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Most of the lands west of the Mississippi in the 1860s were occupied by Native Americans. To make room for white settlers, the U.S. government pursued some policies that were specifically aimed at removing Native Americans or making their ways of life untenable.
The Decimation of the Buffalo
The horses and guns for which Plains Indians had previously traded, allowed them to travel farther, hunt more efficiently, and roam the plains to hunt buffalo. Plains natives used buffalo hides for teepees, clothing, and blankets; buffalo meat was eaten in dried form as pemmican. They were almost completely reliant on the buffalo for their livelihoods. As a way to take control of the land on which the Native Americans lived, the U.S. government encouraged attempts to kill buffalo. The federal government told the military, fur traders, and even tourists to “Kill every buffalo you can! A buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” In some cases men rode the trains across the plains and shot buffalo out the train window, resulting in thousands of buffalo corpses left to rot across the plains. This campaign was disastrous to the Plains Indians. It destroyed the Plains Indians’ main source of food, clothing, shelter, and fuel. From an estimated 60 million buffalo in 1800, by 1890 there were fewer than 1,000 buffalo in North America.
Native American Battles
Native Americans did fight back, but ultimately the U.S. military defeated them. Following the influx of gold miners to the Black Hills of South Dakota, a war broke out when the native followers of Chief Sitting Bull and Chief Crazy Horse left their reservations, presumably to defend the sacred Black Hills from miners. At the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull massacred U.S. troops led by George Custer. This was a victory for the Native warriors; however, the result was terrible for them—the battle convinced many white Americans that Natives were dangerous and savage. The government used this as a justification to work twice as hard to eliminate the Native tribes and move them to reservations.
Ghost Dance Movement
In response to this pressure to assimilate, many Native Americans incorporated a new ceremony into their belief systems called the Ghost Dance. According to the teachings of the spiritual leader Wovoka, performing the dance would bring the spirits of the dead to fight on behalf of the living, end the westward expansion of the white man, and bring unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
As the Ghost Dance gained popularity, the federal government grew increasingly uncomfortable with it. At the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered about 300 mostly-unarmed Native Americans (many of them women and children) in South Dakota. This massacre ended the wars with the Native Americans and, for the most part, ended the resistance to moving to reservations.
Assimilation
The Native Americans who were left in the West after the government campaigns were encouraged to assimilate, meaning that they would give up their beliefs and ways of life to become part of the white culture.
The Dawes Act (1887) was an important example of this push for assimilation. This legislation broke up reservation land and gave it to individual Native Americans who agreed to live on small farms as individual families like white people rather than as nomadic tribes.
Turner’s Frontier Thesis
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the frontier had ceased to exist, meaning that white Americans had conquered the frontier. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner released an essay called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In the essay, he asserted that the American character derives from having a frontier (a clear line of demarcation between “civilization” and “savagery”). This is another example of American exceptionalism—the existence of so much free, accessible land had made the United State special. Turner argued that the frontier, as a place of opportunity and escape, diffused social discontent in America. If the frontier was gone, what would make America special now?
