As in the East,
expansion into the plains and mountains by miners, ranchers and settlers
led to increasing conflicts with the Indians of the West. Many tribes
of Native Americans -- from the Utes of the Great Basin to the Nez Perces
of Idaho -- fought the whites at one time or another. But the Sioux
of the Northern Plains and the Apache of the Southwest provided the
most significant opposition to frontier advance. Led by such resourceful
leaders as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Sioux were particularly skilled
at high-speed mounted warfare. The Apaches were equally adept and highly
elusive, fighting in their environs of desert and canyons.
Conflicts with
the Plains Indians began with a Sioux massacre of whites in 1862 and
continued through the Civil
War. In 1876 the
last serious Sioux war erupted, when the Dakota gold rush penetrated
the Black Hills. The Army was supposed to keep miners off Sioux hunting
grounds, but little was done to protect Indian lands. Yet when ordered
to take action against bands of Sioux hunting on the range according
to their treaty rights, the Army moved vigorously.
In 1876, after
several indecisive encounters, General George Custer found the main
encampment of Sioux and their allies on the Little Big Horn River. Custer
and his men -- who were separated from their main detachment -- were
completely annihilated. Later, in 1890, a ghost dance ritual on the
Northern Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to an
uprising and a last, tragic encounter that ended in the death of hundreds
of Sioux men, women and children.
Long before this,
however, the way of life of the Plains Indians had been destroyed by
the slaughter of the buffalo, almost exterminated in the decade after
1870 by indiscriminate hunting. Meanwhile, the Apache wars in the Southwest
dragged on until Geronimo, the last important chief, was captured in
1885.
Government policy
ever since the Monroe administration had been to move the Indians beyond
the reach of the white frontier. But inevitably the reservations had
become smaller and more crowded, and many began to protest the government's
treatment of Native Americans. Helen Hunt Jackson, for example, an Easterner
living in the West, wrote a book, A Century of Dishonor (1881),
which dramatized the Indians' plight and struck a chord in the nation's
conscience. Most reformers believed the Indian should be assimilated
into the dominant culture. The federal government even set up a school
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to impose white values and
beliefs on Indian youths. (It was at this school that Native American
Jim Thorpe, often considered the best athlete the U.S. has produced,
gained fame in the early 20th century.)
In 1887 the Dawes
Act reversed U.S. Indian policy, permitting the president to divide
up tribal land and parcel out 65 hectares of land to each head of a
family. Such allotments were to be held in trust by the government for
25 years, after which time the owner won full title and citizenship.
Lands not thus distributed, however, were offered for sale to settlers.
This policy, however well-intentioned, proved disastrous, since it allowed
more plundering of Indian lands. Moreover, its assault on the communal
organization of tribes caused further disruption of traditional culture.
In 1934 U.S. policy was reversed again by the Indian Reorganization
Act, which attempted to protect tribal and communal life on the reservations.