Westward expansion: society and culture

Walk the white’s man road

Settler relations with Native Americans alternated between attempts to exile and/or eliminate indigenous societies and to assimilate and reform indigenous peoples to become more similar to the settlers themselves. Once Native Americans were forcibly relocated to reservations, Christian missionaries often sought to educate Native Americans in manner similar to white or Anglo children, often, however, with harsh discipline and punishments for native resistance to adopting Christian names, speaking English, and dressing and acting like white settlers. In the worst examples, native students were beaten and dozens died at schools modeled after the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School founded in Pennsylvania in 1879.

Congress promoted individual land ownership rights through the Dawes Act (1887), but many Native Americans lacked the financial resources to pay taxes on their allotments, leading many to sell their allotments at discounted prices to settlers and land companies; over the next 50 years, native land holdings decreased by nearly two thirds, an area slightly smaller than the size of **Wyoming. **

From the Little Bighorn to Wounded Knee Creek

Western settlement also featured the last of the Indian wars, the nearly 3 centuries long series of armed conflicts between settlers and Native Americans, dating from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 all the way to the battle, or massacre, at **Wounded Knee Creek **in South Dakota in 1890. During the Civil War, the United States government and white settlers confronted indigenous resistance in Minnesota, with **President Lincoln **ordering the execution of 39 Dakota tribesmen from actions taken during the Dakota War in 1862,and in the Colorado territory, where Colonel John Chivington directed the massacre of over 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne natives in November 1864. Further south US cavalry forces and the **Texas Rangers **fought with the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajo, during and immediately after the Civil War.

After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, prospectors quickly moved into sacred ground for native peoples, sparking armed conflict. In the summer of 1876, General George Custer, a Union veteran under General William T. Sherman, and his force of 260 men were massacred by a large force of Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Arapahoes at the Little Bighorn creek in southern Montana. While this native victory, replete with stories of mass scalpings, shocked Americans, US cavalry and prospector and settler advances continued and more indigenous peoples, including the Nez Perce, were forced onto reservations. The end of the Indian Wars occurred in the freezing cold of** South Dakota at Wounded Knee Creek, where several hundred Lakota, including large numbers of women and children, were killed while 25 US soldiers were killed and 40 more injured. In the spring of 1973, Wounded Knee would be the site of a major armed standoff between American Indian Movement (AIM) activists and US marshals, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Women on the frontier

Settlement of most areas of the United States required sustained, although often poorly recognized, contributions from women; settlement of the west was only exceptional in this regard in that women’s contributions were more immediately prominent and recognized. Women cleared and cultivated land, raised livestock, and owned and managed the vital services that developed in mining and farming towns throughout the west. While women were not treated equally to men in the west, their fundamental rights to suffrage were recognized much earlier in western states and territories, beginning with Wyoming and Utah territories in 1869 and 1870, respectively, than in eastern and southern states.