Westward Expansion - American Frontier Wars
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American Frontier Wars
As the US expanded westward, it came into contact with and competed for resources with native peoples. As settlers tried to claim land as their own, conflicts with many groups occurred.
Despite commonly being referred to as the Indian Wars, the relentless attacks and assaults against Native Americans by the US Army began in 1860 and lasted for at least 30 years.
The Oklahoma Land Rush
For several decades, land in Oklahoma had been set aside by the US government for forced Native American relocation. Once settlers realized how little frontier land was still available, they began to pressure the government to open the land up for settlement. By applying the Dawes Act, the government took portions of Oklahoma away from Native American tribes. On April 22, 1889, the land was made available to homesteaders. Prospective landowners streamed into Oklahoma by the thousands to stake 160-acre plots as specified by the Homestead Act.
New Mexico Land Grabs
The Mexican-American War ended in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Included in the terms of the treaty were provisions allowing Mexicans who lived in the territory ceded to the US to retain their property and become US citizens. However, the terms of the treaty were poorly enforced, and as the West was increasingly being taken over by settlers, lands were steadily stolen from Mexican Americans by white Americans through such methods as squatting and filing fraudulent homestead and land ownership claims. Some Mexican Americans mounted strong resistance to these land seizures.
The Cortina Wars
As a result of the new border after the Mexican-American War, Mexicans in the United States were supposed to be able to keep their land. However, many Texans did not respect Mexican land rights, leading to conflict. Juan Cortina was a former Mexican soldier whose family had owned a lot of land around the Rio Grande and who personally felt the effects of land grabs by Texans who did not recognize his family's property rights. He became a leader of armed resistance in a series of conflicts with local Texans, Texas Rangers, and even the Confederate Army that lasted from 1859–1861 and came to be known as the Cortina Wars.
Las Gorras Blancas
Las Gorras Blancas (Spanish for The White Caps) formed in response to individuals and corporations that laid claim to what had previously been public lands in New Mexico. The group, which was active from 1889 to 1891 and may have had between 700 and 1,500 members, operated mainly at night, destroying fences, cutting railroad lines, and destroying other property of those responsible for the land seizures. Las Gorras Blancas stated that their mission was to "protect the rights of the people," and were particularly concerned with helping the lower classes, who were the ones most affected by the claiming and closure of public lands.
Conflict between the US Government and Native Americans in the late 1800s took two primary forms: policies and programs designed to force Native Americans to adopt European American culture, and outright armed conflict.
A series of armed conflicts between Native Americans and the United States lasted 30 years—from approximately eighteen sixty1860 to eighteen ninety1890. This period has also been referred to as the Indian Wars.
These wars occurred as the United States continued to expand its territory with the belief that they had the right to govern everyone they encountered.
Many tactics were used to control and subdue Native Americans, and fighting ensued as they resisted and fought to retain their ways of life.
Bison, or what is more commonly known and referred to as the American buffalo, provided food, clothing, and shelter for Native Americans. They also held religious significance.
As they waged war against Native Americans, one tactic the United States used was to destroy buffalo to take away the food supply and other resources from the Native Americans.
Between 1860 and 1890, the American buffalo population was reduced from 13 million to 1,000.
Attacks on Native American Culture
Reservation System
One of the government's earliest methods of altering the Native American way of life was attempting to confine individual tribes—including traditionally nomadic tribes—to defined areas of land known as reservations. On the reservations, Native Americans were supposed to retain a degree of sovereignty and be safe from interference and encroachment by settlers. In reality, as soon as reservations began to interfere with westward expansion, the government either renegotiated or didn't follow through on most treaties and reservation boundaries.
Americanization Movement
The Americanization Movement started out in the late 1800s among social reformers who disagreed with the poor treatment and killing of Native Americans. Instead, they believed that the solution to what they thought of as the Native American problem was to Americanize Native Americans so they could assimilate into European American society. Efforts inappropriately named civilizing, focused on forcing Native Americans through education, religious conversion, vocational training, and promotion of Western ideals and values, such as land ownership.
Forced Assimilation
Americanization efforts that were dictated by the US government attempted to force Native Americans to assimilate. The Dawes Act was one such act. It allotted land to the head of each Native American family, disregarding the fact that Native American cultural traditions did not generally include land ownership. The government also forcibly separated Native American children from their parents and tribes and placed them in assimilationist schools. Some children never saw their families again.
Residential Schools
Residential boarding schools were set up with the goal of assimilating Native American children into European American culture by removing them from the influence of their own culture and completely immersing them in Western civilization. At the schools they were given Anglo names and clothing, and they were not permitted to speak their Native languages. In addition to devaluing Native American culture, the schools also often exploited the students, keeping them in substandard living conditions and even using them for child labor.
The reservation system as it existed in the mid-1800s was largely the product of the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the US government and chiefs of several Native American tribes. The US government did not fulfill many of the terms of the treaty, including keeping settlers off the land, which was desirable for farming and mining.
Encroachments and attacks by settlers prompted attacks and retaliations by Native Americans, which led to a cycle of conflict that soon involved state militias and the US Army.
Treaties such as the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek established new reservations for several tribes in the late 1860s, but once again, settlers largely ignored Native American land rights if the land they wanted happened to fall within tribal lands.
Over the 30-year span of the so-called Indian Wars, key conflicts included the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of Little Bighorn, the resistance of Chief Joseph, the Ghost Dance movement, and the Wounded Knee Massacre.
American Frontier Wars
Sand Creek Massacre 1864
Under the direction of General John Chivington, the Colorado militia massacred nearly 100 Cheyenne men, women, and children who were camped at Sand Creek, Colorado. The group of Cheyenne had already surrendered and were flying a white flag at the time of the massacre. The brutality of the massacre fed Native American anger and helped spark a cycle of conflicts that would last for decades.
Ghost Dance Movement 1870 — 1890
The Ghost Dance was a Native American religious movement that began in the 1870s. Native American lands had been taken, their ways of life had been destroyed, and many had died. The Ghost Dance was seen as a way of calling upon spiritual forces to restore what had been lost and rid them of their White enemies because it foretold that a Native American deliverer would arise to help the tribes.
Battle of Little Bighorn 1876
Tension arose between the Sioux and the US Army due to failure of settlers and the Army to respect Sioux lands in the Dakotas after gold was discovered on reservation lands. The Sioux gathered in Montana in large numbers and resisted returning to reservations, so the government sent troops to force the return. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his troops were scouting in the Little Bighorn Valley when they were ambushed and quickly defeated by around 3,000 Sioux. The battle is remembered as the worst defeat the US Army had during the Indian Wars.
Resistance by Chief Joseph 1877
Chief Joseph was a leader of the Nez Percé tribe who became well-known due to his actions in the Nez Percé War of 1877. Toward the end of the conflict, Chief Joseph attempted to lead a group of Nez Percé to freedom in Canada. He nearly succeeded and was forced to surrender only 40 miles from the border. After the surrender, Chief Joseph turned to diplomacy and spent much of the rest of his life trying to negotiate the return of the Nez Percé to their lands.
Wounded Knee Massacre 1890
The US Bureau of Indian Affairs saw the Ghost Dance movement as a threat that might result in an uprising, and so it was banned. The US also ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux. After he resisted and was killed, the Sioux fled. The US army captured them and took them to a camp at Wounded Knee Creek. When a gun fired, Army soldiers murdered over 200 Sioux, including women and children.
The US government's accounts of the American Frontier Wars and what they were doing to Native Americans differed dramatically from Native Americans' experiences. For example, the government's version of events might say that they helped preserve Native Americans from extinction by providing them land on reservations and teaching them to be civilized. The Native American experience was from the perspective that they were forcefully removed from their land and restricted to unfamiliar areas under threat of severe punishment that were traumatic and demoralizing.
In what ways did westward expansion shape the experiences of various people living in North America?
Chief Joseph's "I Will Fight No More Forever" Speech
Play audio Chief Joseph, known by the Nez Percé as Heinmot Tooyalakekt, was born in Oregon in 1840, the son of a Nez Percé chief. He became chief himself in 1871 when his father died. In the 1870s, some groups of Nez Percé had agreed to a treaty that bound them to live on a reservation. Chief Joseph's group had not agreed but was still pressured to move to reservation lands. He was a skilled diplomat and quickly became a leader among the Nez Percé who were resisting the reservations. He tried to negotiate a return to tribal lands, but his attempts were unsuccessful.
Eventually, the Nez Percé were given a deadline to report to the reservation. Chief Joseph's group planned to comply, but then violence broke out between settlers and another group of Nez Percé, touching off the Nez Percé War. Rather than continue to fight, after several weeks Chief Joseph and his people attempted to flee over 1,500 miles to reach Canada. They were forced to surrender near the border, at which point Chief Joseph delivered this speech:
"I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, 'Yes' or 'No.' He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are — perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. 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."
Chief Joseph's final declaration shows his determination because of his use of the word "forever" and his reference to the sun. His other statements reveal his feelings and his reasons for wanting this particular conflict to end, but the final statement expresses determination beyond the current day or battle.
Native American Perspectives
Native Americans viewed assimilationist policies such as the Dawes Act and forced education of Native American children very differently than White Americans did. In the firsthand narrative below, an older Native American from the Nooksack tribe describes his feelings about the "choices" and "promises" Native Americans were forced to accept by White society.
"Then the white chiefs say, 'It is well. You may choose for yourselves. You may go with the Lummis and be reservation Indians, or you may each receive an allotment along the streams of your old territory, and be domain Indians. If you go to the reservations, we will take care of you, for are you not our brothers? But, if you take allotments, you must live as white men live, and abide by the laws of Washington. You will be as white men.'
"Now I see the Nooksacs [sic] have chosen. They have chosen allotments that they might be free as white men. But, where is that freedom? White men have taken our children from our houses to schools where they learn to be white men. But, can the deer of the high hills become a cow by going to school? Can the sons of free Nooksacs become farmers as are the whites? Can he learn the ways of slaves?"
"Now I am old and my eyes see dimly. But, I see only a handful of people who call themselves Nooksacs. The white man has promised many things. But this is what his promises has [sic] brought to the Nooksacs– a handful of people left where once there were many. I am an old man, yet I still live. Yet, I must talk through an interpreter to the sons of Nooksacs. Is this the promise of the white men?"
-From A Picture of Northwest Indians, U.S. Work Projects Administration, Federal Writers' Project
The US Government tried to justify its policies towards Native Americans by claiming that they helped the Native Americans. White social reformers acknowledged the mistreatment of Native Americans, but they believed it could best be solved via assimilation. Native Americans did not want to assimilate to a foreign way of life promoted by people who had consistently stolen from them and broken their promises.
Wounded Knee and Sand Creek were the sites of massacres of Native Americans by the Army. At the Battle of Little Big Horn, 62 US soldiers died.
Manifest Destiny was used to justify many acts by the United States against Native Americans, including murder and removal from their lands.
In this lesson you had two questions to investigate:
What challenges and opportunities were posed by American expansion in the late 19th century? You discovered that westward expansion offered economic opportunities. However, those who moved westward sometimes encountered a harsh climate and faced challenges related to competition for land and resources.
In what ways did expansion shape the experiences of various people living in North America? For European Americans, expansion largely offered economic opportunity. For immigrant groups, expansion offered economic opportunity, but also cultural conflict and discrimination. For Native Americans, expansion meant tragedy and the end of a way of life as US government policies stripped them of land and waged both physical and cultural war against them.
Summary of Westward Expansion
War with Mexico 1846 — 1848
Play audio The United States declared war against Mexico in 1846. When the war ended in 1848, Mexico ceded most of the Southwestern states to the US. Failure of the United States to protect the rights of Mexican Americans under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo led to decades of land conflicts as Mexicans resisted encroachment by settlers, railroads, and other economic interests.
Native American Conflicts 1860 — 1890
Play audio Beginning during the Civil War and continuing for 30 years, settlers and the US Army were involved in armed conflicts against Native Americans as European Americans repeatedly broke treaties and moved ever farther onto ancestral Native American lands. The armed conflicts mainly came to an end in 1890 following the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee.
Homestead Act 1862
Play audio The United States encouraged settlers to move to the plains with the Homestead Act, which offered plots of land to those who made a home on the range and lived on the land for at least five years.
Transcontinental Railroad Built 1863 — 1869
Play audio The Transcontinental Railroad was a major factor in movement westward. Travel and movement of goods became exponentially faster and cheaper. Many people, including Chinese and Irish immigrants, labored to build the railroad. After about six years, it was finally completed in 1869.
Invention of Barbed Wire 1874
Play audio Although barbed wire existed as early as 1868, it did not become widely used until 1874, when Edward Glidden patented an improved barbed wire design. Barbed wire enabled settlers on the plains to fence their land despite the scarcity of wood, contributing to the end of the open range and hastening the closure of the frontier.
The Close of the Frontier 1890
Play audio The US Census Bureau announced that the West had been settled and there was no longer a frontier in 1890, following the last major settlement rush into Oklahoma Territory in 1889. Some, like Frederick Jackson Turner, viewed the closure of the frontier as a pivotal point in America’s history that had the potential to affect how American society developed going forward.
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