AMSCO 6.3 Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development

Overview

AMSCO Topic 6.3, "Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development," covers the human side of settling the West from 1865 to 1898: the closing of the frontier, Turner's famous frontier thesis, the Indian Wars and reservation policy, the Dawes Act, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and the birth of the conservation movement. This chapter pairs with AMSCO 6.2 on the West's economic development, which handles railroads, mining, and ranching. Here, the focus is on who lived in the West, how settlement created violent competition for land, and how the U.S. government's policies tried to erase American Indian sovereignty and culture.

The big takeaway for the AP exam: as settlers, American Indians, and Mexican Americans competed for land and resources (especially after the bison were nearly wiped out), conflict exploded. The government violated treaties, used military force against resistance, and confined American Indians to reservations, yet many tribes preserved their cultures and identities anyway.

The Closing of the Frontier and Turner's Thesis

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier settled, except for a few pockets. The year before, the Oklahoma Territory (land once set aside for American Indians) was opened to homesteaders in the last great land rush.

Turner's Frontier Thesis

Three years after the Census announcement, historian Frederick Jackson Turner published "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). His argument:

• Settling the frontier was an evolutionary process. First hunters, then ranchers, miners, and farmers, and finally town and city builders.
• 300 years of frontier experience shaped American character, promoting independence, individualism, inventiveness, practical-mindedness, and democracy.
• The downside: frontier life also made Americans wasteful of natural resources.

Turner also saw the frontier as a "safety valve" that released social discontent by always offering a fresh start. With the frontier closed, he worried the U.S. would slide into the class divisions and social conflict that plagued Europe.

How Historians Push Back on Turner

Later historians challenged Turner's "cities came last" idea. Frontier towns often came first. "Boosters" laid out town plots on paper and competed to win the county seat, state capital, a railroad depot, or a college to make their town the regional hub. Urban markets drove frontier growth too: the cattle frontier only worked because railroads linked it to Chicago and eastern markets. After 1865, frontier development and urban growth were interdependent.

One more reality check: by the 1890s, the biggest migration in America wasn't east to west. It was rural to urban, as people chased opportunity in industry rather than agriculture.

American Indians in the West

The West in 1865 was home to dozens of distinct American Indian cultural and tribal groups, not one uniform "Indian" society.

• Pueblo groups (Hopi, Zuni) in New Mexico and Arizona lived in permanent settlements raising corn and livestock.
• The Navajo and Apache of the Southwest were nomadic hunter-gatherers who adopted more settled lives, raising crops and livestock and producing arts and crafts.
• Pacific Northwest tribes (Chinook, Shasta) built complex communities around abundant fish and game.
• About two-thirds of western tribal peoples lived on the Great Plains. Nomadic tribes like the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, and Comanche had built a way of life around horses (introduced by the Spanish) and buffalo hunting. They lived in bands of 300 to 500 within tribes of several thousand.

That loose tribal organization mattered. White Americans' failure to understand it (and the nomadic lifestyle it supported) fueled many late-19th-century conflicts.

Reservation Policy

Jackson's 1830s removal policy assumed land west of the Mississippi would stay "Indian country" permanently. Wagon trains on the Oregon Trail and transcontinental railroad plans killed that assumption. In 1851, councils at Fort Laramie (Wyoming) and Fort Atkinson (Wisconsin) began assigning Plains tribes large tracts of land, reservations with definite boundaries. Most Plains tribes refused to stay put and kept following the migrating buffalo.

The Indian Wars

Settlement by miners, ranchers, and homesteaders on American Indian lands produced brutal fighting, with the U.S. Army responsible for several massacres. Key events to know:

• In 1866, during the Sioux War, Sioux fighters wiped out an army column under Captain William Fetterman.
• New treaties tried to isolate Plains Indians on smaller reservations, but gold miners ignored treaty lines when gold was found in the Dakotas' Black Hills. Younger warriors and chiefs left out of negotiations denounced the treaties.
• The Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 ended federal recognition of tribes as independent nations and ended treaty-making approved by Congress.
• The 1870s brought the Red River War against the Comanche in the southern plains and a second Sioux War led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the north. In 1876, the Sioux destroyed Colonel George Custer's command at Little Big Horn.
• Chief Joseph's attempt to lead a band of Nez Percé to Canada ended in surrender in 1877.

Constant Army pressure forced tribe after tribe to comply with government terms even after the government violated treaties. The slaughter of most of the buffalo by the early 1880s doomed the nomadic hunting culture of the Plains peoples.

Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

The Ghost Dance movement was the last major resistance to U.S. government control, a religiously inspired movement whose leaders believed it could restore prosperity to American Indians. During the government's campaign to suppress it, Sioux medicine man Sitting Bull was killed during his arrest. In December 1890, the U.S. Army gunned down more than 200 American Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in the Dakotas. That massacre marked the end of the Indian Wars.

Assimilation and the Dawes Act

Helen Hunt Jackson's bestseller A Century of Dishonor (1881) chronicled the injustices done to American Indians. It built sympathy in the East, but ironically also built support for ending Indian culture through assimilation. Reformers pushed formal education, job training, and conversion to Christianity, and set up boarding schools like the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania to separate American Indian children from their people and teach them White culture and farming and industrial skills.

The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 was the legislative version of assimilation. It aimed to break up tribal organizations, which many believed kept American Indians from becoming "civilized." Details:

• Tribal lands were divided into individual plots of up to 160 acres, depending on family size.
• Citizenship went to those who stayed on the land 25 years and "adopted the habits of civilized life."
• The government distributed 47 million acres to American Indians, but 90 million acres of former reservation land (often the best land) was sold off to White settlers by the government, speculators, or American Indians themselves.

The policy failed. By 1900, disease and poverty had reduced the American Indian population to about 200,000, most living as wards of the federal government.

Later Reversals

In 1924, partly admitting forced assimilation had failed, the federal government granted citizenship to all American Indians regardless of Dawes Act compliance. The Indian Reorganization Act (1934), part of FDR's New Deal, promoted the reestablishment of tribal organization and culture. Today more than 3 million American Indians belonging to 500 tribes live in the United States.

Mexican Americans in the Southwest

Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 opened trade with the United States, especially along the Santa Fe Trail, a nearly 1,000-mile route linking Santa Fe, New Mexico, with western Missouri. It stayed a vital economic link until a railroad replaced it in 1880.

After the Mexican War, Mexican landowners in the Southwest and California were guaranteed property rights and citizenship. In practice, drawn-out legal proceedings often cost them their land to new Anglo arrivals. Hispanic culture survived in Spanish-speaking strongholds like the New Mexico territories, border towns, and California barrios.

Mexican Americans moved across the West for work, in Colorado's sugar beet fields and mines and on railroad construction. Before 1917 the border with Mexico was open, with few records kept of seasonal workers or permanent settlers. Like European immigrants, Mexicans were drawn by the region's explosive economic growth. The result: Mexican Americans, American Indians, and White settlers all competed for land and resources, which is exactly the conflict dynamic the AP exam wants you to explain.

The Conservation Movement

Worry over deforestation sparked the conservation movement, helped along by stunning paintings and photographs of western landscapes. Milestones:

• Yosemite Valley preserved as a California state park in 1864 (national park in 1890).
• Yellowstone dedicated as the first national park in 1872.
• Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz advocated forest reserves and a federal forest service; Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland reserved 33 million acres of national timber.
• The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 and Forest Management Act of 1897 withdrew federal timberlands from development and regulated their use.

Know the distinction between two camps. Conservationists believed in scientific management and regulated use of natural resources. Preservationists, like John Muir (a leading founder of the Sierra Club in 1892), wanted natural areas protected from human interference entirely. Arbor Day (established 1872) and the educational work of the Audubon Society and Sierra Club showed growing environmental awareness by 1900.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

Reinforce this chapter with the matching course-topic guide on Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development, then keep moving through the unit with AMSCO 6.4 on the "New South". Browse all chapters on the APUSH AMSCO notes page.

To check your understanding, try guided multiple-choice practice on Period 6 content, or write a response about federal Indian policy and get instant feedback with FRQ practice. The key terms glossary is a quick way to drill the vocabulary above.