The West: Settlement of the Last Frontier
After the Civil War, many Americans turned their energies to the daunting task of settling the final western frontier: the vast arid territory that included the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Western Plateau. Before 1860, these lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast were known as “the Great American Desert” by pioneers passing through on the way to the green valleys of Oregon and the goldfields of California. The plains west of the 100th meridian had few trees and usually less than 15 inches of rainfall a year, which was not considered enough moisture to support farming. While the winter blizzards and hot dry summers discouraged settlement, the open grasslands of the plains supported an estimated 15 million bison, or buffalo. The buffalo in turn provided food, clothing, shelter, and even tools for many of the 250,000 Native Americans living in the West in 1865.
In only 35 years, conditions on the Great Plains changed to such an extent that there was virtually no more frontier. By 1900, the great buffalo herds had been wiped out. The open western lands were now fenced in by homesteads and ranches, crisscrossed by steel rails, and modernized by new towns. By the turn of the century, ten new western states had already been carved out of the last frontier, leaving only Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma as territories awaiting statehood. Progress came at a cost. The frenzied rush for the West’s natural resources caused the near extermination of the buffalo and serious damage to the environment. The Native Americans who happened to be in the way of development also paid a high human and cultural price.
The settlement of the last frontier was achieved by three groups of pioneers: miners, cattlemen and cowboys, and farmers.
The Mining Frontier
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 caused the first flood of newcomers to the West. The California gold rush was only the beginning of a feverish quest for gold and silver that would extend well into the 1890s and would help to settle much of the West. A series of gold strikes and silver strikes in what became the states of Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and South Dakota kept a steady flow of hopeful young prospectors pushing into the western mountains. The discovery of gold near Pike’s Peak in 1859 brought nearly 100,000 miners to Colorado. In the same year, the discovery of the fabulous Comstock Lode (which produced over $340 million in gold and silver by 1890) was responsible for Nevada entering the Union in 1864. Idaho and Montana were also granted early statehood, largely because of the mining boom.
California’s great gold rush of 1849 set the pattern for what happened elsewhere. First, individual prospectors would look for traces of gold in the mountain streams by a method called placer mining, using simple tools such as shovels and washing pans. Eventually, however, such methods gave way to deep-shaft mining that required expensive equipment and the resources of wealthy investors and corporations.
Rich strikes would create boomtowns almost overnight—towns that be- came infamous for their saloons, dance-hall girls, and vigilante justice. A few towns, such as Nevada’s Virginia City (created by the Comstock Lode), added theaters, churches, newspapers, schools, libraries, railroads, and organized law enforcement. Mark Twain started his career as a writer working on a Virginia City newspaper in the early 1860s. Many mining towns, however, became lonely ghost towns within a few years after the gold and silver ran out. Other towns that served the mines, such as San Francisco, Sacramento, and Denver, became important commercial centers.
Most of the mining towns that endured and grew were more like industrial cities than the frontier towns depicted in western films. As the mines developed, mining companies employed experienced miners from Europe, Latin America, and China. It was not unusual for half the population of a mining town to be foreign-born. About one-third of the western miners in the 1860s were Chinese immigrants. Native-born Americans resented the competition. In California, hostility to foreigners took the form of a Miner’s Tax of $20 a month on all foreign-born miners. Political pressure from western states moved Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which prohibited further immigration to the United States by Chinese laborers. Renewed ten years later, this law was the first major act of Congress to restrict immigration on the basis of race and nationality.
Mining not only stimulated the settlement of the West but also had an impact on the economics and politics of the nation. First of all, a vast increase in the supply of silver created a crisis over the relative value of gold- and silver- backed currency, which became a leading political issue for both westerners and the nation in the 1880s and 1890s. The mining boom also left environmental scars that are still visible today. It had a disastrous effect on Native Americans, who lost their lands to the miners’ pursuit of instant riches.
The Cattle Frontier
The economic potential of the vast open grasslands that reached from Texas to Canada was realized by cattlemen and ranchers in the decades after the Civil War. Earlier, cattle had been raised and rounded up in Texas on a smaller scale by Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros. The traditions and techniques of the cattle business in the late 1800s were borrowed from the Mexicans, just as the cattle themselves, the hardy “Texas” longhorns, came originally from Mexico. During the Civil War, after the Union army cut off Texas from the rest of the Confederacy, wild herds of about 5 million head of cattle roamed freely over the Texas grasslands. When the war ended, the Texas cattle business was easy to get into because both the cattle and the grass were free.
The construction of railroads into Kansas after the war opened up eastern markets for the Texas cattle. Joseph G. McCoy realized the huge profits to be made at the end of the line in Chicago where cattle could be sold for $30 to
$50 a head. At the rail stop in Abilene, Kansas, McCoy built the first stockyards to ship out cattle to Chicago. Dodge City and other cow towns were soon established along the railroads to handle the millions of cattle driven up the Chisholm, Goodnight-Loving, and other trails out of Texas during the 1860s and 1870s. The cowboys, many of whom were blacks and Mexicans, received about a dollar a day for their dangerous work.
The long cattle drives began to come to an end in the 1880s when overgrazing destroyed the grass and a winter blizzard and drought of 1885–1886 killed off 90 percent of the cattle. Another factor that closed down the cattle frontier was the arrival of homesteaders, who used barbed wire fencing to cut off access to the formerly open range. Wealthy cattlemen turned to developing huge ranches and using scientific ranching techniques to raise more tender breeds of cattle by feeding them hay and grains. The Wild West was largely tamed by the 1890s, but not before the era changed America’s eating habits from pork to beef and created the legend of the rugged, self-reliant American cowboy.
The Farming Frontier
The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged farming on the Great Plains by offering 160 acres of public land free to any family that settled on it for a period of five years. The promise of free land combined with the promotions of railroads and land speculators induced hundreds of thousands of native-born and immigrant families to attempt to farm the Great Plains between 1870 and
1900. About 500,000 families took advantage of the Homestead Act, but five times that number had to purchase their land, because the best public lands often ended up in the hands of railroad companies and speculators.
Problems and solutions. The first “sodbusters” on the dry and treeless plains often built their homes of sod bricks. Extremes of hot and cold weather, plagues of grasshoppers, and the lonesome life on the plains challenged even the most resourceful of the pioneer families. Water was scarce, and wood for fences was almost nonexistent. The invention of barbed wire by Joseph Glidden in 1874 helped farmers to fence in their lands on the lumber-scarce plains. Using mail-order windmills to drill deep wells provided some water. Even so, many homesteaders discovered too late that 160 acres was not adequate for farming the Great Plains. Long spells of severe weather, together with falling prices for their crops and the cost of new machinery, caused the failure of two- thirds of the homesteaders’ farms on the Great Plains by 1900. Western Kansas alone lost half of its population between 1888 and 1892.
Those who managed to survive adopted “dry farming” and deep-plowing techniques to use the moisture available. They also learned to plant hardy strains of Russian wheat that withstood the extreme weather. Ultimately, dams and irrigation saved many western farmers, as humans reshaped the rivers and physical environment of the West to provide water for agriculture.
Turner’s frontier thesis. The Oklahoma Territory, once set aside for the use of Native Americans, was thrown open for settlement in 1889, and hundreds of prospective homesteaders took part in the last great land rush in the West. The next year, 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the entire frontier— except for a few isolated pockets—had been settled.
Reacting to this announcement of the close of the frontier, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Turner argued that 300 years of frontier experience had played a fundamental role in shaping the unique character of American society. According to Turner’s thesis, the frontier experience had promoted a habit of independence and individualism. The frontier had also acted as a powerful social leveler, breaking down class distinctions and thus fostering social and political democracy. Furthermore, the challenges of frontier life caused Americans to be inventive and practical-minded—but also wasteful in their attitude toward natural resources.
The closing of the frontier troubled Turner. He saw the availability of free land on the frontier as a safety valve for harmlessly releasing discontent in American society. The frontier had always held out the promise of a fresh start. Once the frontier was gone, would the United States be condemned to follow the patterns of class division and social conflict that troubled the nations of Europe?
While many debate the Turner thesis, historians acknowledge that by the 1890s the largest movement of Americans was to the cities and industrialized areas. Not only was the era of the western frontier coming to a close, but the dominance of rural farming America was also on a decline.
The Removal of Native Americans
From the point of view of Native Americans, the frontier was nothing less than their own homeland and the source of their livelihood. As that frontier was progressively taken over by white settlers, the Native Americans lost both their land and the freedom to live according to their traditions.
The Native Americans who occupied the West in 1865 belonged to dozens of different cultural and tribal groups. In New Mexico and Arizona, Pueblo groups such as the Hopi and Zuni lived in permanent settlements as farmers raising corn and livestock. The Navajo and Apache peoples of the Southwest were nomadic hunter-gatherers who adapted a more settled way of life, not only raising crops and livestock but also producing arts and crafts. In the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon), such tribes as the Chinook and Shasta developed complex communities based on abundant fish and game.
About two-thirds of the western tribal groups lived on the Great Plains. These nomadic tribes, such as the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, and Comanche, had given up farming in colonial times after the introduction of the horse by the Spanish. By the 1700s, they had become skillful horsemen and developed a way of life centered on the hunting of buffalo. Although they belonged to tribes of several thousand, they lived in smaller bands of 300–500 members. In the late 19th century, their conflicts with the U.S. government were partly the result of white Americans having little understanding of the Plains people’s loose tribal organization and nomadic lifestyle.
Reservation policy. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing eastern Native Americans to the West was based on the belief that lands west of the Mississippi would permanently remain “Indian country.” This expectation soon proved false, as wagon trains rolled westward on the Oregon Trail, and plans were made for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1851, in councils (negotiations) at Fort Laramie and Fort Atkinson, the federal govern- ment began to assign the plains tribes large tracts of land—or reservations— with definite boundaries. Most Plains tribes, however, refused to restrict their movements to the reservations and continued to follow the migrating buffalo wherever they roamed.
Indian wars. As thousands of miners, cattlemen, and homesteaders began to settle on Native American lands, warfare became inevitable. Sporadic out- bursts of fighting between U.S. troops and Plains people were characterized by brutal episodes. In 1864, the Colorado militia massacred an encampment of Cheyenne women, children, and men at Sand Creek, Colorado. In 1866, during the Sioux War, the tables were turned when an army column under Captain William Fetterman was wiped out by Sioux warriors. Following these wars, another round of treaties attempted to isolate the Native Americans of the Plains on smaller reservations with promises of government support to be provided by federal agents. However, gold miners refused to stay off Native Americans’ lands if gold was to be found on them, as indeed it was in the Dakota’s Black Hills. Soon, minor chiefs not involved in the treaty-making and younger warriors denounced the treaties and tried to return to ancestral lands.
The 1870s witnessed a new round of conflicts in the West. There was the Red River War against the Comanche and a second Sioux War led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Before the Sioux went down to defeat, they ambushed and destroyed Colonel George Custer’s command at Little Big Horn in 1876. Chief Joseph’s courageous effort to lead a band of the Nez Perce´ into Canada ended in defeat and surrender in 1877. The constant pressure of the U.S. Army forced tribe after tribe to comply with Washington’s terms. In addition, the slaughter of most of the buffalo by the early 1880s doomed the way of life of the Plains people.
Assimilationists. The injustices done to Native Americans were chroni- cled in a best-selling book by Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881). Although this book created sympathy for Native Americans, especially in the eastern part of the United States, most of those motivated to help Native Americans proposed assimilation as the solution. These humanitarians emphasized formal education and training and conversion to Christianity. Boarding schools such as the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania were set up to segregate Native American children from their people and teach them white culture and farming and industrial skills.
Dawes Severalty Act (1887). Reformers persuaded Congress to abandon the practice of dealing with Native American tribes as separate nations. A new approach incorporated in the Dawes Act of 1887 was designed to break up tribal organizations, which many felt kept Native Americans from becoming “civilized” and law-abiding citizens. The Dawes Act divided the tribal lands into plots of 160 acres or less, depending on family size. U.S. citizenship was granted to those who stayed on the land for 25 years and “adopted the habits of civilized life.”
Under the Dawes Act, as intended, 47 million acres of land were distributed to Native Americans. What reformers did not anticipate, however, was that 90 million acres of former reservation land—often the best land—would be sold over the years to white settlers by the government, speculators, or Native Americans themselves. The new policy proved a failure. By the turn of the century, disease and poverty had reduced the Native American population to just 200,000 persons, most of whom lived as wards of the federal government.
Ghost Dance movement. The last effort of Native Americans to resist U.S. domination and drive whites from their ancestral lands came through a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. In the government’s campaign to suppress the movement, the famous Sioux medicine man Sitting Bull was killed during his arrest. Then in December 1890, over 200 Native American men, women, and children were gunned down by the U.S. Army in the “battle” (massacre) of Wounded Knee in the Dakotas. This final tragedy marked the end of the Indian Wars on the crimsoned prairie.
Aftermath: U.S. policy in the 20th century. In 1924, in partial recogni- tion of the failure of its policy of forced assimilation, the federal government granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, whether or not they had complied with the Dawes Act. As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Congress adopted the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which promoted the reestablishment of tribal organization and culture. Today, over 1.8 million Native Americans, living both on and off reservations, belong to 116 tribes within the United States, each consisting of 1,000 or more members.
In only 35 years, conditions on the Great Plains changed to such an extent that there was virtually no more frontier. By 1900, the great buffalo herds had been wiped out. The open western lands were now fenced in by homesteads and ranches, crisscrossed by steel rails, and modernized by new towns. By the turn of the century, ten new western states had already been carved out of the last frontier, leaving only Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma as territories awaiting statehood. Progress came at a cost. The frenzied rush for the West’s natural resources caused the near extermination of the buffalo and serious damage to the environment. The Native Americans who happened to be in the way of development also paid a high human and cultural price.
The settlement of the last frontier was achieved by three groups of pioneers: miners, cattlemen and cowboys, and farmers.
The Mining Frontier
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 caused the first flood of newcomers to the West. The California gold rush was only the beginning of a feverish quest for gold and silver that would extend well into the 1890s and would help to settle much of the West. A series of gold strikes and silver strikes in what became the states of Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and South Dakota kept a steady flow of hopeful young prospectors pushing into the western mountains. The discovery of gold near Pike’s Peak in 1859 brought nearly 100,000 miners to Colorado. In the same year, the discovery of the fabulous Comstock Lode (which produced over $340 million in gold and silver by 1890) was responsible for Nevada entering the Union in 1864. Idaho and Montana were also granted early statehood, largely because of the mining boom.
California’s great gold rush of 1849 set the pattern for what happened elsewhere. First, individual prospectors would look for traces of gold in the mountain streams by a method called placer mining, using simple tools such as shovels and washing pans. Eventually, however, such methods gave way to deep-shaft mining that required expensive equipment and the resources of wealthy investors and corporations.
Rich strikes would create boomtowns almost overnight—towns that be- came infamous for their saloons, dance-hall girls, and vigilante justice. A few towns, such as Nevada’s Virginia City (created by the Comstock Lode), added theaters, churches, newspapers, schools, libraries, railroads, and organized law enforcement. Mark Twain started his career as a writer working on a Virginia City newspaper in the early 1860s. Many mining towns, however, became lonely ghost towns within a few years after the gold and silver ran out. Other towns that served the mines, such as San Francisco, Sacramento, and Denver, became important commercial centers.
Most of the mining towns that endured and grew were more like industrial cities than the frontier towns depicted in western films. As the mines developed, mining companies employed experienced miners from Europe, Latin America, and China. It was not unusual for half the population of a mining town to be foreign-born. About one-third of the western miners in the 1860s were Chinese immigrants. Native-born Americans resented the competition. In California, hostility to foreigners took the form of a Miner’s Tax of $20 a month on all foreign-born miners. Political pressure from western states moved Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which prohibited further immigration to the United States by Chinese laborers. Renewed ten years later, this law was the first major act of Congress to restrict immigration on the basis of race and nationality.
Mining not only stimulated the settlement of the West but also had an impact on the economics and politics of the nation. First of all, a vast increase in the supply of silver created a crisis over the relative value of gold- and silver- backed currency, which became a leading political issue for both westerners and the nation in the 1880s and 1890s. The mining boom also left environmental scars that are still visible today. It had a disastrous effect on Native Americans, who lost their lands to the miners’ pursuit of instant riches.
The Cattle Frontier
The economic potential of the vast open grasslands that reached from Texas to Canada was realized by cattlemen and ranchers in the decades after the Civil War. Earlier, cattle had been raised and rounded up in Texas on a smaller scale by Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros. The traditions and techniques of the cattle business in the late 1800s were borrowed from the Mexicans, just as the cattle themselves, the hardy “Texas” longhorns, came originally from Mexico. During the Civil War, after the Union army cut off Texas from the rest of the Confederacy, wild herds of about 5 million head of cattle roamed freely over the Texas grasslands. When the war ended, the Texas cattle business was easy to get into because both the cattle and the grass were free.
The construction of railroads into Kansas after the war opened up eastern markets for the Texas cattle. Joseph G. McCoy realized the huge profits to be made at the end of the line in Chicago where cattle could be sold for $30 to
$50 a head. At the rail stop in Abilene, Kansas, McCoy built the first stockyards to ship out cattle to Chicago. Dodge City and other cow towns were soon established along the railroads to handle the millions of cattle driven up the Chisholm, Goodnight-Loving, and other trails out of Texas during the 1860s and 1870s. The cowboys, many of whom were blacks and Mexicans, received about a dollar a day for their dangerous work.
The long cattle drives began to come to an end in the 1880s when overgrazing destroyed the grass and a winter blizzard and drought of 1885–1886 killed off 90 percent of the cattle. Another factor that closed down the cattle frontier was the arrival of homesteaders, who used barbed wire fencing to cut off access to the formerly open range. Wealthy cattlemen turned to developing huge ranches and using scientific ranching techniques to raise more tender breeds of cattle by feeding them hay and grains. The Wild West was largely tamed by the 1890s, but not before the era changed America’s eating habits from pork to beef and created the legend of the rugged, self-reliant American cowboy.
The Farming Frontier
The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged farming on the Great Plains by offering 160 acres of public land free to any family that settled on it for a period of five years. The promise of free land combined with the promotions of railroads and land speculators induced hundreds of thousands of native-born and immigrant families to attempt to farm the Great Plains between 1870 and
1900. About 500,000 families took advantage of the Homestead Act, but five times that number had to purchase their land, because the best public lands often ended up in the hands of railroad companies and speculators.
Problems and solutions. The first “sodbusters” on the dry and treeless plains often built their homes of sod bricks. Extremes of hot and cold weather, plagues of grasshoppers, and the lonesome life on the plains challenged even the most resourceful of the pioneer families. Water was scarce, and wood for fences was almost nonexistent. The invention of barbed wire by Joseph Glidden in 1874 helped farmers to fence in their lands on the lumber-scarce plains. Using mail-order windmills to drill deep wells provided some water. Even so, many homesteaders discovered too late that 160 acres was not adequate for farming the Great Plains. Long spells of severe weather, together with falling prices for their crops and the cost of new machinery, caused the failure of two- thirds of the homesteaders’ farms on the Great Plains by 1900. Western Kansas alone lost half of its population between 1888 and 1892.
Those who managed to survive adopted “dry farming” and deep-plowing techniques to use the moisture available. They also learned to plant hardy strains of Russian wheat that withstood the extreme weather. Ultimately, dams and irrigation saved many western farmers, as humans reshaped the rivers and physical environment of the West to provide water for agriculture.
Turner’s frontier thesis. The Oklahoma Territory, once set aside for the use of Native Americans, was thrown open for settlement in 1889, and hundreds of prospective homesteaders took part in the last great land rush in the West. The next year, 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the entire frontier— except for a few isolated pockets—had been settled.
Reacting to this announcement of the close of the frontier, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Turner argued that 300 years of frontier experience had played a fundamental role in shaping the unique character of American society. According to Turner’s thesis, the frontier experience had promoted a habit of independence and individualism. The frontier had also acted as a powerful social leveler, breaking down class distinctions and thus fostering social and political democracy. Furthermore, the challenges of frontier life caused Americans to be inventive and practical-minded—but also wasteful in their attitude toward natural resources.
The closing of the frontier troubled Turner. He saw the availability of free land on the frontier as a safety valve for harmlessly releasing discontent in American society. The frontier had always held out the promise of a fresh start. Once the frontier was gone, would the United States be condemned to follow the patterns of class division and social conflict that troubled the nations of Europe?
While many debate the Turner thesis, historians acknowledge that by the 1890s the largest movement of Americans was to the cities and industrialized areas. Not only was the era of the western frontier coming to a close, but the dominance of rural farming America was also on a decline.
The Removal of Native Americans
From the point of view of Native Americans, the frontier was nothing less than their own homeland and the source of their livelihood. As that frontier was progressively taken over by white settlers, the Native Americans lost both their land and the freedom to live according to their traditions.
The Native Americans who occupied the West in 1865 belonged to dozens of different cultural and tribal groups. In New Mexico and Arizona, Pueblo groups such as the Hopi and Zuni lived in permanent settlements as farmers raising corn and livestock. The Navajo and Apache peoples of the Southwest were nomadic hunter-gatherers who adapted a more settled way of life, not only raising crops and livestock but also producing arts and crafts. In the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon), such tribes as the Chinook and Shasta developed complex communities based on abundant fish and game.
About two-thirds of the western tribal groups lived on the Great Plains. These nomadic tribes, such as the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, and Comanche, had given up farming in colonial times after the introduction of the horse by the Spanish. By the 1700s, they had become skillful horsemen and developed a way of life centered on the hunting of buffalo. Although they belonged to tribes of several thousand, they lived in smaller bands of 300–500 members. In the late 19th century, their conflicts with the U.S. government were partly the result of white Americans having little understanding of the Plains people’s loose tribal organization and nomadic lifestyle.
Reservation policy. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing eastern Native Americans to the West was based on the belief that lands west of the Mississippi would permanently remain “Indian country.” This expectation soon proved false, as wagon trains rolled westward on the Oregon Trail, and plans were made for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1851, in councils (negotiations) at Fort Laramie and Fort Atkinson, the federal govern- ment began to assign the plains tribes large tracts of land—or reservations— with definite boundaries. Most Plains tribes, however, refused to restrict their movements to the reservations and continued to follow the migrating buffalo wherever they roamed.
Indian wars. As thousands of miners, cattlemen, and homesteaders began to settle on Native American lands, warfare became inevitable. Sporadic out- bursts of fighting between U.S. troops and Plains people were characterized by brutal episodes. In 1864, the Colorado militia massacred an encampment of Cheyenne women, children, and men at Sand Creek, Colorado. In 1866, during the Sioux War, the tables were turned when an army column under Captain William Fetterman was wiped out by Sioux warriors. Following these wars, another round of treaties attempted to isolate the Native Americans of the Plains on smaller reservations with promises of government support to be provided by federal agents. However, gold miners refused to stay off Native Americans’ lands if gold was to be found on them, as indeed it was in the Dakota’s Black Hills. Soon, minor chiefs not involved in the treaty-making and younger warriors denounced the treaties and tried to return to ancestral lands.
The 1870s witnessed a new round of conflicts in the West. There was the Red River War against the Comanche and a second Sioux War led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Before the Sioux went down to defeat, they ambushed and destroyed Colonel George Custer’s command at Little Big Horn in 1876. Chief Joseph’s courageous effort to lead a band of the Nez Perce´ into Canada ended in defeat and surrender in 1877. The constant pressure of the U.S. Army forced tribe after tribe to comply with Washington’s terms. In addition, the slaughter of most of the buffalo by the early 1880s doomed the way of life of the Plains people.
Assimilationists. The injustices done to Native Americans were chroni- cled in a best-selling book by Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881). Although this book created sympathy for Native Americans, especially in the eastern part of the United States, most of those motivated to help Native Americans proposed assimilation as the solution. These humanitarians emphasized formal education and training and conversion to Christianity. Boarding schools such as the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania were set up to segregate Native American children from their people and teach them white culture and farming and industrial skills.
Dawes Severalty Act (1887). Reformers persuaded Congress to abandon the practice of dealing with Native American tribes as separate nations. A new approach incorporated in the Dawes Act of 1887 was designed to break up tribal organizations, which many felt kept Native Americans from becoming “civilized” and law-abiding citizens. The Dawes Act divided the tribal lands into plots of 160 acres or less, depending on family size. U.S. citizenship was granted to those who stayed on the land for 25 years and “adopted the habits of civilized life.”
Under the Dawes Act, as intended, 47 million acres of land were distributed to Native Americans. What reformers did not anticipate, however, was that 90 million acres of former reservation land—often the best land—would be sold over the years to white settlers by the government, speculators, or Native Americans themselves. The new policy proved a failure. By the turn of the century, disease and poverty had reduced the Native American population to just 200,000 persons, most of whom lived as wards of the federal government.
Ghost Dance movement. The last effort of Native Americans to resist U.S. domination and drive whites from their ancestral lands came through a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. In the government’s campaign to suppress the movement, the famous Sioux medicine man Sitting Bull was killed during his arrest. Then in December 1890, over 200 Native American men, women, and children were gunned down by the U.S. Army in the “battle” (massacre) of Wounded Knee in the Dakotas. This final tragedy marked the end of the Indian Wars on the crimsoned prairie.
Aftermath: U.S. policy in the 20th century. In 1924, in partial recogni- tion of the failure of its policy of forced assimilation, the federal government granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, whether or not they had complied with the Dawes Act. As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Congress adopted the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which promoted the reestablishment of tribal organization and culture. Today, over 1.8 million Native Americans, living both on and off reservations, belong to 116 tribes within the United States, each consisting of 1,000 or more members.