraged to fly two flags over the camp: an American flag (which he had received as a gift from President Lincoln) and a white flag.

Black Kettle and his people settled into the camp. On November 29, 1864, Chivington, leading about 750 members of the Colorado Volunteer Regiment, attacked the Cheyenne camp at dawn. Most of the men were away hunting buffalo, so the camp was most filled with women and children. The soldiers had been ordered by Chivington to kill and scalp every Native American they could.

Riding into the camp with guns blazing, the soldiers cut down the Cheyenne. The attacks were brutal. The soldiers mutilated the bodies, collecting scalps and body parts as souvenirs. When the troops arrived back in Denver, they displayed their grisly trophies.

Estimated Native American casualties varied, but it is widely accepted that between 150 and 200 Native Americans were murdered. Black Kettle survived, but would be shot dead by U.S. cavalry troopers four years later, at the Battle of the Washita.

The attack on defenseless and peaceful Native Americans was at first portrayed as a military victory, and Chivington and his men were hailed as heroes by Denver residents. However, news of the nature of the massacre soon spread. Within months, the U.S. Congress launched an investigation of Chivington's actions.

In July 1865, the results of the Congressional investigation were published. The Washington, D.C., Evening Star featured the report as the lead story on page one on July 21, 1865. The congressional report severely criticized Chivington, who left military service but was never charged with a crime.

Chivington had been thought to have potential in politics, but the shame attached to him following the condemnation of the Congress ended that. He worked at various towns in the Midwest before returning to Denver, where he died in 1894.

Aftermath and Legacy

On the western plains, news spread of the Sand Creek Massacre and violent clashes between Native Americans and White people increased during the winter of 1864-65. The situation calmed for a time. But the memory of Chivington's attack on the peaceful Cheyenne resonated and amplified a feeling of distrust. The Sand Creek massacre seemed to herald a new and violent era on the Great Plains.

The exact location of the Sand Creek Massacre was disputed for many years. In 1999, a team from the National Park Service located specific places believed to be where the troops attacked Black Kettle's band of Cheyenne. The location has been designated a National Historic Site and is administered by the National Park Service.

Hoig, Stan. "Sand Creek Massacre." Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, edited by Dinah L. Shelton, vol. 2, Macmillan Reference USA, 2005, pp. 942-943. Gale eBooks.

Krupat, Arnold. "Indian Wars and Dispossession." American History Through Literature 1820-1870, edited by Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006, pp. 568-580. Gale eBooks.

"Conflicts with Western Tribes (1864-1890)." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History: War, vol. 1, Gale, 2008. Gale eBooks.

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1864 Sand Creek Massacre: History and Impact

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The Sand Creek Massacre was a violent incident in late 1864 in which volunteer cavalry soldiers, commanded by a fanatical hater of Native Americans, rode up to a camp and murdered more than 150 Cheyennes who had been assured of their safety.

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PBS Link

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Colorado Experience
Season 2 Episode 210 | 58m 19s |

What would lead approximately 675 volunteer soldiers to attack a peaceful settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in southeastern Colorado Territory? On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led a group to do just that, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred men, women and children. This episode revisits the horrific events and uncovers the history 150 years later.

Aired: 11/27/14

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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Colorado Experience | Sand Creek Massacre | Season 2 | Episode 210

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Colorado Experience Season 2 Episode 210 | 58m 19s | What would lead approximately 675 volunteer soldiers to attack a peaceful settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in southeastern Colorado Territory? On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led a group to do just that, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred men, women and children.

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Manifest Destiny (Sound Smart from the History Channel)

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Manifest Destiny (Sound Smart from the History Channel)

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Westward Expansion Student Worksheet 21-22

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Envisioning Manifest Destiny during the Civil War

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Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890), the slaughter of approximately 150–300 Lakota Indians by U.S. Army troops in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army’s late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains Indians.

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Start studying Ch 3 The West. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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Indian City

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The massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, marked a particularly tragic milestone in American history. The killing of mostly unarmed men, women, and children, was the last major encounter between the Sioux and U.S. Army troops, and it could be viewed as the end of the Plains Wars.

The violence at Wounded Knee was rooted in the federal government's reaction to the ghost dance movement, in which a religious ritual centered around dancing became a potent symbol of defiance to white rule. As the ghost dance spread to Indian reservations throughout the West, the federal government began to regard it as a major threat and sought to suppress it.

The tensions between whites and Indians greatly increased, especially as federal authorities began to fear that the legendary Sioux medicine man Sitting Bull was about to become involved in the ghost dance movement. When Sitting Bull was killed while being arrested on December 15, 1890, the Sioux in South Dakota became fearful.

Overshadowing the events of late 1890 were decades of conflicts between whites and Indians in the West. But one event, the massacre at the Little Bighorn of Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops in June 1876 resonated most deeply.

The Sioux in 1890 suspected that commanders in the U.S. Army felt a need to avenge Custer. And that made the Sioux especially suspicious of actions taken by soldiers who came to confront them over the ghost dance movement.

Against that backdrop of mistrust, the eventual massacre at Wounded Knee arose out of a series of misunderstandings. On the morning of the massacre, it was unclear who fired the first shot. But once the shooting began, the U.S. Army troops cut down unarmed Indians with no restraint. Even artillery shells were fired at Sioux women and children who were seeking safety and running from the soldiers.

In the aftermath of the massacre, the Army commander on the scene, Col. James Forsyth, was relieved of his command. However, an Army inquiry cleared him within two months, and he was restored to his command.

The massacre, and the forcible rounding up of Indians following it crushed any resistance to white rule in the West. Any hope the Sioux or other tribes had of being able to restore their way of life was obliterated. And life on the detested reservations became the plight of the American Indian.

The Wounded Knee massacre faded into history, but a book published in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, became a surprise bestseller and brought the name of the massacre back to public awareness. The book by Dee Brown, a narrative history of the West told from the Indian point of view, struck a chord in America at a time of national skepticism and is widely considered a classic.

And Wounded Knee came back in the news in 1973, when American Indian activists, as an act of civil disobedience, took over the site in a standoff with federal agents.

Roots of the Conflict

The ultimate confrontation at Wounded Knee was rooted in the movement of the 1880s to force Indians in the West onto government reservations. Following the defeat of Custer, the U.S. military was fixated on defeating any Indian resistance to forced resettlement.

Sitting Bull, one of the most respected Sioux leaders, led a band of followers across the international border into Canada. The British government of Queen Victoria allowed them to live there and did not persecute them in any way. Yet conditions were very difficult, and Sitting Bull and his people eventually returned to South Dakota.

In the 1880s, Buffalo Bill Cody, whose exploits in the West had become famous through dime novels, recruited Sitting Bull to join his famous Wild West Show. The show traveled extensively, and Sitting Bull was a huge attraction.

After a few years of enjoying fame in the white world, Sitting Bull returned to South Dakota and life on a reservation. He was regarded with considerable respect by the Sioux.

The Ghost Dance

The ghost dance movement began with a member of the Paiute tribe in Nevada. Wovoka, who claimed to have religious visions, began preaching after recovering from a serious illness in early 1889. He claimed that God had revealed to him that a new age was about to dawn on earth.

According to Wovoka's prophecies, game which had been hunted to extinction would return, and Indians would restore their culture, which had been essentially destroyed during the decades of conflict with white settlers and soldiers.

Part of Wovoka's teaching involved the practice of ritual dancing. Based on older round dances performed by Indians, the ghost dance had some special characteristics. It was generally performed over a series of days. And special attire, which became known as ghost dance shirts, would be worn. It was believed that those wearing the ghost dance would be protected against harm, including bullets fired by U.S. Army soldiers.

As the ghost dance spread throughout western Indian reservations, officials in the federal government became alarmed. Some white Americans argued that the ghost dance was essentially harmless and was a legitimate exercise of religious freedom.

Others in the government saw malicious intent behind the ghost dancing. The practice was seen as a way to energize Indians to resist white rule. And by late 1890 the authorities in Washington began giving orders for the U.S. Army to be ready to take action to suppress the ghost dance.

Sitting Bull Targeted

In 1890 Sitting Bull was living, along with a few hundred other Hunkpapa Sioux, at the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota. He had spent time in a military prison and had also toured with Buffalo Bill, but he seemed to have settled down as a farmer. Still, he always seemed in rebellion to the rules of the reservation and was perceived by some white administrators as a potential source of trouble.

The U.S. Army began sending troops into South Dakota in November 1890, planning to suppress the ghost dance and the rebellious movement it seemed to represent. The man in charge of the Army in the area, General Nelson Miles, came up with a plan to get Sitting Bull to surrender peacefully, at which point he could be sent back to prison.

Miles wanted Buffalo Bill Cody to approach Sitting Bull and essentially lure him into surrendering. Cody apparently traveled to South Dakota, but the plan fell apart and Cody left and returned to Chicago. Army officers decided to use Indians who were working as policemen on the reservation to arrest Sitting Bull.

A detachment of 43 tribal police officers arrived at Sitting Bull's log cabin on the morning of December 15, 1890. Sitting Bull agreed to go with the officers, but some of his followers, who were generally described as ghost dancers, tried to intervene. An Indian shot the commander of the police, who raised his own weapon to return fire and accidentally wounded Sitting Bull.

In the confusion, Sitting Bull was then fatally shot by another officer. The outbreak of gunfire brought a charge by a detachment of soldiers who had been positioned nearby in case of trouble.

Witnesses to the violent incident recalled a peculiar spectacle: a show horse which had been presented to Sitting Bull years earlier by Buffalo Bill heard the gunfire and must have thought it was back in the Wild West Show. The horse began performing intricate dance moves as the violent scene unfolded.

The Massacre

The killing of Sitting Bull was national news. The New York Times, on December 16, 1890, published a story at the top of the front page headlined "The Last of Sitting Bull." The sub-headlines said he had been killed while resisting arrest.

In South Dakota, the death of Sitting Bull stoked fear and distrust. Hundreds of his followers departed the Hunkpapa Sioux camps and began to scatter. One band, led by the chief Big Foot, began traveling to meet up with one of the old chiefs of the Sioux, Red Cloud. It was hoped Red Cloud should protect them from the soldiers.

As the group, a few hundred men, women, and children, moved through the harsh winter conditions, Big Foot became quite ill. On December 28, 1890, Big Foot and his people were intercepted by cavalry troopers. An officer in the Seventh Cavalry, Major Samuel Whitside, met with Big Foot under a flag of truce.

Whitside assured Big Foot his people would not be harmed. And he made arrangements for Big Foot to travel in an Army wagon, as he was suffering from pneumonia.

The cavalry was going to escort the Indians with Big Foot to a reservation. That night the Indians set up camp, and the soldiers set up their bivouacs nearby. At some point in the evening another cavalry force, commanded by Col. James Forsyth, arrived on the scene. The new group of soldiers was accompanied by an artillery unit.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army troops told the Indians to gather in a group. They were ordered to surrender their weapons. The Indians stacked up against their guns, but the soldiers suspected they were hiding more weapons. Soldiers began searching the Sioux tepees.

Two rifles were found, one of which belonged to an Indian named Black Coyote, who was probably deaf. Black Coyote refused to give up his Winchester, and in a confrontation with him, a shot was fired.

The situation quickly accelerated as soldiers began shooting at the Indians. Some of the male Indians drew knives and faced the soldiers, believing that the ghost dance shirts they were wearing would protect them from bullets. They were shot down.

As Indians, including many women and children, tried to flee, the soldiers continued firing. Several artillery pieces, which had been positioned on a nearby hill, began to rake the fleeing Indians. The shells and shrapnel killed and wounded scores of people.

The entire massacre lasted for less than an hour. It was estimated that about 300 to 350 Indians were killed. Casualties among the cavalry amounted to 25 dead and 34 wounded. It was believed most of the killed and wounded among the U.S. Army troops had been caused by friendly fire.

Wounded Indians were taken on wagons to the Pine Ridge reservation, where Dr. Charles Eastman, who had been born a Sioux and educated at schools in the East, sought to treat them. Within days, Eastman traveled with a group to the massacre site to search for survivors. They did find some Indians who were miraculously still alive. But they also discovered hundreds of frozen corpses, some as many as two miles away.

Most of the bodies were gathered by soldiers and buried in a mass grave.

Reaction to the Massacre

In the East, the massacre at Wounded Knee was portrayed as a battle between "hostiles" and soldiers. Stories on the front page of the New York Times in the final days of 1890 gave the Army version of events. Though the number of people killed, and the fact that many were women and children, created interest in official circles.

Accounts told by Indian witnesses were reported and appeared in newspapers. On February 12, 1890, an article in the New York Times was headlined "Indians Tell Their Story." The sub-headline read, "A Pathetic Recital of the Killing of Women and Children."

The article gave witness accounts and ended with a chilling anecdote. According to a minister at one of the churches at the Pine Ridge reservation, one of the Army scouts told him he had heard an officer say, after the massacre, "Now we have avenged Custer's death."

The Army launched an investigation of what happened, and Col. Forsyth was relieved of his command, but he was quickly cleared. A story in the New York Times on February 13, 1891, was headlined "Col. Forsyth Exonerated." The sub-headlines read "His Action at Wounded Knee Justified" and "The Colonel Restored to Command of His Gallant Regiment."

Legacy of Wounded Knee

After the massacre at Wounded Knee, the Sioux came to accept that resistance to white rule was futile. The Indians came to live on the reservations. The massacre itself faded into history.

In the early 1970s, the name of Wounded Knee came to take on resonance, largely due to Dee Brown's book. A native American resistance movement put a new focus on the massacre as a symbol of broken promises and betrayals by white America.

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1890 Wounded Knee Massacre Broke Indian Resistance to White Rule

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The massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, marked a particularly tragic milestone in American history. The killing of mostly unarmed men, women, and children, was the last major encounter between the Sioux and U.S.

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29th December 1890: Lakota Sioux massacred at Wounded Knee

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WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE

On December 29, 1890, on Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota, a tangle of events resulted in the deaths of more than 250, and possibly as many as 300, Native Americans. These people were guilty of no crime and were not engaged in combat. A substantial number were women and children. Most of the victims were members of the Miniconjou band of the Lakota Sioux who had been intercepted by military forces after they fled their reservation in South Dakota for refuge in the Badlands.

The story begins in October 1890, when Daniel F. Royer arrived at Pine Ridge Agency, home of the Oglala Lakotas, to assume responsibility as agent. His selection as agent could not have been worse: he knew nothing about Native Americans and was irrationally fearful of them, and from the time of his arrival the dispatches he sent back to Washington were peppered with warnings of an outbreak similar to the one in Minnesota in 1862 in which hundreds of settlers were killed by Santee Sioux. Royer's appointment was also ill timed. In 1890 drought replaced the bountiful rainfall of the 1880s, resulting in crop failures and economic depression. On their reservations, Native Americans were forced into dependence on the federal government for food and clothing. When Royer took over as agent, there was widespread anxiety among the Oglalas regarding the adequacy of government provisions.

A year earlier, the Ghost Dance had appeared on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Born from the vision of a Paiute named Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson), the Ghost Dance blended the messianic account of Christianity with traditional Native beliefs. This new religion told of the return of the Messiah to relieve the suffering of Native Americans and promised that if they would live righteous lives and perform the Ghost Dance in the prescribed manner, the European American invaders would vanish, the bison would return, and the living and the dead would be reunited in an Edenic world. But in Royer's paranoid mind the Ghost Dance was a war dance that threatened imminent bloodshed. His dispatches to Washington urged that troops be sent to protect citizens from war.

In mid-November 1890 President Benjamin Harrison responded to the fears of an Indian outbreak by ordering troops into the area. Regular troops were sent from Fort Robinson, Nebraska, and on November 18, 1890, the Second Nebraska Infantry left Fort Omaha in two special trains. On the train was also a cadre of newspaper reporters. From that point on, the crisis at Pine Ridge was a significant news item in newspapers across the country and around the world.

The trains unloaded their travelers at Rushville, Nebraska, on November 20, 1890, and from there the troops and reporters made their way to Pine Ridge Agency, where they all soon discovered that there was no crisis to be found. Soon a regular fare of rumors and lies began to appear in the national press, fed by merchants who wanted to keep the reporters, and their expense accounts, engaged in the economically strained communities south of the Pine Ridge Reservation. These fantastic stories fed a growing national anxiety about impending war. They also appeared on the reservations, where Lakotas who had been educated in the nation's Indian schools read the reports of troop activities and the rumors of outbreak to other members of their community. In this manner, the press became an important factor in stoking the anxiety both on and off the reservation.

By mid-December 1890 the combination of news reports, governmental reports (particularly those of the panic-stricken Royer), and Ghost Dancing had every nerve in the region on edge. The Lakotas polarized into political camps commonly referred to in the press as "hostiles" and "friendlies," a distinction between those who were opposed and those who were reconciled to reservation life. The Ghost Dancers were generally assigned to the "hostiles" camp. On December 15, 1890, the Hunkpapa holy man and Ghost Dance leader, Sitting Bull, was killed at Standing Rock Agency. Sitting Bull's death was seen by many as the fate that awaited all who failed to accept reservation life. To the south, at Cheyenne River Agency, the Miniconjou Lakotas grew nervous. Their leader, Big Foot, was also engaged in the Ghost Dance, and though not considered a major threat, he was under close observation by the military. In an attempt to quiet the Miniconjous, the military asked a local squatter named John Dunn to persuade them to acquiesce to the military's wishes that they stay in their own village on the reservation. Dunn's tactics are inexplicable: he is reported to have told the Miniconjous that the military planned to take their men prisoner and deport them to an island in the Atlantic Ocean. He apparently advised them to take sanctuary on Pine Ridge Reservation.

On December 23, the Miniconjous left their village in the dead of night and fled south toward the Badlands. Big Foot soon contracted pneumonia, which slowed the escape. Nonetheless, the tribe managed to avoid the military pursuit for five days. But on December 28, the Seventh Cavalry intercepted the ailing Big Foot and his people and ordered them into confinement on Wounded Knee Creek. On the morning of December 29, Col. James W. Forsyth convened a council with the Miniconjous. He demanded that they surrender all their firearms and told them that they would be relocated to a new camp. The order to a new camp was interpreted by the Miniconjous as exile, probably to Indian Territory, a prospect that they found intolerable.

While these discussions proceeded in the Lakota camp, a number of Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs, with some rising to throw handfuls of dirt in the air. The troops who surrounded them perceived the singing and dirt throwing as signals to attack, and at this tense moment the fuse was lit. A man named Black Coyote (sometimes called Black Fox) refused to surrender his rifle to a soldier. The two began wrestling over the gun, and in the struggle it discharged. Immediately the nervous troops began firing, while the Miniconjous retrieved their weapons and returned fire. The military's rifle fire was complemented with cannon rounds from Hotchkiss guns, whose accuracy and exploding shells were formidable. The outnumbered and outgunned Lakotas fled, and for several hours intermittent gunfire continued, with the military in pursuit. Bodies were found as far away as three miles from the camp. Firing ceased, and by midafternoon the troops had gathered up their dead and wounded, as well as Lakota wounded, and returned to Pine Ridge Agency. The fear of a reprisal attack kept troops and civilians entrenched at the agency until January 3, 1891, when a military-escorted civilian burial party proceeded to the site of the massacre. There they buried 146 Lakotas in a single mass grave. Other dead were accounted for later, bringing the total to more than 250 Lakotas; the Seventh Cavalry lost twenty-five men.

Photographers accompanied the burial detail and made a total of sixteen photographs. A snowstorm that occurred shortly after the massacre added a cold and grim edge to the scene of carnage. The photographs sold well and, together with news stories, carried the story of the massacre at Wounded Knee worldwide. Soon the event developed a meaning that transcended the reality of the tragic loss of life, and Wounded Knee became, and remains, the symbol of the inhumanity of U.S. government policy toward Native Americans.

See also NATIVE AMERICANS: Sitting Bull / RELIGION: Ghost Dance.

John E. Carter Nebraska State Historical Society

Jensen, Richard E., R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1896.

Utley, Robert. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1963.

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View larger On December 29, 1890, on Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota, a tangle of events resulted in the deaths of more than 250, and possibly as many as 300, Native Americans. These people were guilty of no crime and were not engaged in combat.

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Wounded Knee Massacre & The Ghost Dance (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Hip Hughes History

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The Homestead Act of 1862 Explained: US History Review

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Reading from Common Lit

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Wounded Knee I

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The late 19th century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in the 1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose among Indians of the Great Basin, and then spread, in the late 1880s, to the Great Plains. Beginning among the Paiute Indians of Nevada in 1870, the Ghost Dance promised to restore the way of life of their ancestors.

During the late 1880s, the Ghost Dance had great appeal among the Sioux, despairing over the death of a third of their cattle by disease and angry that the federal government had cut their food rations. In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, had a revelation. If only the Sioux would perform sacred dances and religious rites, then the Great Spirit would return and raise the dead, restore the buffalo to life, and cause a flood that would destroy the whites.
Wearing special Ghost Dance shirts, fabricated from white muslin and decorated with red fringes and painted symbols, dancers would spin in a circle until they became so dizzy that they entered into a trance. White settlers became alarmed: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection, and we need it now."

Fearful that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials ordered Indian police to arrest the Sioux leader Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic, his followers fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee Creek. There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents in American history took place. While soldiers disarmed the Sioux, someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns to slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children. The Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk summed up the meaning of Wounded Knee:

I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.

The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries of bitter warfare between Indians and whites. Indians had been confined to small reservations, where reformers would seek to transform them into Christian farmers. In the future, the Indian struggle to maintain an independent way of life and a separate culture would take place on new kinds of battlefields.

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Printable Version The late 19th century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare.

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Wounded Knee II

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It was the final incident in the Indian Wars that took place in the two decades after the Civil War. On December 29, 1890, near Pine Ridge, South Dakota at least 146 Indians and 31 U.S. soldiers were killed. Some historians believe the actual number of Indians killed was closer to 300.

Around 1870, in Nevada, a Paiute named Tavibo declared he had a vision of Christ's Second Coming. He said he was told to teach the Indians to prepare by doing good works and engaging in a ritual dance. With this dance, his people would be reunited with their ancestors in the spirit world.

This "ghost religion" was revived by another Paiute who had lived with and been educated by pious whites. They named him Jack Wilson, but he went back to his people and was known as Wovoka. He too foresaw Christ's Second Coming and urged a special dance.

A special shirt, decorated with Indian symbols, was worn at the dance. The Ghost Religion caught on. It spread to the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Sioux.
Whites were getting nervous. The 6,000 Sioux at the Pine Ridge Reservation had seen their beef rations severely reduced. They had once subsisted on buffalo; now fewer than 2,000 of these animals populated the Plains.

The army ordered the arrest of 38 Indian leaders, among them Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Sioux spiritual leader. In arresting Sitting Bull, he, his 14 year old son, and six of his followers were killed, along with six of the arresting officers. The reservation police claimed that Sitting Bull had resisted arrest.

Alarmed by Sitting Bull's death, many Sioux fled to Pine Ridge in southwestern South Dakota. They were pursued by U.S. forces including units of the 7th Cavalry, the regiment that Sitting Bull and Crazy horse had defeated at the battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Indian leader Big Foot, suffering from pneumonia and internal bleeding, ran up a white flag. The cavalrymen escorted the party, 120 men and 230 women and children, to Wounded Knee Creek.

The next morning, Dec. 29, the Indians were told to give up their arms. A gun went off. The soldiers opened fire with Hotchkiss guns, which could fire 50 rounds a minute, and other weapons. The shooting lasted about ten minutes. The dead Indians' bodies were taken from the snow and buried in mass graves. U.S. forces received 22 Congressional Medals of Honor for their actions at Wounded Knee.

Four men and 47 women and children, many of whom were wounded, were taken away alive, including a Lakota infant lying beneath her mother's body, named Zintkala Nuni or Lost Bird. Just four months old, she had been protected from the soldiers' bullets by her mother's body. The child was raised by Brigadier General Leonard Colby and his wife Clara, who renamed her Marguerite. For a time she worked in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and died at the age of 29.

General Nelson Miles, who commanded military forces in the area, sought a court martial for the office in charge of the troops at Wounded Knee. Miles described what happened as a "cruel and unjustifiable massacre."

While serving as the editor and publisher of the Aberdeen, South Dakota Saturday Pioneer, L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote an editorial following the death of Sitting Bull. "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent," he wrote, "and the best safety of the frontier settlers will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

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Printable Version It was the final incident in the Indian Wars that took place in the two decades after the Civil War. On December 29, 1890, near Pine Ridge, South Dakota at least 146 Indians and 31 U.S. soldiers were killed. Some historians believe the actual number of Indians killed was closer to 300.

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Kill the Indian and Save the Man

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In 1879, an army officer named Richard H. Pratt opened a boarding school for Indian youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His goal: to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture. That year, 50 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee arrived at his school. Pratt trimmed their hair, required them to speak English, and prohibited any displays of tribal traditions, such as Indian clothing, dancing, or religious ceremonies. Pratt's motto was "kill the Indian and save the man."

The Carlisle Indian School became a model for Indian education. Not only were private boarding schools established, so too were reservation boarding schools. The ostensible goal of such schools was to teach Indian children the skills necessary to function effectively in American society. But in the name of uplift, civilization, and assimilation, these schools took Indian children away from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their cultural heritage.

By the late 19th century, there was a widespread sense that the removal and reservation policies had failed. No one did a more effective job of arousing public sentiment about the Indians' plight than Helen Hunt Jackson, a Massachusetts-born novelist and poet. Her classic book A Century of Dishonor (1881), recorded the country's sordid record of broken treaty obligations, and did as much to stimulate public concern over the condition of Indians as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did to raise public sentiment against slavery or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to ignite outrage against environmental exploitation. Ironically, reformers believed that the solution to the "Indian problem" was to erase a distinctive Indian identity.

During the late 19th century, humanitarian reformers repeatedly called for the government to support schools to teach Indian children "the white man's way of life," end corruption on Indian reservations, and eradicate tribal organizations. The federal government partly adopted the reformers' agenda. Many reformers denounced corruption in the Indian Bureau, which had been set up in 1824 to provide assistance to Indians. In 1869, one member of the House of Representatives said, "No branch of the federal government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption...as this Indian Bureau." To end corruption, Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1869, which had the major Protestant religious denominations appoint agents to run Indian reservations. The agents were to educate and Christianize the Indians and teach them to farm. Dissatisfaction with bickering among church groups and the inexperience of church agents led the federal government to replace church-appointed Indian agents with federally-appointed agents during the 1880s.

In 1871 to weaken the authority of tribal leaders, Congress ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign nations. To undermine older systems of tribal justice, Congress, in 1882, created a Court of Indian Offenses to try Indians who violated government laws and rules.

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Printable Version In 1879, an army officer named Richard H. Pratt opened a boarding school for Indian youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His goal: to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture. That year, 50 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee arrived at his school.

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Homestead Act

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Printable Version Farming on the Great Plains depended on a series of technological innovations. Lacking much rainfall, farmers had to drill wells several hundred feet into the ground to tap into underground aquifers. Windmill-powered pumps were necessary to bring the water to the surface and irrigate fields. Steel tipped plows were necessary to cut through the plains' grasses dense roots. To make up for a scarcity of farm labor, farmers relied heavily on mechanical threshing machinery.

To encourage farmers to settle on the Great Plains, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This act allowed any citizen or any immigrant intending to become a citizen to get title to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on the tract for five years, and making a few improvements. It also allowed settlers to pay $1.25 an acre and own the land immediately.

Homestead Patent No. 1 was granted to a Daniel Freeman in 1862 for a tract in Nebraska. Between 1862 and 1900, the Homestead Act provided farms to more than 400,000 families.

Homesteading proved to be very difficult. About a third of those who tried to develop homesteads eventually failed. On the Great Plains, rain was scarce and a farm or ranch of 160 acres was too small to be economical.

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Printable Version Farming on the Great Plains depended on a series of technological innovations. Lacking much rainfall, farmers had to drill wells several hundred feet into the ground to tap into underground aquifers. Windmill-powered pumps were necessary to bring the water to the surface and irrigate fields.

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Closing the American Frontier

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Printable Version In 1890 the superintendent of the U.S. Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." In just a quarter century, the far western frontier had been settled. Three million families started farms on the Great Plains during these years.

Contrary to the popular image of the West as a rural region, by 1890 most of the West's population lived in cities. Not only was the Trans-Mississippi West the country's most culturally diverse region, it was also by 1890, the most urbanized.
The Turner Thesis
In 1893, three years after the superintendent of the Census announced that the western frontier was closed, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian from the University of Wisconsin, advanced a thesis that the conquest of the western frontier had given American society its special character. At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.

In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.

In his address on the significance of the frontier in American history, Turner referred to the Census Bureau's announcement that the frontier was now closed. He speculated that now that the frontier was settled, a crucial epoch in American history was over.

When John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential election in 1960, he called on the country to enter a new frontier. Since that time, Americans have repeatedly searched for new frontiers--in outer space and cyberspace and even below the ocean's surface. The frontier remains a potent symbol more than a century after it physically disappeared.

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Printable Version In 1890 the superintendent of the U.S. Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." In just a quarter century, the far western frontier had been settled. Three million families started farms on the Great Plains during these years.

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The West of the Imagination

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Printable Version In 1893, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show arrived in Chicago, popularizing the image of the West as a region of gun-toting scouts and cowboys and marauding Indians. For more than 30 years, from 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was one of the most popular entertainments. It toured the United States and Europe. It contained rodeo-like displays of cowboy skills, feats of marksmanship, riding and roping, and horse races. It also featured attacks on stage coaches and settler's cabins, a cyclone, and a prairie fire.

Until 1869, William F. Cody had been a farmer, teamster, trapper, solider, Pony Express rider, army scout, and buffalo hunter. He achieved fame as the result of a dime novel loosely based on his life that was published in 1869 and was adapted into a stage melodrama in 1871. The Wild West show helped to transform the West into a mythic space, more primitive and natural than the eastern cities.

No region is more shrouded in myth than the area west of the Mississippi River. In popular films and best-selling novels, the late 19th century western frontier was represented as a place where heroic, ruggedly independent pioneers struggled against an unfamiliar environment and brought civilization to a savage wilderness.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the cowboy and the western lawman were the classic American heroes. While other episodes from the American past faded, such as the era of the whale-hunting harpooner or the lumberjack, the western frontier remained a staple of American popular culture.

The very first movie to tell a story, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) had a western setting, and for 30 years, from 1939 to 1969, the Western was Hollywood's most widely produced action film, and John Wayne was Hollywood's most consistently popular star. Roughly a quarter of all Hollywood movies made before 1970 were westerns.

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Printable Version In 1893, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show arrived in Chicago, popularizing the image of the West as a region of gun-toting scouts and cowboys and marauding Indians. For more than 30 years, from 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was one of the most popular entertainments.

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Miners and Ranchers

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Farming the Plains

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Native Americans

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Visual Summary Graphic Organizer

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Benchmark Note Cards

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Benchmark Skill Activities

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Using Primary Sources

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from History.com

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link from the National Park Service

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Story of the Battle - Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)

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Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

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From Don't Know Much About History

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What Happened at Custer's Last Stand from Don't Know Much About History

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The "Indian Problem" was produced to serve as the central video in the exhibition "Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations," on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. This video introduces visitors to the section of the exhibition titled "Bad Acts, Bad Paper."

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On this day in 1876, Native American forces led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana's Little Bighorn River.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, leaders of the Sioux tribe on the Great Plains, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota's Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. This betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had gathered in a camp along the Little Bighorn River-which they called the Greasy Grass-in defiance of a U.S. War Department order to return to their reservations or risk being attacked.

In mid-June, three columns of U.S. soldiers lined up against the camp and prepared to march. A force of 1,200 Native Americans turned back the first column on June 17. Five days later, General Alfred Terry ordered Custer's 7th Cavalry to scout ahead for enemy troops. On the morning of June 25, Custer drew near the camp and decided to press on ahead rather than wait for reinforcements.

At mid-day, Custer's 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. Among the Native Americans, word quickly spread of the impending attack. The older Sitting Bull rallied the warriors and saw to the safety of the women and children, while Crazy Horse set off with a large force to meet the attackers head on. Despite Custer's desperate attempts to regroup his men, they were quickly overwhelmed. Custer and some 200 men in his battalion were attacked by as many as 3,000 Native Americans; within an hour, Custer and every last one of his soldier were dead.

The Battle of Little Bighorn-also called Custer's Last Stand-marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The gruesome fate of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Indians as wild and bloodthirsty. Meanwhile, the U.S. government increased its efforts to subdue the tribes. Within five years, almost all of the Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations.

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On this day in 1876, Native American forces led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana's Little Bighorn River. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, leaders of the Sioux tribe on the Great Plains, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S.

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Battle of the Little Bighorn, (June 25, 1876), battle at the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, U.S., between federal troops led by Lieut. Col. George A. Custer and Northern Plains Indians (Lakota [Teton or Western Sioux] and Northern Cheyenne) led by Sitting Bull. Custer and all the men under his immediate command were slain. There were about 50 known deaths among Sitting Bull's followers.

Events leading up to the confrontation were typical of the irresolute and confusing policy of the U.S. government toward Native Americans. Although the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), in effect, had guaranteed to the Lakota and Dakota (Yankton) Sioux as well as the Arapaho Indians exclusive possession of the Dakota territory west of the Missouri River, white miners in search of gold were settling in lands sacred especially to the Lakota. Unwilling to remove the settlers and unable to persuade the Lakota to sell the territory, the U.S. government issued an order to the Indian agencies that all Indians return to the designated reservations by January 31, 1876, or be deemed hostile. The improbability of getting that message to the hunters, coupled with its rejection by many of the Plains Indians, made confrontation inevitable.

In defiance of the government's threats, bands of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne Indians (along with a smaller number of Arapaho) who had refused to be confined by reservation boundaries came together under the leadership of Sitting Bull, a charismatic Lakota who called for resistance to U.S. expansion. With the arrival of spring 1876 and the start of the hunting seasons, many more Indians left their reservations to join Sitting Bull, whose growing numbers of followers were camped on the Little Bighorn River (a branch of the Bighorn River) in southern Montana Territory at the end of June. Earlier in the spring, many of those Native Americans had congregated to celebrate the annual Sun Dance ceremony, at which Sitting Bull experienced a prophetic vision of soldiers toppling upside down in his camp, which he interpreted as a harbinger of a great victory for his people.

That spring, under the orders of Lieut. Gen. Philip Sheridan, three army columns converged on Lakota country in an attempt to corral the rebellious bands. Moving east, from Fort Ellis (near Bozeman, Montana), was a column led by Col. John Gibbon. From the south and Fort Fetterman in Wyoming Territory came a column under the command of Gen. George Cook. On May 17 Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry headed west from Fort Abraham Lincoln in charge of the Dakota Column, the bulk of which constituted Custer's 7th Cavalry. On June 22 Terry sent Custer and the 7th Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull's trail, which led into the Little Bighorn Valley. Terry's plan was for Custer to attack the Lakota and Cheyenne from the south, forcing them toward a smaller force that he intended to deploy farther upstream on the Little Bighorn River. By the morning of June 25, Custer's scouts had discovered the location of Sitting Bull's village. Custer intended to move the 7th Cavalry to a position that would allow his force to attack the village at dawn the next day. When some stray Indian warriors sighted a few 7th Cavalrymen, Custer assumed that they would rush to warn their village, causing the residents to scatter.

Custer chose to attack immediately. At noon on June 25, in an attempt to prevent Sitting Bull's followers from escaping, he split his regiment into three battalions. He sent three companies under the command of Maj. Marcus A. Reno to charge straight into the village, dispatched three companies under Capt. Frederick W. Benteen to the south to cut off the flight of any Indians in that direction, and took five companies under his personal command to attack the village from the north. That tactic proved to be disastrous. In fragmenting his regiment, Custer had left its three main components unable to provide each other support.

As the Battle of the Little Bighorn unfolded, Custer and the 7th Cavalry fell victim to a series of surprises, not the least of which was the number of warriors that they encountered. Army intelligence had estimated Sitting Bull's force at 800 fighting men; in fact, some 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors took part in the battle. Many of them were armed with superior repeating rifles, and all of them were quick to defend their families. Native American accounts of the battle are especially laudatory of the courageous actions of Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala band of Lakota. Other Indian leaders displayed equal courage and tactical skill.

Cut off by the Indians, all 210 of the soldiers who had followed Custer toward the northern reaches of the village were killed in a desperate fight that may have lasted nearly two hours and culminated in the defense of high ground beyond the village that became known as "Custer's Last Stand." The details of the movements of the components of Custer's contingent have been much hypothesized. Reconstructions of their actions have been formulated using both the accounts of Native American eyewitnesses and sophisticated analysis of archaeological evidence (cartridge cases, bullets, arrowheads, gun fragments, buttons, human bones, etc.), Ultimately, however, much of the understanding of this most famous portion of the battle is the product of conjecture, and the popular perception of it remains shrouded in myth.

Atop a hill on the other end of the valley, Reno's battalion, which had been reinforced by Benteen's contingent, held out against a prolonged assault until the next evening, when the Indians broke off their attack and departed. Only a single badly wounded horse remained from Custer's annihilated battalion (the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne had captured 80 to 90 of the battalion's mounts). That horse, Comanche, managed to survive, and for many years it would appear in 7th Cavalry parades, saddled but riderless.

The outcome of the battle, though it proved to be the height of Indian power, so stunned and enraged white Americans that government troops flooded the area, forcing the Indians to surrender. Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (1946) and Indian Memorial (2003) commemorate the battle.

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Battle of the Little Bighorn | Summary, Location, & Custer's Last Stand

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Battle of the Little Bighorn, battle at the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory on June 25, 1876, between U.S. federal troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and Northern Plains Indians (Lakota and Northern Cheyenne) led by Sitting Bull. Custer and all the men under his immediate command were slain.

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By the standards of 19th century warfare, the engagement between George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry and Sioux warriors on a remote hillside near the Little Bighorn River was little more than a skirmish. But the battle on June 25, 1876 cost the lives of Custer and more than 200 men of the 7th Cavalry, and Americans were stunned when the news from the Dakota Territory reached the east coast.

Shocking reports about Custer's demise first appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 1876, two days after the nation's centennial celebration, under the headline, "Massacre of Our Troops."

The idea that a unit of the US Army could be wiped out by Indians was simply unthinkable. And Custer's final battle was soon elevated to a national symbol. These images related to the Battle of the Little Bighorn give an indication of how the defeat of the 7th Cavalry was portrayed.

George Armstrong Custer had been through years of combat in the Civil War, and became known for leading daring, if not reckless, cavalry charges. On the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Custer performed heroically in an enormous cavalry fight which was overshadowed by Pickett's Charge, which occurred on the same afternoon.

Later in the war Custer became a favorite of reporters and illustrators, and the reading public became familiar with the dashing cavalryman.

Not long after arriving in the West, he witnessed the results of combat on the plains.

In June 1867, a young officer, Lieutenant Lyman Kidder, with a detachment of ten men, was assigned to carry dispatches to a cavalry unit commanded by Custer near Fort Hays, Kansas. When Kidder's party did not arrive, Custer and his men set out to search for them.

In his book My Life On the Plains, Custer told the story of the search. Sets of horse tracks indicated that Indian horses had been chasing cavalry horses. And then buzzards were seen in the sky.

Describing the scene he and his men encountered, Custer wrote:

"Each body was pierced by from 20 to 50 arrows, and the arrows were found as the savage demons had left them, bristling in the bodies.

"While the details of that fearful struggle will probably never be known, telling how long and gallantly this ill-fated little band contended for their lives, yet the surrounding circumstances of ground, empty cartridge shells, and distance from where the attack began, satisfied us that Kidder and his men fought as only brave men fight when the watchword is victory or death."

In early 1876 the US government decided to drive the Indians out of the Black Hills, although the territory had been granted to them by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

Lieutenant Colonel Custer led 750 men of the 7th Cavalry into the vast wilderness, leaving Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory on May 17, 1876.

The strategy was to trap the Indians who had rallied around the Sioux leader, Sitting Bull. And, of course, the expedition turned into a disaster.

Custer discovered that Sitting Bull was camped near the Little Bighorn River. Instead of waiting for a full force of the US Army to assemble, Custer divided the 7th Cavalry and chose to attack the Indian camp. One explanation is that Custer believed the Indians would be confused by separate attacks.

On June 25, 1876, a brutally hot day on the northern plains, Custer encountered a much larger force of Indians than anticipated. Custer and more than 200 men, approximately one third of the 7th Cavalry, were killed in the battle that afternoon.

The other units of the 7th Cavalry also came under intense attack for two days, before the Indians unexpectedly broke off the conflict, packed up their immense village, and began leaving the area.

When US Army reinforcements arrived, they discovered the bodies of Custer and his men on a hill above the Little Bighorn.

There was a newspaper correspondent, Mark Kellogg, riding along with Custer, and he was killed in the battle. With no definitive account of what happened during Custer's final hours, newspapers and illustrated magazines took license to depict the scene.

The standard depiction of Custer usually shows him standing among his men, surrounded by hostile Sioux, bravely fighting to the end. In this particular print from the late 19th century, Custer stands above a fallen cavalry trooper, firing his revolver.

Sitting Bull was known to white Americans before the battle of the Little Bighorn, and was even mentioned periodically in newspapers published in New York City. He became known as the leader of the Indian resistance to the invasions of the Black Hills, and in the weeks following the loss of Custer and his command, Sitting Bull's name was plastered across American newspapers.

The New York Times, on July 10, 1876, published a profile of Sitting Bull based, it was said, on an interview with a man named J.D. Keller who had worked at the Indian reservation at Standing Rock. According to Keller, "His countenance is of an extremely savage type, betraying that bloodthirstiness and brutality for which he has long been notorious. He has the name of being one of the most successful scalpers in Indian country."

Other newspapers repeated a rumor that Sitting Bull had learned French from trappers as a child, and had somehow studied the tactics of Napoleon.

Regardless of what white Americans chose to believe, Sitting Bull had gained the respect of the various Sioux tribes, who gathered to follow him in the spring of 1876. When Custer arrived in the area, he did not expect that so many Indians had come together, inspired by Sitting Bull.

Following the death of Custer, soldiers flooded into the Black Hills, intent on capturing Sitting Bull. He managed to escape to Canada, along with family members and followers, but returned to the US and surrendered in 1881.

The government kept Sitting Bull isolated on a reservation, but in 1885 he was allowed to leave the reservation to join Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, a hugely popular attraction. He was only a performer for a few months.

In 1890 he was arrested as the US government feared he was an instigator of the Ghost Dance, a religious movement among Indians. While in custody he was shot and killed.

Two days after the battle, reinforcements arrived, and the carnage of Custer's Last Stand was discovered. The bodies of the men of the 7th Cavalry were strewn across a hillside, stripped of their uniforms, and often scalped or mutilated.

Soldiers buried the bodies, generally where they fell, and marked the graves as best they could. The names of officers were usually put on a marker, and enlisted men were buried anonymously.

This photograph depicts the grave of Myles Keogh. Born in Ireland, Keogh was an expert horseman who had been a colonel in the cavalry in the Civil War. Like many officers, including Custer, he carried a lesser rank in the postwar Army. He was actually a captain in the 7th Cavalry, but his grave marker, as was customary, notes the higher rank he carried in the Civil War.

Keogh had a prized horse named Comanche, which survived the battle at Little Bighorn despite considerable wounds. One of the officers who discovered the bodies recognized Keogh's horse, and saw to it that Comanche was transported to an Army post. Comanche was nursed back to health and was regarded as something of a living monument to the 7th Cavalry.

Legend has it that Keogh introduced the Irish tune "Garryowen" to the 7th Cavalry, and the melody became the unit's marching song. That could be true, however the song had already been a popular marching tune during the Civil War.

A year after the battle, Keogh's remains were disinterred from this grave and returned to the east, and he was buried in New York State.

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How Images of Custer's Final Fight Became Iconic

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By the standards of 19th century warfare, the engagement between George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry and Sioux warriors on a remote hillside near the Little Bighorn River was little more than a skirmish.