1. Expansion of western railroads:
In 1865 there had been 35k of railroads in the US; by 1900 more than 192k had been built—outpacing Europe as a whole.
The construction was sufficiently expensive to warrant government subsidies—over time, national interest (and effective lobbying) elicited more than 155 million acres given to rail companies
The Union Pacific, Central Pacific (companies that combined on the “wedding of the rails” in Utah in 1869), Northern Pacific, Atchison/Topeka/Santa Fe, and Southern Pacific led the way in creating America’s Gilded Age growth industry

2. Competitors for “the West”:
In addition to tribes like the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nez Perce, Navajo, and Commanche, Western settlement was complicated by Mexican-American settlements and traditions, other mobile groups like Mormons, and the unpredictable nature of “cowboy” culture and isolated, independent towns and people

3. The Western conflicts: Chief Joseph
The Nez Perce (meaning “pierced nose”) had been named by French fur trappers who tended to cultivate a “frontier of inclusion.” They had occasionally assisted American armies and many of them were Christian converts. But the discovery of gold on their lands changed their relationship with the national government. Some illegitimate authorities from the tribe agreed to a treaty that paid the Nez Perce less than 10 cents an acre in 1863—launching their 14 years of evasion and exile …

4. Continued: Little Big Horn
The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had granted the Sioux people the right to occupy the Black Hills for “as long as the grass shall grow”; gold discovery again thwarted the tribal relations … Lt. Col. George Custer, who had graduated last in his class at West Point, organized a surveying expedition to the Black Hills … your text covers the resulting rout at the hands of 2,000 to 4,000 Native soldiers …

5. Government policy toward the Indian people:
The Indian Wars, lasting roughly from Sand Creek in the mid-1860s, through Little Bighorn in the 1870s, culminating with Wounded Knee in the early 1890s, ended in tribal acquiescence and were frequently described by authors like Helen Hunt Jackson as part of A Century of Dishonor.
Even well-intended policy could undermine tribal tradition and life:

6. The Dawes Act (see online)
Congressman Henry Dawes, author of the act, once expressed his faith in the civilizing power of private property with the claim that to be civilized was to "wear civilized clothes ... cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.“
(from PBS’ “The West”)

7. The Ghost Dance
The Paiute prophet Wovoka had, while sick with scarlet fever, experienced a vision during a total eclipse. The Creator told him that if the Indian people learned to love each other they would be granted a special place in the afterlife.
The Sioux adopted his vision and sounded their chant:
“The whole world is coming.
A nation is coming, a nation is coming.
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
The father says so, the father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming.
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,
The Father says so, the Father says so.”

8. Wounded Knee
Wounded Knee has continued to be a place of great symbolic significance. During the 1970s the American Indian Movement, founded in 1968 as a group of young, militant natives who would monitor police brutality against Indian people in cities, grew to sponsor a “Red Power” movement. Claiming to represent “Indians of all tribes,” they seized Alcatraz Island in 1969 for more than a year, staged the “Trail of Broken Treaties” as they occupied the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs for a week, and surrounded Wounded Knee demanding the removal of an Oglala leader they viewed as a corrupt puppet of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.