1.11 Conflict with Native Americans

Question 1

What was the Manifest Destiny?

Answer 1

An ideology introduced by the journalist O’Sullivan in 1845 which proposed that Americans had a god-given right to conquer places such as the West and Mexico. It saw America as a future world power and was a racial doctrine of white supremacy.

Question 2

What is continentalism?

Answer 2

The consolidation of the United States to occupy the North American continent.

Question 3

How was Westward expansion and the Native Americans portrayed by the National Myth?

Answer 3

It suggested the settling of the ‘empty’ West was a great leap forward for modernity and progress, fulfilling a ‘civilising mission’. In this narrative, Native Americans were ‘noble savages’ who were a barrier to progress. At the time and in later histories, Native Americans were depicted as racially and culturally inferior and were a ‘problem’ for the governments to deal with.

Question 4

What was the culture of Native Americans like?

Answer 4

Native Americans were made up of numerous Indian Nations, each with their own way of life, their own ancestral land, and their own political and social structures.

Question 5

What made the colonisation of the West possible?

Answer 5

Wars, treaties, and the executive decisions of the government, enforced by the US army.

Question 6

What happened in the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864?

Answer 6

There was no fighting during the Civil War west of Mississippi so regular soldiers were withdrawn from the Plains to fight in the East. They were replaced by volunteers who weren’t trained and were ill-disciplined. This led to a number of brutal atrocities. The most notorious was at Sand Creek where a force of 700 troops of cavalry attacked an undefended camp of the Cheyenne tribe, killing and mutilating elderly men, women, and children.

Question 7

How many battles and conflicts were there in 1871?

Answer 7

101

Question 8

What was US policy toward Native Americans in the first phase?

Answer 8

To recognise the Indian Nations and make ‘equal’ peace treaties with them.

Question 9

What was the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in October 1867?

Answer 9

It was made up of 3 treaties between the Indian Peace Commission, set up by Congress in 1867, and the Indian nations of the southern Plains: the Comanche, the Apache, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho. The treaty set new borders for ‘Indian Territory’ and was intended to ensure control over white intrusion into Native American lands.

Question 10

What was the Treaty of Fort Laramie?

Answer 10

This agreement (also known as the Sioux Treaty) was made in Wyoming Territory in April 1868, between the United States and the chiefs of the Lakota Sioux and the Arapaho Nation. The Great Sioux Reservation was established to the west of the Missouri River, including exclusive Native American rights over the Black Hills region. The treaty also made provision for white assistance in education and economic development.

Question 11

What caused the Treaty of Fort Laramie to be established?

Answer 11

The Red Cloud’s War of 1866-68.

Question 12

What was the Red Cloud’s War?

Answer 12

A war fought by the Plains Indians, led by the Sioux chief Red Cloud, to stop white encroachment.

Question 13

What is encroachment?

Answer 13

Intrusion on a person’s territory, rights, etc.

Question 14

How did policy toward Native Americans shift when Grant became president?

Answer 14

Policy shifted towards one of ‘reservation or assimilation’, requiring Native Americans to accept life in demarcated reservations, or to assimilate as individual citizens.

Question 15

What were the intentions behind Grant’s policy towards Native Americans?

Answer 15

To protect Native Americans from exploitation by settlers and from the corruption among government agents. President Grant appointed Quaker missionaries as agents, hoping to ensure higher ethical standards.

Question 16

What was Hayes’s approach towards Native Americans?

Answer 16

From 1877, Hayes and his Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, continued to reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs to root out corruption.

Question 17

What were the limitations of Grant and Hayes’s policy towards Native Americans?

Answer 17

The agents were often unable to enforce their authority over white settlers, and even reformers like Schurz regarded Native Americans as culturally inferior, not as equals.

Question 18

What were the three aspects of white power that the Native Americans found themselves fighting?

Answer 18

The initiation of conflict by the actions of settlers, the decisions of the US government and its Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the US army.

Question 19

What wars took place in the South West?

Answer 19

The long-running Apache Wars were ended in 1874 when the Apache leader Cochise agreed a peace treaty.

Question 20

What war took place in the Great Plains?

Answer 20

Breaches of the 1868 peace treaty by white settlers and gold prospectors led to renewed war in the Black Hills and to a catastrophic defeat of the US Army at the Little Bighorn in 1876, but the Sioux and Cheyenne nations were brutally suppressed in the months that followed.

Question 21

What war took place in the North West?

Answer 21

The Comanche and Cheyenne were defeated in the Red River War of 1874-5. In the Nez Perce War of 1877, Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce warriors fought their way across five Northwest states towards Canada until forced to surrender by the US Army under General Miles.

Question 22

What outbreaks of rebellion regarding Native Americans were there by the end of 1877, despite US military control?

Answer 22

Geronimo’s War from 1881 to 1886 and the Ghost Dance Rebellion of the Lakota Sioux, crushed by the US Army at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.

Question 23

What position were the Native Americans in during the Oklahoma Land Rush?

Answer 23

2 million acres of Indian Territory was granted as free land to white settlers.

Question 24

When was the Oklahoma land rush?

Answer 24

1889

Question 25

What was westward expansion like before the Civil War?

Answer 25

Many settlers began to move West in the 1840s. Many of these were mormons trying to escape persecution, high taxes, and overpopulation in the East. The West seemed to offer the possibility of a new life with cheap and fertile land. The government encouraged people to move West as it would increase their chances of taking it over.

Question 26

How many people moved West in 1848 after the discovery of gold in California?

Answer 26

300,000

Question 27

Why did the government introduce federal territories?

Answer 27

During the Civil War, the government wanted to secure control of land west of Mississippi. This was done by the creation of federal territories governed by officials appointed by the federal government in Washington and populating these vast open spaces with settlers. As territories, they became subject to the laws of the USA.

Question 28

How could federal territories become states?

Answer 28

When the population reached 60,000, the inhabitants could apply to become a state, which gave them the right to some degree of self-determination. They had their own elected state assembly and were given authority to make their own laws.

Question 29

What caused the Great Sioux War in 1876?

Answer 29

Settlers intruded in the Black Hills after the discovery of gold. The government offered $6 million after they failed to keep the settlers out. When the Native Americans turned this down, they were demanded to go to their reservation and those who didn’t do so by the end of January 1876 would be treated as hostile. Many didn’t hear or chose to ignore these instructions.

Question 30

What happened during the Great Sioux War?

Answer 30

The decision was taken to remove the Native Americans from the Black Hills. AFter some setbacks, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a large and well-equipped US army wiped out the Native Americans.

Question 31

What was Reservation policy?

Answer 31

Native Americans were placed on government-controlled reservations. These would allow the government to ‘americanise’ them as they were seen as savages. This would be achieved through education, conversion to Christianity, and training them to become farmers. Tribal life was destroyed by being separated from buffalo hunting.

Question 32

How did Reservation policy fail?

Answer 32

Life was extremely harsh. The Native Americans could not become farmers because much of the land given was impossible to cultivate. They were dependent on the food supplied by the government and starved. Depending on white Americans for food, clothing, and shelter was humiliating. Some Native American agents on the reservations were corrupt and used government resources for their own means.

Question 33

What did the government do to support the education of Native American children?

Answer 33

Congress provided funds to set up boarding schools where Native American children could be taught American skills and attitudes away from the influence of their parents. By 1889, $2.5 million was spent each year on 148 boarding and 225 day schools.

Question 34

What did the Dawes act of 1887 entail?

Answer 34

It broke up reservation land into small units held by individuals or families. Native Americans who accepted the allotments and ‘adopted the habits of civilised life’ were to be granted US citizenship after 25 years.

Question 35

What were the problems with the Dawes Act?

Answer 35

The Act assumed native Americans could be turned into farmers. It was doomed to failure at a time of agricultural depression and they weren’t necessarily given arable land. Most Indians had little understanding of what the act entailed and most sold or lost their land to white and fell into poverty within a short period of time.

Question 36

What led to the Wounded Knee Massacre?

Answer 36

The chief, Sitting Bull, embraced the Ghost Dance and helped facilitate its spread throughout the Sioux reservation. In 1890, police officers feared that he was about to flee the reservation, shot and killed him. Many people fled with the army in persuit.

Question 37

What happened in the Wounded Knee Massacre?

Answer 37

Two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull, the nervous Seventh Cavalry fired into a group of Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. About 200 people died, many of them women and children.