From 1870 to 1900 Native Americans lost significant amounts of land and power to the U. S. government, which already had begun to remove and in some cases force Indian tribes onto reservations, making them wards of the government. Major tribes were assigned reservations in which to live, often far from their original homes and sometimes alongside enemy tribes. Wars on the Great Plains and in the Southwest, often brutal, eventually defeated hostile Indian tribes by attrition. Significant federal legislation, such as the well-intentioned Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, dissolved tribes as legal entities and distributed communal lands to individual Indians, which greatly reduced the land owned by Native Americans. Further, the extermination oe the BUEEALo took away the Plains Indians’ way of life and economy, forcing nomadic tribes to adopt a settled farming lifestyle. Although humanitarian Easterners established reform groups to aid Native Americans, these organizations tended to be paternalistic and worked to further separate Indians from their traditional ways of life and assimilate them into the larger white society.
The wars against Native Americans waged by the U. S. government subdued Indian tribes and opened up their lands for white settlement in the frontier regions of the plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest. After the Civil War the government was successful in relocating various bands of the Sioux Nation (Red Cloud was their most conspicuous leader) on reservations as a result of the Sioux WARS. Several bands, however, most notably the Oglala, Hunkpapa, and Miniconjou, resisted government efforts to relocate. In the War for the Black Hills (187677), the federal government aimed to remove Sioux tribes and clear the way for mining interests, but at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876), General George Armstrong Custer’s troops were annihilated by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse (Custer’s Last Stand).
Tragically, the 1877 Nez Perce War was fought by the army against a people who could not be characterized as hostile to white settlers and who were protesting their removal from land in Oregon on which they clearly had a right to remain. Led by Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce’s incredible 1,700 mile retreat through Idaho and Montana, during which they continually fought off the U. S. Army, ended with their surrender within a few miles of the Canadian border. Despite assurances that they could remain in the Northwest, they were shipped off to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), although ultimately they were allowed to return to reservations in Idaho and Washington.
The Apache War, marked by frequent skirmishes and battles along the border between the United States and Mexico, lasted from the early 1870s into the 1880s. During the struggle the military, intent on bringing peace to a region plagued by frequent Apache raids, focused on securing the area for copper-mining interests after settlers began to mine copper ore. The government tried to subdue the disparate bands of Apache by consolidating them at the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona, succeeding only after Geronimo’s renegade fighters were resettled in Florida in 1886.
The last of the Sioux Wars, indeed the last of all the Indian wars, came in late 1890. Sioux Indians adopted a movement that had started in the West 20 years earlier called Ghost Dancing, which involved communing with ancestors via a trancelike dance. The practice of Ghost Dancing unnerved the agents in charge of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where it had become popular, and in 1890 the U. S. Army moved in to monitor the situation. Reservation agents killed Sitting Bull, who had joined in the movement and whom they suspected was stirring up trouble, while trying to arrest him. Fearing an uprising, the army on December 29, 1890, massacred at Wounded Knee Creek a group of Miniconjou Sioux suspected of planning to revolt with their Sioux brethren at the Pine Ridge Reservation. The massacre united the Sioux, who ambushed military personnel the next day. Outnumbered, the Sioux surrendered on January 15, 1891, a date that historians have called the end of the Indian wars.
Federal legislation, backed by humanitarian reformers in the Indian Rights Association, aimed to accultur-ate Indian customs and tradition and to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant Euro-American society. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which opened western lands to individual ownership and broke the Native American tradition of collective landholding, allotted reservation lands to each tribal member. The act formed the basis of federal policy toward Native Americans until the 1930s. Western interests, including railroad companies, tended to support the act, since it would put surplus lands formerly held by tribes for sale, opening Indian lands to free-market forces. Reformers believed that passage of the law would help Native Americans realize the benefits of land ownership and therefore help them become full U. S. citizens. Over time, the long wait (25 years) for full title to land was considered an impediment and after 1906 could be shortened by the secretary of the interior. The Dawes Act decreased the size of Indian landholdings dramatically; by the 1930s Indian landholdings were only a bit more than one-third of what they were at the time the Dawes Act was passed, and two-thirds of Native Americans had no land at all. The
Photograph of a Sioux village taken in 1891, one month before the events at Wounded Knee (Library of Congress)
Indian Rights Association’s goals of assimilation mirrored the federal government’s objectives in subduing the Indian tribes, as both worked to replace Indian religious traditions, social organizations, and cultural attitudes with Christianity, codified systems of laws, western-style schools, and a Protestant work ethic.
The Office of Indian Affairs (often referred to as the Indian Bureau), attempted to carry out federal Indian policy. During the Gilded Age it established a few off-site boarding schools (the most famous Indian school was founded in 1879 at Carlisle, Pennsylvania) that worked to assimilate young Native Americans by separating them from their homes and culture. The Office of Indian Affairs was charged with the task of overseeing the Indians on reservations and carving up those reservations under the Dawes Act. Shrinking landholdings forced Native Americans to abandon hunting and adopt farming, for which they had little inclination, on land that was not productive, with the result that food rations were needed, which in turn kept tribes dependent on the federal government. The Office of Indian Affairs remained a paternalistic force in Indian culture until the 1930s, when the agency became more concerned with protecting Native American culture and heritage and promoting self-determination among the tribes.
The extermination of the buffalo, which occurred throughout the course of the 19th century, culminated in a 10- to 15-year period of intense slaughter during the 1870s and 1880s, when the animal was nearly hunted to permanent extinction. The disappearance of the buffalo destroyed Plains Indians’ culture and economy, made them dependent on grazing and farming, and broke their resistance to the invasion of white settlers. By 1880 all the wild buffalo in the southern plains had been killed. In the northern plains, extinction was delayed by the war with the Sioux for the Black Hills, but by 1879 the species was extinct in Wyoming and eastern Nebraska and by 1883 in Montana and the Dakotas. The extinction of the buffalo coincided with the removal of the Plains Indians to reservations.
Some Native Americans, after resisting the army and the hordes of white settlers, ceased their opposition. Red Cloud, a most formidable Sioux warrior during the War for the Bozeman Trail in 1866, negotiated a treaty at Fort Laramie in 1868 and adopted a peace stance in future wars. He was either hailed as a realistic statesman who understood the futility of further resistance or mistrusted as a sellout coopted by the U. S. government, although he never received much from it for his cooperation. Other prominent Native American warriors became part of a sideshow in American popular culture during the 1890s, after all of the hostile western tribes had been successfully subdued. Geronimo became the most well-known Apache to whites, appearing at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. Sitting Bull, after being imprisoned by the U. S. government from 1881 to 1883 for conspiring during the War for the Black Hills, toured with William Frederick (Buffalo Bill) Cody’s Wild West Show between 1885 and 1886, performing with luminaries such as the sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
The reduction of Indian landholdings accelerated toward the end of the Gilded Age. Even Oklahoma’s Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole), who were considered the most “sovereign” Native American tribes, and the Osage were in 1898 no longer exempt from the Dawes Act, with the result that their lands were sharply reduced to accommodate white settlers. Western lands that in 1870 were almost exclusively occupied by Indians, like Montana and the Dakotas, were in 1889 granted statehood. By the end of the 19th century, tribal sovereignty had ended, and most Indians were on the way to becoming U. S. citizens. But rather than being integrated into the larger society, Native Americans were marginalized economically and physically on its fringes.
See also color map on page M3.
Further reading: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wo-unded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Richard White, A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
—Scott Sendrow
World History
