Lesson 17: The American West & Native American Resistance (1860s–1890)
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The "Wild West" of popular imagination obscures a darker reality: the conquest of the West meant the destruction of Native American societies, the exploitation of immigrant labor, and environmental devastation.
The Plains Wars
After the Civil War, the US Army waged systematic war against Plains tribes. The Sand Creek Massacre (1864) saw Colorado militia murder 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly women and children. Red Cloud's War forced the US to abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail (1868). Custer's Last Stand at Little Bighorn (1876) — Sioux and Cheyenne warriors annihilated the 7th Cavalry — was a rare Native victory. The Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, fought a brilliant 1,400-mile retreat before surrendering in 1877: "I will fight no more forever."
Wounded Knee and the Reservation System
The Dawes Act (1887) broke up tribal lands into individual allotments, stripping 90 million acres from Native control. The Ghost Dance movement offered spiritual hope; the Army's panic led to the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), where soldiers killed 250–300 Lakota — mostly unarmed. Boarding schools like Carlisle forcibly assimilated Native children: "Kill the Indian, save the man." By 1900, the Native population had fallen from millions to ~250,000.
Railroads, Mining, and Ranching
The transcontinental railroad (1869) accelerated settlement. Chinese immigrants — 12,000 of them — built the Central Pacific through the Sierra Nevada, then faced the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Gold and silver rushes (California 1849, Comstock 1859, Black Hills 1874) brought boomtowns and busts. Cattle drives and barbed wire (1874) transformed the open range. The Homestead Act (1862) offered 160 acres to settlers — land taken from Native peoples.
The Myth vs. Reality
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and dime novels created the cowboy myth. The reality: cowboys were often Black, Mexican, or poor white laborers earning $30/month. Women homesteaders proved up claims independently. The West was diverse, violent, and environmentally destructive — the buffalo, numbering 30 million, were slaughtered to near-extinction partly to starve Plains tribes.
Why It Matters
The conquest of the West completed America's continental empire at enormous human cost. Understanding this history is essential to grappling with Native sovereignty issues, immigration debates, and the environmental consequences of expansion that persist today.
Voices from the Past
Chief Joseph, surrender speech (1877): "Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed... It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death... I will fight no more forever." One of American history's most eloquent speeches — delivered in defeat.
Sitting Bull, refusing to sell land: "They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her." The Lakota concept of land as communal clashed fundamentally with American property law.
Frederick Jackson Turner, "Frontier Thesis" (1893): "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development." Turner's thesis celebrated the frontier while ignoring its costs — Native dispossession, environmental destruction, Mexican and Chinese labor.
Discussion Questions
- Was westward expansion inevitable? Justified?
- How did Native Americans resist? Why did resistance fail?
- How does the frontier myth shape American identity?
Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
Wovoka, a Paiute prophet, promised the Ghost Dance would restore the buffalo and remove whites. Desperate Lakota embraced it. Indian agents panicked; the Army sent troops. Sitting Bull was killed during arrest (December 1890). At Wounded Knee Creek, soldiers disarming Lakota opened fire - 250-300 killed, mostly women and children. Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers. The massacre marked the end of armed resistance. Black Elk lamented: A people's dream died there. Congress apologized in 1990 - a century later. The American Indian Movement's 1973 Wounded Knee occupation reclaimed the site for protest.
Resistance and Survival
Native resistance took many forms: armed (Plains Wars), legal (Cherokee Supreme Court cases), cultural (Ghost Dance, peyote religion), political (Red Progressive reformers). Survival itself was resistance. Boarding schools tried to kill the Indian; students preserved languages secretly. Termination (1950s) tried to end tribal status; tribes fought back. Self-determination (1970s) restored tribal control. Today, 574 federally recognized tribes exercise sovereignty - running governments, courts, schools. Casinos brought wealth to some; poverty persists for many. The fight for land, water, and rights continues - Standing Rock (2016) showed Native activism's power.
Thinking Historically: Causation, Continuity, and Change
Why did Native resistance fail despite victories like Little Bighorn? Stack the causes honestly. Military technology gaps were real but narrow — many Native fighters carried repeating rifles superior to the Army's single-shot carbines. The decisive causes were structural: a settler population that outnumbered Native peoples many times over; epidemic diseases that had reduced Native numbers for two centuries; railroads that moved troops and supplies in winter campaigns once thought impossible; and the deliberate destruction of the buffalo, encouraged by officials precisely because it destroyed the Plains economy's foundation. Hunger, more than battle, forced the surrenders; Chief Joseph's band was starving and freezing, not outgeneraled. Contingency still mattered — Red Cloud actually won his war in 1868, forcing the United States to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts — but structure narrowed what even victories could achieve.
For a century, the master interpretation was Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" (1893): free land made American democracy, and in 1890 the frontier "closed." The New Western History — Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest (1987) above all — replaced "frontier" with "conquest" and insisted the story continues past 1890: treaties, allotment, termination, and self-determination form one continuous history of sovereignty contested, not the tale of a civilization that vanished.
That continuity is this lesson's final point. The Dawes Act's ninety million lost acres, the boarding schools, and Wounded Knee were not the end. Some 574 federally recognized tribes govern today, and the Standing Rock protests of 2016 showed 1890's issues — land, water, treaty rights — still alive and litigated.
Follow the money as well as the cavalry. Conquest had a corporate balance sheet: railroad land grants transferred an area larger than Texas to private companies, whose land departments then recruited the settlers whose farms made the grants valuable; mining law (the General Mining Act of 1872) gave away mineral wealth on public land at 1872 prices; cattle companies fenced the open range with barbed wire patented in 1874. Native nations were not merely defeated in war — they were enclosed by a legal-economic system that converted their land into other people's capital. And the continuity runs forward institutionally, too: the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, championed by Commissioner John Collier, formally reversed allotment and encouraged tribal governments — proof that 1887's policy was a choice, and that later generations could choose differently, however imperfectly they funded the choice.
Quantify the demographic arc, because its shape is the argument. From several million people north of Mexico in 1500, Native population fell to a nadir of roughly 250,000 in the census of 1900 — the product of disease, war, removal, and the buffalo's destruction (some 30 million animals reduced to a few hundred wild survivors by the 1880s). Then the line turns: the twentieth century brought slow recovery, and the 2020 census counted 9.7 million people identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native alone or in combination. A history that stops at the nadir teaches vanishing; the full curve teaches survival under assault — which is why the periodization you choose is itself an interpretation.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Calling Wounded Knee a "battle." The Army was disarming a largely unarmed camp; some 250–300 Lakota, many women and children, were killed. Precision in naming is an ethical as well as factual duty.
- The benevolent Dawes Act. Whatever its reformers claimed, allotment transferred roughly ninety million acres out of Native control by 1934.
- Ending Native history in 1890. Termination, relocation, self-determination, and 574 federally recognized tribal governments today continue the story; do not write in the past tense only.
Exam Experience: SAQ Practice (APUSH Style)
The stimulus — Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq'it) of the Nez Perce, surrender speech, Bear Paw Mountains, Montana, October 5, 1877: "Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed... It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death... I will fight no more forever."
Answer all parts.
- (a) Describe the circumstances in which the speech was delivered.
- (b) Explain how United States treaty policy toward the Nez Perce produced the flight of 1877.
- (c) Explain one limitation of the speech as a historical source, and how historians handle it.
Model answers.
- (a) The speech ended the Nez Perce War. After refusing removal to a reduced reservation in Idaho, Joseph's band — some 750 people, most of them noncombatants — fled 1,400 miles toward Canada, fighting a series of rearguard actions, and were trapped forty miles from the border at Bear Paw. Joseph surrendered to Generals Howard and Miles while another leader, White Bird, escaped to Canada with part of the band.
- (b) The 1855 treaty had guaranteed the Nez Perce a large reservation including Joseph's Wallowa Valley homeland. In 1863, after gold was found, the government imposed a new treaty shrinking the reservation by about ninety percent — signed by chiefs who had no authority to sell the Wallowa band's land, and known among the Nez Perce as the "thief treaty." Joseph's band never signed. When the Army finally ordered them onto the reduced reservation in 1877, violence by young warriors against settlers triggered the flight: treaty-breaking manufactured the war.
- (c) The speech survives through white intermediaries: Joseph spoke in Nez Perce, translated by interpreters and transcribed by officers, most famously Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who may have polished its phrasing for publication. Historians therefore treat the famous wording as a translation filtered through literary hands — but the surrender, its conditions, and the sentiment are corroborated by Army records and Nez Perce oral tradition, so the speech is used as reliable evidence of the event and its meaning, with caution about exact words.
Scoring notes.
- (a) requires the specifics of circumstance — the retreat, the distance, Bear Paw — not merely "he surrendered."
- In (b), the two treaties (1855 versus 1863) are the mechanism; an answer without them describes the war, not its cause.
- (c) rewards the two-step move: name the mediation (translation/transcription), then state the corroboration. Writing the speech off as "fake" is as much an error as quoting it uncritically.
🗺️ Interactive: Empire Map — The American West — Shrinking Reservations
Map boundaries are approximate and for learning purposes.
Key Terms
- Battle of Little Bighorn (1876)
- Sioux/Cheyenne victory over Custer; "Custer's Last Stand."
- Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)
- Army killed 250–300 Lakota; marked the end of armed Native resistance.
- Dawes Act (1887)
- Broke up tribal lands; cost Native Americans 90 million acres.
- Homestead Act (1862)
- Offered 160 acres to settlers willing to farm for five years.
- Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
- Banned Chinese immigration; first race-based immigration law.
- Ghost Dance
- Native spiritual movement; Army feared it as a war signal.
The Treaty System and Its Collapse
For most of the 19th century, the United States dealt with Native nations through treaties — formal nation-to-nation agreements, over 370 of them. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 promised the Lakota the Black Hills "as long as the grass shall grow." But treaties proved worthless once gold was discovered or railroads needed routes. In 1871, Congress ended treaty-making entirely (though existing treaties remained technically binding), downgrading Native nations from diplomatic counterparts to wards of the state. The reservation system that replaced treaties confined tribes to shrinking fragments of land, policed by the U.S. Army and managed by often-corrupt federal agents.
The pattern was brutally consistent: discovery of resources on Native land → settler invasion → military "protection" of settlers → a new agreement shrinking the reservation → repeat. Red Cloud's War (1866–1868) was a rare Native victory — the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho forced the Army to abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail. But after the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 1876), where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Custer's 7th Cavalry, the Army's revenge was systematic and merciless: winter campaigns that destroyed villages, food stores, and horse herds, making resistance physically impossible.
The Buffalo and the Iron Horse
The Plains Wars were ecological wars. The American bison — tens of millions strong, the foundation of Plains Native economies, diets, and spiritual life — was slaughtered to near extinction within two decades. Commercial hunters, sometimes encouraged by Army officers who understood that killing buffalo meant killing Native independence, reduced the herds to a few hundred animals by the mid-1880s. Simultaneously, the transcontinental railroad (completed at Promontory, Utah, in 1869) and its successors sliced the Plains into sections, brought settlers by the million, and made the Army's campaigns logistically possible. The railroad companies received enormous federal land grants — over 170 million acres — which they sold to settlers. The "winning of the West" was, at bottom, a federally subsidized project of ecological and military transformation.
Voices of Resistance
Native resistance was strategic, prolonged, and led by remarkable figures. Red Cloud fought the U.S. to a standstill. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led the coalition at Little Bighorn. Quanah Parker, the Comanche leader, held out on the southern Plains until 1875, then became a successful rancher and political broker — a complicated figure who adapted without surrendering his identity. Geronimo's band of Apaches evaded thousands of U.S. troops for years before his 1886 surrender.
Perhaps the most eloquent voice was Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, who in 1877 led 800 people on a 1,170-mile fighting retreat toward Canada, outmaneuvering pursuing armies for months before surrendering 40 miles from the border. His surrender speech — "I will fight no more forever" — remains one of American history's most quoted passages, though its fame sometimes obscures the policy of removal and confinement that made such speeches necessary.
Assimilation's Cruel Tools
Once military resistance was crushed, the government turned to assimilation: the forced remaking of Native people into individual American farmers. The Dawes Act (1887) broke up tribal lands into 160-acre individual allotments, selling the "surplus" to white settlers. Tribal landholdings collapsed from 138 million acres to 48 million by 1934 — one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, conducted legally.
More devastating still were the boarding schools. Carlisle Indian Industrial School (founded 1879) and dozens of imitators seized Native children — sometimes by force — cut their hair, banned their languages, and drilled them in manual labor and Christianity. Founder Richard Henry Pratt's motto was "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Generations grew up severed from family, language, and tradition; the trauma echoes in Native communities today. Only in recent decades have investigations — including federal acknowledgment of burial sites at former schools — begun to reckon with this history.
The West as America's First Big-Government Project
The myth says the West was won by rugged individuals. The reality: it was won by the federal government. Washington funded the Army's campaigns, granted railroads more land than the state of Texas, passed the Homestead Act (1862) giving away 160-acre plots, subsidized irrigation, and set land policy for a third of the continent. The "self-made" pioneer typically traveled on a government-subsidized railroad, claimed government-surveyed land, and was protected by government troops. Recognizing this does not diminish settlers' courage — but it corrects a myth that still shapes American politics, where beneficiaries of government largesse often imagine they did it alone.
Voices from the Past — Expanded
Chief Joseph, surrender (1877): "I am tired of fighting... I will fight no more forever." Spoken after a 1,170-mile retreat, forty miles short of Canada.
A Carlisle school survivor later recalled: "They told us the Indian was dead inside us. But at night we whispered our names to each other in our own language." Resistance took quiet forms.
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier" (1893): Turner argued the frontier forged American democracy and individualism — the thesis that shaped a century of textbooks, and that modern historians have largely dismantled for ignoring Native peoples, the federal government's role, and the West's diversity.
Discussion Questions
- Was U.S. policy toward Native nations better described as conquest, negotiation, or something else? Defend your answer with specific policies.
- How did the destruction of the buffalo function as a military strategy?
- Why does the "rugged individual" myth persist despite the evidence of massive federal involvement?
🎬 Watch & Learn
- Westward Expansion: Crash Course US History #24 — CrashCourse. The myth vs. reality of the West, the federal government's role, and what expansion cost Native nations.
- Westward expansion: social and cultural development — Khan Academy. How migration west reshaped society — and devastated Indigenous peoples and the environment.
- Populism and the Populist Movement in America for Dummies — Hip Hughes. The farmers' revolt of the Gilded Age West — debt, railroads, and the People's Party.
- Continuity and change in the Gilded Age — Khan Academy. What changed — and what didn't — in work, cities, and culture from 1865 to 1898.
🔗 Explore Further
- Dawes Act (1887) — National Archives: the allotment law that broke up tribal lands — read the text and its stated "civilizing" purpose.
- Chief Joseph's Surrender Speech — PBS: The West: the full text of the 1877 speech, with historical context.
- Interactive: PBS — The West (Ken Burns): episode guides, timelines, biographies, and primary documents from the landmark documentary series.