1. Culture of the Plain Indians
Nomads
roamed vast distances
main source of food
-the Buffalo
Similarities Between Them
Extended family networks
Close relationship with nature
Assignment of tasks
Women generally performed domestic tasks:
Rearing Children
Cooking
Preparing hides
Men performed a variety of tasks that included:
Hunting
Trading
Supervising the military life of the band

2. The Dakota Sioux Uprising
Government issued annuities
Payments to reservation dwellers
Abuses
August, 1867
Late Payments
starving to death.
Chief Little Crow
food on credit.
Trader Andrew Myrick replied, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
Myrick dead
Grass stuffed in this mouth.
Military Tribunal
307 Dakota to death
President Lincoln reduced to 38.
Troops to the Plains
Sioux – The Lakota
The Lakota offered refuge to fleeing Dakota Indians
Chief Red Cloud
Chief Crazy Horse
Chief Sitting Bull

3. Fetterman’s Massacre Bozeman Trail Captain William Judd Fetterman
Link the mining towns with the East.
Sioux Indian hunting grounds
Chief Red Cloud warned
Fort Phil Kearney
Northern Wyoming
Frequently attacked
Captain William Judd Fetterman
82-man force sent to its rescue.
Trapped-Dec. 21, 1866
1,500 Sioux
Chief High Backbone
"The Fetterman Fight" by J. K. Ralston.

4. Sand Creek Massacre Trading Stopped
Raiding wagon trains & stealing cattle and horses from ranches.
Estimate 200 settlers killed.
November, 1864
Chief Black Kettle
Negotiate Peace
To await at Sand Creek
Colonel John Chivington
Ordered to attack the Cheyenne at Sand Creek
Fourteen soldiers died
Native Americans were killed.

5. A Doomed Plan for Peace Fetterman’s Massacre & Sand Creek Massacre,
Congress that something had to be done.
In 1867 Congress formed an Indian Peace Commission.
Two large reservations
Pressured Native American leaders into signing treaties
Those who refused
Poverty
Despair
Corrupt American Traders
Demise of the Buffalo
The Army encouraged buffalo killing.
By 1889 very few of the animals remained
Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and Ramona
Criticism of policy towards American Indians

6. Battle of the Little Bighorn
1876 Lakota Sioux Reservation
Gold Mines
Expeditionary Force
General Alfred H. Terry.
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, Seventh Cavalry
June 25, 1876
Custer launched attack in broad daylight
2,500 Lakota and Cheyenne Warriors
Custer commanded about 210 soldiers
Newspapers portrayed the battle as a massacre.
The United States Army responded quickly
October of 1877, Chief Joseph surrendered
“Our chiefs are killed…The little children are freezing to death. My people…have no blankets, no food…Hear me, my chiefs; I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” -quoted in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

7. Tragedy at Wounded Knee
The Ghost Dance
Banned Religious ceremony
Celebrated “Day of Reckoning”
Reunite with deceased ancestors
Sitting Bull
Blamed for defiance
Resisted Arrest
Died
Wounded Knee
Ghost Dance participants fled
200 Men/Women/Children Dead

8. Assimilation
Assimilate, or be absorbed, into American society as landowners and citizens.
That meant breaking up the reservation system into individual land allotments
This became law in 1887 with the Dawes Act.
160 acres of reservation land for farming
Like many homesteaders, they found the land allotments too small to be profitable and life too harsh to withstand.

9. Americanization of the Indians
Same young Indians a short time later
Young Indians upon arrival at Carlisle School in Penn.

10. The Turner Thesis
Fredrick J. Turner
…American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.
The frontier Americanized Americans.
The individual was rapidly acclimatized, though the process lasted 300 years.
Cheap or even free land provided a "safety valve" which protected the nation against uprisings of the poverty-stricken and malcontent.