Chapter 16: Dispersal of the Tribes

Objectives: Dispersal of the Tribes

o We will study American government policy and treatment of Native Americans and the establishment of the reservation system.

o We will study both the rise and hardship of farmers and agriculture in the West and its impact on the West.

(1Ki 21:16) And it came to pass,

when Ahab heard that Naboth

was dead, that Ahab rose up to

go down to the vineyard of

Naboth the Jezreelite, to take

possession of it.

o The traditional policy of the

federal government was to regard

the tribes simultaneously as

independent nations.

o And as wards of the president,

and negotiate treaties with them

that were solemnly ratified by the

Senate.

White Tribal Policies:

o This limited concept of Indian sovereignty had been responsible for the government’s attempt before 1860 to erect a permanent frontier between whites and Indians.

o To reserve the region west of the bend of the Missouri River as permanent Indian Country.

White Tribal Policies:

o Treaties or agreements with the tribes seldom survived the pressure of white settlers eager for access to the Indian lands.

o The history of relations between the U.S. and Native Americans was therefore one of nearly endless broken promises.

White Tribal Policies:

o By the early 1850s, the idea of

establishing one great enclave

in which many tribes could live

gave way, in the face of white

demands for access to lands in

Indian Territory, to a new

reservation policy known as

“concentration.”

White Tribal Policies:

o In 1851, each tribes was assigned its own defined reservation, confirmed by separate treaties—treaties of ten illegitimately negotiated with unauthorized representatives chosen by whites, people known sarcastically as “treaty chiefs.”

o The new arrangement had many benefits for whites and few for the Indians.

White Tribal Policies:

o It divided the tribes from one another and made them easier to control.

o It allowed the government to force tribes into scattered locations and to take over the most desirable lands for white settlement.

o But it did not survive as the basis of Indian policy for long.

White Tribal Policies:

o Worsening the fate of the tribes was the white Anglos’ relentless slaughtering of the buffalo herds that supported the tribes’ way of life.

o Even in the 1850s, whites and been killing buffalo at a rapid rate to provide food and supplies for the large bands of migrants traveling to the gold rush in California.

White Tribal Policies:

o After the Civil War the White demand for buffalo hides became a national phenomenon partly for economic reasons and partly as a fad.

o Everyone east of the Missouri seemed to want a buffalo robe from the romantic west.

o There was strong demand for Buffalo leather, which were used to make machine belts in eastern factories.

White Tribal Policies:

o Gang of professional hunters swarmed over the plains to shoot the huge animals.

o Railroad companies hired riflemen and arranged shooting expeditions to kill large numbers of buffalo, hoping to thin the herds.

White Tribal Policies:

o There was almost incessant fighting between whites and Indians from 1850s to the 1880s, as Indians struggled against the growing threats to their civilizations.

o Indians warriors, usually traveling in raiding parties of thirty to forty men attacked wagon trains and coaches and isolated ranches, often in retaliation for earlier attacks.

The Indian Wars:

o In response whites called a large

territorial militia.

o The governor urged all friendly

Indians to congregate at army

posts for protection before the

army began its campaign.

The Indian Wars:

o One Arapaho and Cheyenne band under Chief Black Kettle, apparently in response to the invitation camped near Fort Lyon on Sand Creek in November 1864.

o Some members of the party were warriors, but Black Kettle believed he was under official protection and exhibited no hostile intention.

The Indian Wars:

o Nevertheless Colonel J.M. Chivington apparently encouraged by the army commander of the district led a volunteer military force.

o Largely consisted of unemployed miners, many apparently drunk to unsuspecting camp and massacred 133 people, 105 of them women and children.

o Black Kettle himself escaped the Sand Creek massacre.

The Indian Wars:

o At the end of the Civil War, white troops stepped up their wars against the western Indians on several fronts.

o The most serious and sustained conflict was in Montana.

o Also unofficial violence by White vigilantes engaged in “Indian hunting” where they hunted and killed Indians for fun.

o Waves of White settlers and miners caused Indians to resist the encroachment.

The Indian Wars:

o In the Northern plains, the Sioux rose up in 1875 and left their reservation.

o When white officials ordered them to return, bands of warriors gathered in Montana and united under two great leaders: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

The Indian Wars:

o Three army columns set out to round them up and force them back onto the reservation.

o With the expedition, as colonel of the famous Seventh Calvary, was the colorful and controversial George A. Custard, a golden hair, romantic glory seeker.

The Indian Wars:

o At the Battle of Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876, the most famous of all conflicts between whites and Indians.

o The tribal warriors surprised Custer and 264 members of his regiment surrounded them, and killed every man.

o Custer was accused of rashness but he encountered something that no white man would likely have predicted.

The Indian Wars:

o One of the most dramatic episodes of Indian history happened in Idaho in 1877.

o The Nez Perce’ Tribe was a small and relatively peaceful tribe, who were forced into reservation with another branch of the tribe that had accepted a treaty in the 1850s.

o With no realistic prospect of resisting, the Indians began the journey to the reservation; but on the way, several younger Indians, drunk and angry killed four white settlers.

The Indian Wars:

o The chiefs had gathered as many as 2,500 warriors, one of the largest Indian armies ever assembled at one time in the United States.

o But the Indians did not have the political organization or the supplies to keep their troops united.

o Soon the warriors drifted off in bands to elude pursuit or search for food, and the army eventually forced them back to the Dakota Reservation.

The Indian Wars:

o The leader of the Nez Perce’ Chief Joseph urged his followers to flee American troops.

o Joseph moved with 200 men and 350 children and elders in a effort to reach Canada to take refuge with the Sioux there.

o They were pursued by American troops evading them for 1,321 miles, seventy five days but finally caught just before the Canadian border.

The Indian Wars:

o Some escaped and slipped across the border; but Joseph and most of his followers discouraged and broken gave up.

o Joseph said “I am Tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

The Indian Wars:

o He surrendered to Miles in exchange for a promise that his band could return to the Nez Perce’ reservation in Idaho.

o But the government refused to honor this promise and were shipped to one place or another for several years and in the process many died of disease and malnutrition.

The Indian Wars:

o The last Indians to maintain organized resistance against the whites were the Chiricahua, Apaches who fought intermittently from the 1860s to the late 1880s.

o Apache leader Geronimo unwilling to bow to white pressures to assimilate, fought on for more than a decade, leading Apache warriors in intermittent raids against white outposts.

o But warriors sustained consistent casualties.

The Indian Wars:

o By 1886, Geronimo’s plight was hopeless.

o His band consisted of only about thirty people, including women and children, while his white pursuers numbered perhaps ten thousand.

o Geronimo recognized the odds and surrenderd, an event that marked the end of formal warfare between Indians and Whites.

The Indian Wars:

o The Apache wars were the most violent of all Indian conflicts, perhaps because the tribes were now the most desperate.

o But it was the whites who committed the most flagrant and vicious atrocities.

o Miners in 1871 raided an Apache camp, slaughtered over a hundred Indians, and captured children whom they sold as slaves to rival tribes.

The Indian Wars:

o In the 1890s the Sioux experienced a revival that itself symbolized the catastrophic effects of the white assaults on Indian civilization.

o A prophet named Wovoka inspired a spiritual awakening or revival that emphasized the coming of a Messiah but its most conspicuous feature was a mass, emotional “Ghost Dance” which inspired ecstatic visons.

o Among these visions were images of a retreat with white people from the plains and a restoration of the great buffalo herds.

The Indian Wars:

o White agents in the reservation became fearful of the spectacle.

o On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Calvary tried to round up about 350 Sioux at Wounded Knee South Dakota when fighting broke out in which 40 white soldiers and more than 300 of the Indians including women and children died.

o What precipitated the conflict is a matter of dispute.

o The battle became a one sided massacre.

The Indian Wars:

o The Federal Government had moved to destroy forever the tribal structure that had always been the cornerstone of Indian culture.

o Reversing its policy of nearly fifty years of creating reservations in which tribes would be isolated from white society, Congress abolished the practice by which tribes owned reservation lands communally.

The Dawes Act:

o Some supporters of the new policy believed that they were acting for the good of the Indians, whom they considered a “vanishing race” in need of rescue by white society.

o The Dawes Act sought to force Indians to become landowners and farmers, to abandon their collective society and culture and become part of White Civilization.

The Dawes Act:

o In any case, white administration of the program was so corrupt and inept, that ultimately the government simply abandoned it.

o The interests of the Indians were not compatible with those of the expanding white civilization.

o Whites successfully settled the American West only at the expense of the region’s indigenous peoples.

The Dawes Act:

o The decisive phase of white

settlements was when farmers

poured into the plains and beyond.

o Farmers enclosed land that was

once been hunting territory for

Indians and grazing territory for

cattle, establishing a new agriculture

region.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE WESTERN FARMER:

o Railroad was the most important factor that produced the surge of western settlement.

o Before the Civil War, the Great Plains had been accessible only through a difficult journey by wagon.

o But beginning in the 1860s a great new network of railroad lines developed, spearheaded by the transcontinental routes Congress had authorized and subsidized in 1862.

o They made huge new areas of settlement accessible.

Farming on the Plains:

o The completion of the transcontinental line was a dramatic and monumental achievement.

o The two lines joined at Promontory Point in Northern Utah in 1869.

o Helping settlers expand to the West with greater ease.

Farming on the Plains:

o Farmers also had challenges settling in the West.

o First there was a challenge of fencing.

o Farmers had to enclose their land, if for no other reason than to protect it from the herds of the open-range cattlemen.

o But traditional wood or stone fences were too expensive and ineffective a barrier to cattle.

Farming on the Plains:

o In 1873, two Illinois farmers, Joseph H. Glidden and I.L. Ellwood solved this problem by developing and marketing barbed wire.

o Which became standard equipment on the plains and revolutionized fencing practices all over the country.

Farming on the Plains:

o American farming by the late nineteenth century no longer bore very much relation to the comforting image many Americans continued to cherish.

o The sturdy, independent farmer of popular myth was being replaced by the commercial farmer.

o Farmers were attempting to do in the agricultural economy that industrialists were doing in the manufacturing economy.

Commercial Agriculture:

o Commercial farmers were not self-sufficient and made no effort to become so.

o They specialized in cash crops, which they sold in national or world markets.

o They did not make their own household supplies or grow their own food but bought them instead at town or village stores.

Commercial Agriculture:

o This kind of farming when it was successful, raised the farmer’s living standards.

o But it also made them dependent on bankers and interest rates, railroads and freight rates, national and European markets, world supply and demand.

o This caused farmers to be in unstable situations where they were vulnerable and dependent on factors outside their control.

Commercial Agriculture:

o With overproduction in both the nation and world causing commercial farmers to suffer.

o Farmers blamed their plight on inequitable freight rates, high interest charges, and an inadequate currency.

o Farmers first and most burning grievance was against the railroads.

o The railroads charged higher freight rates for farm goods than for other goods.

The Farmers Grievances:

o Farmers also resented the institutions controlling credit, banks, loan companies, insurance corporations.

o Since sources of credit in the west and South were few, farmers had to take loans on whatever they could get, often at interest rates that were high.

o Paying back these loans became difficult.

The Farmers Grievances:

o A third grievance concerned prices.

o Both the prices farmers received for their products and the prices they paid for goods.

o Farmers sold their products in a competitive world market over which they had no control of which they had no advanced knowledge.

o A farmer could plant a large crop at a moment when prices were high and find that by harvest-time, the price had declined.

The Farmers Grievances:

o These economic difficulties produced a series of social and cultural resentments.

o Farm families in some parts of the country, particularly in the prairie and plains regions, where large farms were scattered over vast areas.

o These farms were virtually cut off from the outside world and human companionship.

The Farmers Grievances:

o Farmers lacked access to adequate education for their children.

o Proper medical facilities.

o To recreational or cultural activities, to virtually anything that might give them a sense of being members of a community.

o In contrast to the romanticization of the cowboy, writers such as Hamlin Garland reflected on the growing disillusionment in a series of novels and short stories.

The Farmers Grievances:

o Now farmers in the West were becoming painfully aware that their position was declining in relation to the rising urban-industrial society in the east.

o The expansion out West in essence was fueled by the need for economic growth and capitalistic ambition.

o In other words the need and desire to make more money.

The Farmers Grievances: