Conflict with the Indigenous Nations

I - Overview

This subject is much easier to understand than it seems in the textbooks.  You will need to understand the following issues:

1. Four stages of conflict
2. Five reasons for conflict
3. Six reasons why they lost

In addition you will need to know the WHY-WHAT-THEREFORE of certain events:

1. Trail of Tears, 1830-50
2. The Fort Laramie Treaty, 1851
3. Sand Creek Massacre, 1864
4. Fetterman's Trap 1866
5. Red Cloud's War, 1866-67
6. Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876
7. The Dawes Act, 1887
8. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, 1890

FOUR STAGES OF THE CONFLICT

I taught his subject to my own students from the mid-1980s on.  They were always befuddled by the complexities, so I developed this simple grid to make it easy to understand!  You have learned about the issues in green already – all you have to do is to get your head around the sequence of events in the grid, and learn the content in black.

There are four stages in the story, and each follows the same pattern:

1. the Indigenous Peoples accept a harsh-but-negotiated peace;
2. they find they have been lied to and are being forced out;
3. conflict breaks out.

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic accounts from BBC Bitesize

YouTube

Loss of Native American Land - year-by-year

NARRATIVE: CONFLICT WITH THE INDIGENOUS NATIONS

In the following, all I am doing is telling you in continuous prose a more detailed version of the story-from-the-grid:

The ‘Permanent Indian Frontier’

Until 1803, the Great Plains were owned by the French.  Then, in 1803, the United States government bought the Great Plains from France (the Louisiana Purchase).  It paid £1 million for them. 

The Americans did not want the Great Plains for themselves.  They thought the Great Plains were a useless desert.  They bought them for the Indigenous Peoples in the Eastern United States.  Over the next twenty years, they forced all the Indigenous Peoples who lived in the Eastern United States to go and live on the Great Plains.  One of the Indigenous tribes which had to move were the Cherokees.  They called their journey to the Great Plains in the 1820s ‘the trail of tears’, because a quarter of their tribe died on the way. 

The Americans never thought they would want the Great Plains; they said that the Mississippi River would be the ‘Permanent Indian Frontier’. 

Concentration

In the 1840s, the first groups of white Americans began to go onto the Great Plains.  Gold miners wanted to go there for gold.  Pioneers travelled across the Plains to Oregon and California.  The Mormons settled by the Great Salt Lake.  These settlers killed thousands of the buffalo which the Indigenous Peoples ate.  Some of them were robbed and killed by Indigenous raiders. 

The United States government started to say that the answer was concentration: making the Indigenous Peoples stay in certain 'reserved' parts of the Great Plains. 

In 1851, the Indigenous Chiefs signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851).  They promised to let the  cross the Plains, and promised to stay in their own hunting grounds. 

But the Treaty did not last long.  More gold was discovered, and more gold miners went west.  Cattlemen wanted to set up huge ranches on the Great Plains. 

In 1861, the government told the Cheyenne they would have to give up most of their land in Colorado, and go to live on a small reservation at Sand Creek.  Some of the Cheyenne went on the warpath. 

In retaliation, the Colorado Volunteers, led by Colonel Chivington, massacred a village of peaceful Cheyenne at the Massacre of Sand Creek (1864).  Chivington's orders were to 'kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice'.  This massacre was the subject of the film Soldier Blue. 

Soon after, in 1866-7, the Sioux, led by their chiefs Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, also went on the warpath.  Red Cloud fought a brilliant guerrilla war.  This time, the wašíču lost Red Cloud's War. 

In 1866 Crazy Horse wiped out a company of cavalry led by Captain Fetterman (the ‘Fetterman Massacre’).  The United States government offered to make peace. 

Reservations

At the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek (1867), the Indigenous Chiefs agreed to hand over most of their land to the United States government.  They promised to live on reservations - small areas of land.  The Cherokees, Cheyenne and Apache were given land in Oklahoma.  The Sioux were given land around the Black Hills of Dakota.  They promised to try to live by farming the land.  The United States government promised to give them food (until they learned how to farm the land), medicine and money.  It promised that the reservations would be theirs 'for all time'. 

The government did not send enough food or medicines.  The Indigenous Peoples could not grow crops on the poor land they had been given – conditions on the Apache reservation at San Carlos were particularly horrific: “nothing but cactus, rattlesnakes, heat, rocks and insects.  No game; no edible plants.  Many, many of our people died of starvation”.  They caught wašíču diseases and – because they had no resistance to them – thousands of Indigenous people died of measles, whooping cough and cholera; some started drinking wašíču whisky, and became alcoholics. 

Some white Americans wanted Indigenous people to be given land and be taught ‘to walk the white man's road’.  But many wanted simply to kill them all.  General Sheridan, in charge of the army, said: “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year”. 

In the 1860s, railroads had been built across the Great Plains.  The railroads stopped the migration of the buffalo to the reservations.  They also brought hunters, who killed thousands more buffalo for their skins (Wyatt Earp was one).  Some wašíču set about killing all the buffalo, because they knew that the Indigenous Peoples would starve without them.  Millions of buffalo were shot in a few years. 

Then in 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota.  Thousands of miners rushed into the Sioux lands.  Red Cloud complained to the United States government.  The government tried to buy the land.  The Sioux refused: 'one does not sell the earth upon which the people walk'. 

In 1876, an army marched into the Black Hills to attack the Sioux.  It was led by Colonel Custer.  He attacked villages and massacred the Indigenous people there .  In 1876 a huge army of Indigenous warriors gathered; it surrounded and killed his army at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 

The Defeat of the Indigenous Nations

The Little Bighorn did not mark the Indigenous Peoples’ victory; it began their defeat. 

The United States government was angry.  After 1876, thousands of new soldiers – called ‘Custer's Avengers’ – went west.  With them they took machine guns. 

The Indigenous Chiefs could not keep together the army which destroyed Custer; they could not feed such a huge group.  They split into small guerrilla parties, such as the one led by the Apache Geronimo.  One by one the United States army hunted them down.  The army fought throughout the winter as well as in the summer; when it attacked a village in winter, the Indigenous people had no food left, and were forced to surrender. 

In 1885, the Indigenous law courts were abolished; Indigenous children were taken away to attend Boarding Schools, where they were forced to adopt western clothing and behaviour.  In 1887, the Dawes Act took away ownership of reservation land from the tribes, and gave it to individual Indigenous people ...  AND it gave white Americans the right to buy Indigenous-owned land.  In 1888, the Black Hills were sold to white settlers.  In 1889, white Americans bought most of Oklahoma (the ‘Oklahoma Land Run’). 

The Indigenous Nations had been defeated.  Many of them turned to religion.  In 1890, some warriors began a ghost dance.  They said a Messiah would come and lead them to victory.  They believed that they could not be killed by the wašíču bullets.  Local settlers called in the army, which shot 200 at Wounded Knee (1890). 

Before the wašíču, there had been millions of Indigenous people.  By 1800, that number had fallen to 600,000.  In 1900, there were only 237,000.