http://samples.hmhco.com/united_states_history/index.

php

Native Americans in the West

During the days of westward expansion in the United States, the white settlers often encountered the
American Indians. Though many of these meetings were peaceful, the cultures more often clashed,
resulting in hundreds of battles known as the "Indian War period" between 1866 and 1890.

Initially relations between Native American tribes and the new settlers moving to the West
were friendly. An attempt was made to resolve conflicts by negotiation of the Treaty of Fort
Wise which established a reservation in southeastern Colorado, but the settlement was not
agreed to by all. During the early 1860s tensions increased and culminated in the Colorado
War and the Sand Creek Massacre where Colorado volunteers fell on a peaceful Cheyenne
village killing women and children which set the stage for further conflict.

The Dakota War of 1862 was the first major armed engagement between the U.S. and the
Sioux. After six weeks of fighting in Minnesota, records conclusively show that more than
500 U.S. soldiers and settlers died in the conflict, though many more may have died in small
raids or after being captured. The number of Sioux dead in the uprising is mostly
undocumented, but after the war, 303 Sioux were convicted of murder and rape by U.S.
military tribunals and sentenced to death. Most of the death sentences were commuted by
President Lincoln, except for 38 Dakota Sioux men who were hanged in what is still today the
largest mass execution in U.S. history.

The savagery of the attacks on civilians during the Dakota War of 1862 contributed to these
sentiments as did the few minor incidents which occurred in the Platte Valley and in areas
east of Denver. Regular army troops had been withdrawn for service in the Civil War and
were replaced with the Colorado Volunteers, rough men who often favored extermination of
the Indians.

Raids by bands of plains Indians on isolated homesteads to the east of Denver, on the
advancing settlements in Kansas, resulted in settlers in both Colorado and Kansas adopting a
murderous attitude towards Native Americans, with calls for extermination. Likewise, the
savagery shown by the Colorado Volunteers during the Sand Creek massacre resulted in
Native Americans, particularly the Dog Soldiers, a band of the Cheyenne, engaging in savage
retribution.

On November 29, 1864, Colorado Volunteers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho
village camped on Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. Under orders to take no prisoners,
the militia killed and mutilated about 200 of the Indians, two-thirds of whom were women
and children. The Indians at Sand Creek had been assured by the U.S. Government that they
would be safe in the territory they were occupying, but anti-Indian sentiments by white
settlers were running high.

Following the massacre, the survivors joined the camps of the Cheyenne on the Smokey Hill
and Republican rivers. There, the war pipe was smoked and passed from camp to camp
among the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho which together attacked white settlements. A great
deal of loot was captured and many whites killed. Most of the Indians then moved north into
Nebraska on their way to the Black Hills.

In 1875, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, the last serious Sioux war erupted, when the
Dakota gold rush penetrated the Black Hills. The U.S. Army did not keep miners off Sioux
hunting grounds; yet, when ordered to take action against bands of Sioux hunting on the
range, according to their treaty rights, the Army moved vigorously. In 1876, after several
indecisive encounters, General George Custer found the main encampment of the Lakota and
their allies at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer and his men—who were separated from
their main body of troops—were all killed by the far more numerous Indians who had the
tactical advantage. They were led in the field by Crazy Horse and inspired by Sitting Bull's
earlier vision of victory.

Later, in 1890, a Ghost Dance ritual on the Northern Lakota reservation at Wounded Knee,
South Dakota, led to the Army's attempt to subdue the Lakota. During this attempt, gunfire
erupted, and soldiers killed up to 300 Indians, mostly old men, women and children. The
approximately 25 soldiers who died may have been killed by friendly fire during the battle.
Long before this, the means of subsistence and the societies of the indigenous population of
the Great Plains had been destroyed by the slaughter of the buffalo, driven almost to
extinction in the 1880s by indiscriminate hunting. By the time it was over, at least 150 men,
women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed and 51 wounded (4 men, 47 women
and children, some of whom died later).

From 1778 to 1871, the U.S. federal government tried to resolve its relationship with the various native tribes by
negotiating treaties. Native American people were citizens of their tribe, living within the boundaries of the U.S.
The treaties were negotiated by the executive branch on behalf of the president and ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The native tribes would give up their rights to hunt and live on huge parcels of land that they had inhabited in
exchange for trade goods, yearly cash annuity payments, and assurances that no further demands would be made
on them. Most often, part of the land would be "reserved" exclusively for the tribe's use.

The reservations were devised to encourage the Indians to live within clearly defined zones, and the U.S. promised
to provide food, goods and money and to protect them from attack by other tribes and white settlers. The
reservation policy also reflected the views of some of the educators and protestant missionaries that forcing the
Indians to live in a confined space with little opportunity for nomadic hunting would make it easier to "civilize the
savages."

The reservation system proved a disaster for the Indians as the government failed to keep its
promises. The nomadic tribes were unable to follow the buffalo, and conflict among the tribes
increased, rather than decreased, as the tribes competed with each other for dwindling
resources.

Congressman Henry Dawes had great faith in the civilizing power of private property. He convinced Congress to
pass an act (The Dawes Act) designed to turn Indians into farmers, in the hopes they would become more like
mainstream America.

The federal government divided communal tribal lands into 160-acre parcels — known as allotments — and gave
them to individual tribal members. The Act went on to offer Indians the benefits of U.S. citizenship — if they took
an allotment, lived separate form the tribe and became "civilized." The Act also declared that Indians could
become citizens if they had separated from their tribes and adopted the ways of civilized life, without ending their
rights to tribal or other property. In a sense, the American Indian could maintain dual citizenship tribal and
American.
The supporters of the Dawes Act not only wanted to destroy the Indian tribal loyalties and the reservation system
but also to open up the reservation lands to white settlement. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land remained
after the individual 160-acre allotments had been made. These parcels were then sold at bargain prices to land-
hungry whites.

Funds from the sale of so-called surplus land were used to establish Indian schools. The idea was that Indian
children could be educated and taught the social habits of white Americans, thus completing the process of
assimilation.

The allotment system turned out to be a monumental disaster for the Indians. In addition to losing their "surplus"
tribal land, many Native American families also lost their allotted land. The poorest of the poor were landless and
the majority of Indians still resisted assimilation. Native Americans reached their lowest population numbers
shortly after the turn of the 20th Century.

Because special treaties guaranteed them self-government, the tribes in the Indian Territory had been excluded
from the Dawes Act. But, the pressures of white settlers and railroads wanting to acquire Indian land soon
resulted in President Harrison declaring in 1889 that lands in the Oklahoma area were open to settlement. The
various tribes in the Indian Territory were pressured into signing agreements to allot their lands. By 1901, the
Native Americans of the Indian Territory were declared U.S. citizens. Until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,
Indians occupied an unusual status under federal law. Some had acquired citizenship by marrying white men.
Others received citizenship through military service, by receipt of allotments, or through special treaties or special
statutes. But many were still not citizens, and they were barred from the ordinary processes of naturalization open
to foreigners. Congress took what some saw as the final step on June 2, 1924 and granted citizenship to all Native
Americans born in the United States.

During World War I, about 9,000 American Indians served in the armed services. They fought and died in defense
of a nation that still denied most of them the right to participate in the political process. Congress, as a result,
enacted legislation on November 6, 1919, granting citizenship to Indian veterans of World War I who were not yet
citizens