1. James L. Roark Michael P. Johnson Patricia Cline Cohen Sarah Stage Susan M. Hartmann CHAPTER 17 The Contested West, 1865-1900 The American Promise A History of the United States Fifth Edition Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's

2. I. Conquest and Empire in the West A. Indian Removal and the Reservation System 1. Early Indian policy 2. Manifest destiny and reservations land no longer seemed inexhaustible; the government sought control of Indian lands, promising in return to pay annuities and to place Indians on lands reserved for their use—reservations. 3. The Treaty of Fort Laramie 1851, ten thousand Plains Indians met at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to negotiate a treaty that ceded a wide swath of their land to allow passage of wagon trains hoped to preserve their culture in the face of the white onslaught, which had already decimated their population and despoiled their environment the U.S. government promised that the rest of Indian lands would remain inviolate 4. Life on the reservation Indians were confined by armed force eked out an existence on stingy government rations found themselves dependent on government handouts and greedy Indian agents resembled colonial societies where native populations saw their culture assaulted, their religious practices outlawed, and their way of life attacked 5. The Sand Creek Massacre November 1864, at Sand Creek, Colonel John Chivington and his local Colorado militia savagely killed 270 Cheyenne, including children

4. I. Conquest and Empire in the West B. The Decimation of the Great Bison Herds 1. Environmental and human factors 2. Industrial demands and the railroad industrial demand for heavy leather belting used in machinery and the development of more accurate rifles combined to hasted the slaughter of the buffalo; the nation’s growing rail system cut the range in two and divided the herds 3. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge and the move to reservations C. Indian Wars and the Collapse of Comanchería 1. The last resistance in the West and the Great Sioux Uprising 2. Grant’s “peace policy” adopted a “peace policy” designed to segregate and control Indians while opening up the land to white settlers; General William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the policy: “Remove all to a safe place and then reduce them to a helpless condition.” 3. The end of Comanchería 1871, Grant’s peace policy gave way to all-out warfare as the U.S. Army dispatched three thousand soldiers to wipe out the remains of the Comanche empire; the army’s scorched-earth policy, combined with the decimation of the bison, led to the final collapse of the Comanche people; the only survivors—1,500 Comanche—retreated to the reservation at Fort Sill

6. I. Conquest and Empire in the West D. The Fight for the Black Hills 1. The Second Treaty of Fort Laramie 2. The discovery of gold and battling for the Black Hills miners and the Northern Pacific Railroad invaded the region; at first, the government offered to purchase the Black Hills, but the Sioux believed the land sacred and refused to sell; the army responded by ordering all Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians onto the Pine Ridge Reservation and threatened to hunt down those who refused. 3. The Battle of the Little Big Horn Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the Sioux tribes mounted resistance, winning a pyrrhic victory against Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876; in the five years that followed, Crazy Horse was killed, Sitting Bull surrendered, and the government had taken the Black Hills, confining the Lakota to the Great Sioux reservation; the Sioux never accepted the loss of the Black Hills, filing suit and demanding compensation for lands illegally taken from them; in 1980, the Supreme Court granted $122.5 million in monetary compensation to the tribes, but the Sioux refused the settlement and continue to press for the return of the Black Hills.

8. II. Forced Assimilation and Resistance Strategies A. Indian Schools and the War against Indian Culture 1. Cultural battleground: Indian education “to destroy the Indian in him and save the man”; in 1877, Congress appropriated funds for Indian education because “it was less expensive to educate Indians than to kill them”; authorities preferred boarding schools in order to isolate students from tribal values. 2. Indian resistance 3. Assimilation hair cut off; issued uniforms received Anglo-American names; curriculum featured agricultural and manual arts for boys and domestic skills for girls; students sent to live with white families during vacations B. The Dawes Act and Indian Land Allotment 1. Farming and property ownership 2. Criticism of reservations 3. Reducing land and destroying culture abolished reservations and allotted lands to individual Indians as private property; Indian rights groups viewed the Dawes Act as a positive initiative, but the act effectively reduced Indian lands from 138 million acres to a scant 48 million

9. II. Forced Assimilation and Resistance Strategies C. Indian Resistance and Survival 1. Varied responses to U.S. reservation policy the Crow, Arikara, Pawnee, and Shoshoni fought alongside the U.S. Army against their old enemies, the Sioux, in an effort to hold onto their lands. 2. The flight of the Nez Percé 1877, the army ordered the Nez Percé to come in to the reservation or be hunted down; the Nez Percé fled to Canada to escape confinement stopped to rest after 1,300 miles, only 50 miles from freedom; American soldiers attacked Nez Percé surrendered to U.S. Army soldiers after a 5 day siege. 3. Apache armed resistance Geronimo repeatedly led Apache warrior raiding parties off the reservation; eventually surrendered to General Nelson Miles in 1886 government arrested nearly 500 Apaches, though fewer than three dozen had been hostile, and sent them as prisoners to Florida, where more than a quarter of them died in 1892, the Apaches were moved to Fort Sill in Oklahoma and then later to New Mexico. 4. The Ghost Dance 5. Wounded Knee President Harrison to dispatch several thousand federal troops to Sioux country to handle any outbreak; in December 1890, when Sitting Bull joined the Ghost Dance in South Dakota, he was shot and killed by Indian police as they tried to arrest him at his cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation. The fleeing Sioux were apprehended at Wounded Knee Creek and a melee ensued; the army opened fire on the Indians; minutes later, more than 200 Sioux lay dead or dying in the snow

12. III. Gold Fever and the Mining West A. Mining on the Comstock Lode 1. Silver in Nevada 1859, refugees from California’s goldfields flocked to the Washoe basin in Nevada, where they found the richest silver ore on the continent—the legendary Comstock Lode 2. Financing silver mining mining was an expensive operation that required capital and technological resources to exploit the claims; an active San Francisco stock market sprang up to finance operations on the Comstock speculation, misrepresentation, and outright thievery ran rampant 3. The immigrant population in the cosmopolitan West Irish immigrants formed the largest ethnic group in the mining district; Irish and Irish American women constituted the largest group of women on the Comstock conversely, the Chinese community was overwhelmingly male; subject to anti-Chinese discrimination 4. Another clash between Euro-American and Native Americans natives became exiles in their own land; developed resourceful strategies to adapt and preserve their culture and identity. 5. Corporate Comstock in 1873 6. New technology, new dangers 1 out of 30 miners was injured on the job and one out of eighty killed; although the mining towns of the Wild West were often depicted as lawless outposts, these places were often urbanized and industrialized by 1875, Virginia City boasted a population of 25,000 people, making it one of the largest cities between St. Louis and San Francisco

14. III. Gold Fever and the Mining West B. The Diverse Peoples of the West 1. African Americans 2. Hispanic peoples 3. The Chinese 4. Chinese exclusion 5. Mormons C. Territorial Government 1. Benign neglect 2. Territorial governors

15. IV. Land Fever A. Moving West: Homesteaders and Speculators 1. Challenges could face blizzards, tornadoes, grasshoppers, hailstorms, drought, prairie fires, accidental death, and disease; even with free land, homesteaders still needed as much as $1,000 for a house, a team of farm animals, a well, fencing, and seed 2. Women on the frontier 3. Success and failure 4. The Great American Desert moved into western Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado—an area known as the Great American Desert; farmers attempted to cultivate the region, but cyclical droughts in the 1880s and 1890s sent starving farmers reeling back from the plains 5. Oklahoma land runs opening of two million acres of land in former Indian Territory in Oklahoma in 1889 brought as many as ten thousand settlers in one day. B. Ranchers and Cowboys 1. The cattle kingdom 1865 and 1885, cattle ranchers followed the railroads onto the plains, establishing a cattle kingdom from Texas to Wyoming barbed wire revolutionized the cattle business: As the largest ranchers in Texas began to build fences, nasty fights broke out with “fence cutters,” 2. The end of the open range 1886, cattle overcrowded the range, but severe blizzards during the winters of 1886–87 and 1887–88 decimated the herds

20. IV. Land Fever C. Tenants, Sharecroppers, and Migrants 1. Exodusters 2. Vaqueros 3. Tejanos 4. Migratory labor D. Commercial Farming and Industrial Cowboys 1. Farming revolution 2. Volatile markets 3. Western industrialism 4. The transformation of the American farmer