The West after 1877: settlement and the assault on American Indian nations

After the Civil War, railroads, mining, cattle ranching, and the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered 160 acres of public land to settlers, drew millions of people west. That expansion came at the direct expense of American Indian nations. The U.S. Army fought wars against Plains nations such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche; hunters slaughtered the buffalo herds that Plains peoples depended on, reducing them from millions to only a few hundred by the late 1880s; and treaties were broken as tribes were forced onto shrinking reservations. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservation land into individual plots and sold off the "surplus," costing Indian nations about two thirds of their remaining land by 1934, while boarding schools separated children from their families and tried to erase their languages and cultures. In 1890, U.S. soldiers killed about 250 or more Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. The same year, the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. Chinese immigrants who built railroads and Mexican Americans in the Southwest also faced discrimination and loss of land.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report