Hoping to forestall similar uprisings and all-out Indian wars, the U.S. Army condemned Chivington’s tactics and their results however, the raid served as a model for some settlers who sought any means by which to eradicate the perceived Indian threat. For the rest of his life, Chivington would proudly display his collection of nearly one hundred Indian scalps from that day. The camp was flying both the American flag and the white flag of surrender when Chivington’s troops murdered close to one hundred people, the majority of them women and children, in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. One of the more vicious examples was near Sand Creek, Colorado, where Colonel John Chivington led a militia raid upon a camp in which the leader had already negotiated a peaceful settlement. In Colorado, Arapahoe and Cheyenne tribes fought back against land encroachment white militias then formed, decimating even some of the tribes that were willing to cooperate. Settlers in other regions responded to news of this raid with fear and aggression. The thirty-eight who were found guilty were hanged in the largest mass execution in the country’s history, and the rest of the tribe was banished. troops, 303 were sentenced to death, but President Lincoln intervened, releasing all but thirty-eight of the men. Of the four hundred Sioux captured by U.S. Over one thousand white settlers were captured or killed in the attack, before an armed militia regained control. In 1862, frustrated and angered by the lack of annuity payments and the continuous encroachment on their reservation lands, Dakota Sioux Indians in Minnesota rebelled in what became known as the Dakota War, killing the white settlers who moved onto their tribal lands. Some Indians resisted, only to then face massacres. Rather than negotiating new treaties, settlers-oftentimes backed by local or state militia units-simply attacked the tribes out of fear or to force them from the land. In addition, within a decade, as the pace and number of western settlers increased, even designated reservations became prime locations for farms and mining. Due to government corruption, many annuity payments never reached the tribes, and some reservations were left destitute and near starving. In return for annual payments of $50,000 to the tribes (originally guaranteed for fifty years, but later revised to last for only ten) as well as the hollow promise of noninterference from westward settlers, Indians agreed to stay clear of the path of settlement. This agreement established distinct tribal borders, essentially codifying the reservation system. In 1851, the chiefs of most of the Great Plains tribes agreed to the First Treaty of Fort Laramie. government was prepared, during the era of western settlement, to deal with tribes that settlers viewed as obstacles to expansion.Īs settlers sought more land for farming, mining, and cattle ranching, the first strategy employed to deal with the perceived Indian threat was to negotiate settlements to move tribes out of the path of white settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” which saw nearly fifty thousand Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Indians relocated west of the Mississippi River to what is now Oklahoma between 18. Previous wars against these tribes in the early nineteenth century, as well as the failure of earlier treaties, had led to a general policy of the forcible removal of many tribes in the eastern United States. On the eve of westward expansion, as many as 250,000 Indians, representing a variety of tribes, populated the Great Plains. But of course this was an exaggerated depiction. CLAIMING LAND, RELOCATING LANDOWNERSīack east, the popular vision of the West was of a vast and empty land. The Manifest Destiny of the settlers spelled the end of the Indian way of life.
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The result was devastating for the Indian tribes, which lacked the weapons and group cohesion to fight back against such well-armed forces. Ultimately, the settlers, with the support of local militias and, later, with the federal government behind them, sought to eliminate the tribes from the lands they desired. The clashes, when they happened, were indeed brutal, although most of the brutality occurred at the hands of the settlers. Army actions directed against them, the occasional attack-often one of retaliation-was enough to fuel the popular fear of the “savage” Indians.
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Although the threat of Indian attacks was quite slim and nowhere proportionate to the number of U.S.
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Explain the process of “Americanization” as it applied to Indians in the nineteenth centuryĪs American settlers pushed westward, they inevitably came into conflict with Indian tribes that had long been living on the land.
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government used to address the “Indian threat” during the settlement of the West By the end of this section, you will be able to: