6.3 Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development

Plains nations such as the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa had built economies around the horse and the buffalo. Millions of buffalo still roamed the Plains after the Civil War. Hide hunters, railroad crews and sport shooters killed them by the millions in the 1870s and 1880s, and the U.S. Army encouraged it because it weakened Native resistance. By the late 1880s only about a thousand remained.

In 1871 Congress stopped making treaties with Native nations and began treating them as wards of the government. Federal policy aimed to confine Native peoples to reservations, smaller areas of land set aside for them, often on land settlers did not want yet.

• Fort Laramie Treaty (1868): the U.S. promised the Lakota the Black Hills. After gold was found there in 1874, miners rushed in and the government tried to force a sale.
• Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 1876): Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, with leaders including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, wiped out Lt. Col. George Custer's command in Montana. It was a major Native victory, but the army answered with an overwhelming campaign, and most Lakota were forced onto reservations within about a year.
• Nez Perce (1877): Chief Joseph led his people on a long retreat toward Canada before surrendering in Montana.
• Apache resistance in the Southwest continued until Geronimo surrendered in 1886.
• Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890): the Ghost Dance, a religious movement promising renewal of the old world, alarmed federal agents. Two weeks after reservation police killed Sitting Bull during an attempted arrest, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry killed somewhere between about 150 and 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. It is usually seen as the end of large-scale armed resistance.

Assimilation means absorbing a group into the dominant culture. Many white reformers sincerely believed they were helping Native people by making them into Christian, English-speaking individual farmers. Helen Hunt Jackson's book A Century of Dishonor (1881) exposed broken treaties and pushed reform, but most reformers still rejected Native cultures.

The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservation land into individual allotments, usually 160 acres for the head of a family. Land left over after allotment was declared 'surplus' and sold to settlers. Native Americans who accepted allotments and gave up tribal ways could become U.S. citizens. The result was disastrous: Native landholdings fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million by 1934, when the policy ended.

Boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (founded 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt) took children far from home, cut their hair, banned Native languages and taught Christianity and trades.

Native people resisted in many ways besides war. Families hid children from school officials, kept ceremonies alive in secret, and used English and the courts to defend their land. Some nations also found new ways to support themselves on reservations, such as raising cattle and sheep, selling crafts or leasing grazing land. Many cultures survived despite policies meant to end them.

The West was also home to Mexican Americans in the Southwest, whose land claims were often ignored after 1848. As Anglo ranchers and railroads moved in, fights over land turned violent; in New Mexico in 1889–1890, Hispano farmers known as Las Gorras Blancas (the White Caps) cut fences and tore up rail ties to defend shared grazing lands. The West was also home to Chinese immigrants and Black 'Exodusters' who moved to Kansas around 1879. Historians now describe the West as a meeting place of many peoples, not an empty frontier.

In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier, declared closed by the 1890 census, had shaped American democracy and individualism. Later historians criticized his thesis for ignoring Native Americans and others already living there.