2.3 Westward Expansion and Native American Conflicts

Westward expansion in the late 19th century reshaped America's geography, economy, and population. Driven by Manifest Destiny and economic opportunity, settlers pushed into the Great Plains and beyond, displacing Native American peoples and transforming the landscape. Understanding this period means grappling with the tension between national growth and the devastating costs imposed on Indigenous communities.

Westward Expansion Motivations and Consequences

Driving Forces

Manifest Destiny was the widespread belief that the United States was destined to stretch across the entire North American continent. By the post-Civil War era, this wasn't just an abstract idea; it shaped government policy, railroad investment, and how ordinary Americans thought about the West.

Economic opportunity pulled people westward in huge numbers:

• Gold and silver strikes (like the Comstock Lode in Nevada, 1859) drew miners and speculators
• Ranchers saw vast open grasslands as ideal for cattle operations
• Entrepreneurs followed, setting up businesses to serve growing western communities

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to any citizen (or intended citizen) who would live on it and farm it for five years. This was a direct government incentive to populate the West, and by 1900 roughly 600,000 claims had been filed.

The First Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, tied everything together. Cross-country travel dropped from months by wagon to about a week by rail, making migration practical for families who never would have attempted an overland journey.

Consequences and Impact

• Displacement of Native peoples: Settlers and the federal government steadily encroached on tribal lands, pushing Native communities off ancestral territory and onto reservations
• New regional cultures: Cowboy culture, cattle drives, and the mythology of the "Wild West" emerged from this era, along with new states and territories with their own political identities
• Environmental strain: Overgrazing destroyed grasslands, deforestation accelerated, and fierce disputes erupted over water rights between settlers, ranchers, and mining operations
• Agricultural and mining expansion: Large-scale farming operations and cattle ranches spread across the Plains, while mining towns boomed around gold, silver, and copper deposits, feeding eastern markets with raw materials

Government Policies and Native American Communities

Forced Relocation and Confinement

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the president to negotiate (and in practice, to force) the relocation of Native tribes from their homelands to designated territories west of the Mississippi. The most infamous result was the Trail of Tears, during which thousands of Cherokee and members of other tribes died from exposure, disease, and starvation during forced marches.

Note that the Indian Removal Act predates this unit's time period by several decades, but it set the precedent for later policies. By the Gilded Age, the federal government had shifted from removal to confinement through the reservation system.

• Reservations were established through treaties and congressional acts, confining tribes to specific tracts of land
• These lands were often resource-poor, far from traditional hunting grounds and sacred sites
• Conditions on many reservations were dire: poverty, malnutrition, and disease became widespread

Assimilation and Cultural Suppression

The Dawes Act of 1887 represented a shift in strategy from confinement to forced assimilation. Instead of keeping tribes on communal reservations, the government broke tribal lands into individual 160-acre allotments. The stated goal was to turn Native Americans into individual farmers on the European-American model. In practice:

• "Surplus" land left over after allotment was sold to white settlers, costing tribes roughly 90 million acres by 1934
• Communal tribal structures were undermined, since land was now held by individuals rather than the tribe
• Traditional land-use practices (seasonal migration, communal farming) became impossible under the allotment system

The Indian Boarding School system removed Native children from their families and sent them to government-run schools, often hundreds of miles away. The explicit philosophy, as one official put it, was to "kill the Indian, save the man." These schools suppressed Native languages, banned cultural practices, and forced children to adopt English and European-American customs. The long-term damage to tribal identity and intergenerational knowledge was enormous.

Other suppression policies included:

• Banning traditional religious ceremonies such as the Sun Dance and Ghost Dance
• Prohibiting the use of Native languages in schools and official settings
• Routinely breaking treaties whenever land or resources became valuable to settlers or the government, deepening mistrust and dispossession

Transcontinental Railroad's Role in Migration

Improved Transportation and Accessibility

The First Transcontinental Railroad, completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines. Its effects on migration were immediate and dramatic.

• Travel time from the East Coast to California dropped from four to six months to roughly one week
• Shipping costs for goods plummeted, connecting western farms and mines to eastern markets
• New settlements sprang up along rail lines, and many western towns literally owed their existence to a railroad depot

Promotion and Incentives

Railroad companies didn't just build tracks; they actively recruited settlers. The federal government had granted railroads enormous tracts of public land (about 175 million acres total), and the companies needed people to buy that land and generate freight traffic.

• Companies ran advertising campaigns in the eastern U.S. and Europe, portraying the West as a land of opportunity
• They offered discounted fares and land-purchase financing to attract families
• Railroad construction itself relied heavily on immigrant labor, particularly Chinese workers on the Central Pacific line, who faced severe discrimination, dangerous conditions (including blasting tunnels through the Sierra Nevada), and lower pay than white workers

Impact on Native American Communities

For Native peoples, the railroad was devastating:

• Construction cut directly through tribal lands, often without consent, destroying hunting grounds and sacred sites
• The railroad enabled the near-extermination of the Plains bison herds, which were central to the economies and cultures of tribes like the Lakota and Comanche. Hunters could now ship hides east by rail, and the army encouraged bison killing as a way to weaken Native resistance
• Rail lines allowed the rapid deployment of U.S. military forces to suppress tribal resistance, shifting the balance of power decisively against Native communities
• Increased settlement along rail corridors intensified competition for land and resources, accelerating the push to confine tribes onto reservations

Key Events and Conflicts: Little Bighorn, the Dawes Act, and Wounded Knee

Battle of Little Bighorn (1876)

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer led roughly 210 soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry against a large encampment of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. Custer's force was wiped out in what became known as Custer's Last Stand.

• The battle was a significant military victory for the Native coalition, led by figures like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse
• It shocked the American public and challenged assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. military dominance in the West
• The aftermath, however, was harsh: the government poured more troops into the region, and within a year most Lakota bands had been forced to surrender and relocate to reservations
• Little Bighorn became a turning point not because it stopped expansion, but because it intensified the government's determination to crush Native resistance

Dawes Act (1887)

The Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) was the government's major legislative tool for forced assimilation. Its key provisions:

1. Tribal lands were divided into 160-acre allotments for each head of household (80 acres for single adults, 40 acres for children)
2. Allotted land was held in trust by the government for 25 years, after which the owner received full title and U.S. citizenship
3. All remaining "surplus" land was opened to non-Native purchase

The results were catastrophic for Native communities. Tribal landholdings shrank from about 138 million acres in 1887 to roughly 48 million acres by 1934. The allotment system created a patchwork of Native and non-Native ownership within reservations, complicating governance and resource management for generations. The act remained in effect until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reversed course and attempted to restore some tribal land and self-governance.

Ghost Dance Movement and Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)

The Ghost Dance movement emerged in the late 1880s, inspired by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. It was both a spiritual revival and an expression of resistance, promising that faithful practice would bring back the bison, restore ancestral lands, and reunite the living with the dead. The movement spread rapidly among Plains tribes, particularly the Lakota.

U.S. officials saw the Ghost Dance as a threat. They moved to ban the practice and arrest its leaders. Tensions escalated sharply:

• On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed by reservation police during an attempted arrest
• On December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the 7th Cavalry opened fire on a group of Lakota who were in the process of surrendering their weapons. An estimated 250 to 300 Lakota men, women, and children were killed

The Wounded Knee Massacre is widely regarded as the end of armed Native resistance on the Plains. It exposed the violence underlying U.S. assimilation policies and remains one of the most significant events in Native American history. Its legacy continued to shape Native activism well into the 20th century, including the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement (AIM).