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![“The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be
killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the
more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be
maintained as a species of paupers [beggars].”
- General William Tecumseh Sherman 1867](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/woundedkneeghostdancedawesactassimilation-131217131226-phpapp01/75/Closing-the-Frontier-4-2048.jpg)
![In a letter from Gen. Sherman to Gen. Sheridan of date October 15, 1868
"As to extermination; it is for the Indians themselves to determine… As
brave men, and as the soldiers of a government which has exhausted
its peace efforts, we, in the performance of a most unpleasant duty,
accept the war begun by our enemies, and hereby resolve to make its
end final.
If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result
of what they have been warned again and again, and for which they
seem fully prepared.
I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing
what they deem proper on the spot…. [and] will use all the powers
confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race
and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on
their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext that they may choose
to allege.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/woundedkneeghostdancedawesactassimilation-131217131226-phpapp01/75/Closing-the-Frontier-6-2048.jpg)
![Crazy Horse - 1877
We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our
tepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservation,
where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough
to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.
We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense for the
government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers
were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages.
The “Long Hair” [Custer] came in the same way. They say we
massacred him , but he would do the same thing to us had we not
defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to
escape with our [women], but we were so hemmed in that we had to
fight.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/woundedkneeghostdancedawesactassimilation-131217131226-phpapp01/75/Closing-the-Frontier-8-2048.jpg)
![The Dawes Act - 1887
[to be civilized is to]… "wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live
in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink
whiskey [and] own property."
– Congressman Henry Dawes](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/woundedkneeghostdancedawesactassimilation-131217131226-phpapp01/75/Closing-the-Frontier-10-2048.jpg)
![Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado was one of the most outspoken
opponents of allotment.
In 1881, he said that allotment was a policy "to despoil the Indians of
their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth."
Teller also said,
"the real aim [of allotment] was "to get at the Indian lands and open
them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the
Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them....If this
were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it
in the name of Humanity...is infinitely worse."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/woundedkneeghostdancedawesactassimilation-131217131226-phpapp01/75/Closing-the-Frontier-12-2048.jpg)
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Closing the Frontier
- 1. The Closing ofthe Frontier Indian Removal in the West 1862 - 1900
- 2. Homestead Act -1862 • Legal mandate for Manifest Destiny • 160 acres for a small fee
- 3. Fort Laramie Treaty- 1868 • Cedes the Black hills to the Sioux • Black Hills = Gold • Black Hills war • Custer’s Last Stand / Custer’s Bluster http://www.custerwest.org/accueileng.htm
- 4. “The more Indianswe can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers [beggars].” - General William Tecumseh Sherman 1867
- 6. In a letterfrom Gen. Sherman to Gen. Sheridan of date October 15, 1868 "As to extermination; it is for the Indians themselves to determine… As brave men, and as the soldiers of a government which has exhausted its peace efforts, we, in the performance of a most unpleasant duty, accept the war begun by our enemies, and hereby resolve to make its end final. If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned again and again, and for which they seem fully prepared. I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot…. [and] will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext that they may choose to allege.”
- 7. Battle of theLittle Big Horn
- 8. Crazy Horse -1877 We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our tepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservation, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt. We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense for the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. The “Long Hair” [Custer] came in the same way. They say we massacred him , but he would do the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our [women], but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight.
- 9. Sitting Bull What treatyhave the Sioux made with the white man that we have broken? Not one. What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?.. ..What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?
- 10. The Dawes Act- 1887 [to be civilized is to]… "wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property." – Congressman Henry Dawes
- 11. The Dawes Act- 1887 •The Dawes Act divided tribal lands into individual parcels.
- 12. Senator Henry M.Teller of Colorado was one of the most outspoken opponents of allotment. In 1881, he said that allotment was a policy "to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth." Teller also said, "the real aim [of allotment] was "to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them....If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity...is infinitely worse."
- 13. VISION: The Dawes Actcodified the idea of dividing Indian lands into individual holdings to promote assimilation by deliberately destroying tribal relations. Surplus land was given to whites. Allotted land for specific tribe and left other tribal allotments to the discretion of the President. “Civilize” the Indians through education, private property, and introduction of agriculture. Support from paternalistic Easterners REALITY: Supporters of the Dawes Act either knew or should have known that in many cases it would mean allotting land that could not be farmed. The Indians, for the most part, did not become self-supporting farmers or ranchers. Inheritance caused problems as allotments were further and further subdivided. The Dawes Act prescribed the assimilation of Native Americans and the loss of their traditional ways of agriculture, but most significantly, it resulted in the loss of Indian lands. Native Americans didn’t get the right to vote until 1924.
- 16. Oklahoma Land Runs- 1889 • From 1891 to 1895, lands runs were used to “settle” lands in Oklahoma given to the Iowa, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomie, Shawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cherokee and Kickapoo in various treaties.
- 17. Ghost Dance -1888 • Wovoka • Native American apocalypse • A return to life without the white man
- 18. Wounded Knee -1890
- 19. The frozen bodyof one of the victims at Wounded Knee. The caption written on this photograph identifies him as the medicine man who triggered the conflict with a handful of dust tossed into the air to illustrate how the power of the Ghost Dance would sweep the whites from the plains. (Library of Congress)
- 20. Dee Brown, BuryMy Heart at Wounded Knee When the madness ended, Big Foot and more than half of his people were dead or seriously wounded; 153 were known dead, but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward. One estimate placed the final total of dead very nearly 300 of the original 350 men, women and children. The soldiers lost 25 dead and 39 wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel. A detail of soldiers went over to the Wounded Knee battlefield, gathering up Indians who were still alive and loading them into wagons. As it was apparent by the end of the day that a blizzard was approaching, the dead Indians were left lying where they had fallen. (After the blizzard, when a burial party returned to Wounded Knee, they found the bodies, including Big Foot’s, frozen into grotesque shapes.) The wagonloads of wounded Sioux reached Pine Ridge after dark. Because all available barracks were filled with soldiers, they were left lying in the open wagons in the bitter cold while an inept Army officer searched for shelter. Finally the Episcopal mission was opened, the benches taken out and hay scattered over the rough flooring. In was the fourth day after Christmas. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see the Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN.
- 21.
- 22. “A great generalhas said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” -Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, 1892
- 25. 20 Century th • • • • Pan-Indian identity AmericanIndian Movement (AIM) Incident at Oglala (1975) Wounded Knee Occupation (1973)
- 26. I. What approaches didwhite take to the “Indian problem”? II. Explain different Indian responses. III. What was the purpose of the Dawes Act? What effect did it have on the Indians? IV. What imaginary myths of the West developed through time?
- 27. Recommendations for IndianPolicy 1886 The Native Americans lead a strong resistance against their forced relocation evidenced in the Battle of the Greasy Grass, Red Cloud’s war, the Nez Perce trail, etc. Write a government policy arguing one of the following solutions for Native American-White relations. Mention specific ways in which it could be implemented. Present your policy. 1. State the purpose of the policy. 2. Give a reason for the policy. 3. Discuss the implementation of the policy. POLICY OPTIONS a. No regulation b. Return to Homeland c. Reservation System d. Assimilation e. Annihilation
Editor's Notes
- #3 Built house out of sod for lack of trees Deep cold, swarms of grasshoppers ate crops. Drought. Populism grew out of farmers that feel into debt because of fluctuations in crop prices. A sort of socialism. The Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Eventually 1.6 million homesteads were granted and 270 million acres was privatized between 1862 and 1964. A total of 10% of all lands in the United States. The person to whom title was granted had to be at least 21 years of age, white, and free, to have built on the section, and to have farmed on it for 5 years, and to have a house on it that was at least 12 by 14 feet (3.6 x 4.3 m) in size.
- #4 Ended Red Cloud’s war – one real victory of Native Americans. Fetterman’s Massacre (Crazy Horse) took place during the war. From the 1860s through the 1870s the American frontier was filled with Indian wars and skirmishes. In 1865 a congressional committee began a study of the Indian uprisings and wars in the West, resulting in a Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes , which was released in 1867. This study and report by the congressional committee led to an act to establish an Indian Peace Commission to end the wars and prevent future Indian conflicts. The United States government set out to establish a series of Indian treaties that would force the Indians to give up their lands and move further west onto reservations. In the spring of 1868 a conference was held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory. The Black Hills of Dakota are sacred to the Sioux Indians. In the 1868 treaty, signed at Fort Laramie and other military posts in Sioux country, the United States recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for exclusive use by the Sioux people. In 1874, however, General George A. Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills accompanied by miners who were seeking gold. Once gold was found in the Black Hills, miners were soon moving into the Sioux hunting grounds and demanding protection from the United States Army. Soon, the Army was ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range in accordance with their treaty rights. In 1876, Custer, leading an army detachment, encountered the encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River. Custer's detachment was annihilated, but the United States would continue its battle against the Sioux in the Black Hills until the government confiscated the land in 1877. To this day, ownership of the Black Hills remains the subject of a legal dispute between the U.S. government and the Sioux. We packed them... on top of the ammunition boxes in the wagons.... Could not tell Cavalry from the Infantry. All dead bodies stripped naked, crushed skulls, with war clubs, ears, nose and legs had been cut off, scalps torn away and the bodies pierced with bullets and arrows, wrists, feet and ankles leaving each attached by a tendon... We walked on their internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man's guts and an infantry man got a cavalry man's guts. Private John Guthrie describing Fetterman’s Massacre http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/sioux-treaty/ http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/sioux/sioux.asp
- #7 http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nalakota/wotw/mlyhbb/medlodge_wotw0838.htm
- #11 Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of Indian land. The Indian estate amounted in 1887 to 136,394,985 acres. By 1920 it had shrunk to 72,660,316 acres, of which 17,575,033 acres were leased to whites. In Congress, the bill was pushed through not by greedy Western land speculators, but by Eastern humanitarians that felt that “communal landholding was an obstacle to the civilization they wanted Indians to acquire.” They also feared that by doing nothing the Indians would succumb totally to Westward expansion; the government doing little or nothing to stop it.
- #12 Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of Indian land. The Indian estate amounted in 1887 to 136,394,985 acres. By 1920 it had shrunk to 72,660,316 acres, of which 17,575,033 acres were leased to whites. In Congress, the bill was pushed through not by greedy Western land speculators, but by Eastern humanitarians that felt that “communal landholding was an obstacle to the civilization they wanted Indians to acquire.” They also feared that by doing nothing the Indians would succumb totally to Westward expansion; the government doing little or nothing to stop it.
- #14 Even reservations that were still unallotted by 1904 lost land, however. Even with the addition of new reservations after 1887, statistics for 47 unallotted reservations, agencies and tribal units shows that more than 37 percent of their land was alienated between 1887 and 1904.
- #15 A 1911 ad offering former reservation land for sale. Most of the land sold the previous year (1910) was Sioux land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation
- #16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bia-map-indian-reservations-usa.png
- #17 The person to whom title was granted had to be at least 21 years of age, white, and free, to have built on the section, and to have farmed on it for 5 years, and to have a house on it that was at least 12 by 14 feet (3.6 x 4.3 m) in size. The Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Eventually 1.6 million homesteads were granted and 270 million acres was privatized between 1862 and 1964. A total of 10% of all lands in the United States.
- #22 Carlisle, Penn. 1879-1917. At the Carlisle school Pratt was instructed to recruit 36 children from each of the reservations. Parents were persuaded to send their children. If their children were literate, maybe they could prevent the mistakes of the past.