2.2 Federal Native American Policy: Plains Wars, Wounded Knee, and Dawes

Why Native policy sits on the same exam as the railroad

Content outlines for United States History II treat racial and ethnic minorities and the role of the environment as themes that cut across periods. Independent OpenExamPrep teaching for 1865–1900 therefore refuses to treat federal Indian policy as a sidebar to “settlement.” Homestead acres and railroad grants were surveyed on land that Native nations already used under treaty, hunting right, or occupancy. The United States combined military force, treaties it then violated, reservations, allotment, and boarding schools to convert that land into a real-estate inventory for the market system in Section 2.1.

Massacres, the Bozeman Trail, and Fort Laramie, 1868

The wartime pattern was already visible on 29 November 1864 at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory. Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp that had been told it was under military protection. Most of the dead were women, children, and elders. Sand Creek is slightly before this chapter’s 1865 start date, but every standard treatment of the Plains Wars uses it as the volunteer-massacre template: gold-rush politics, local troops, and a peace camp destroyed.

On the northern Plains the Bozeman Trail cut through Lakota hunting ground toward Montana mines. In December 1866, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors destroyed Captain William Fetterman’s command near Fort Phil Kearny (the Fetterman Fight). The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) followed. The United States abandoned the Bozeman posts and recognized a Great Sioux Reservation that included the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) in present-day South Dakota, plus hunting rights in unceded Powder River country. That treaty is the legal baseline later questions assume you know.

Gold wrecked the baseline. George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 Black Hills expedition advertised ore; prospectors invaded; Washington first tried to buy the Hills and then ordered non-agency bands onto reservations. On 25–26 June 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces—including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—defeated Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. The victory did not restore 1868 geography. A winter campaign, the death of Crazy Horse in 1877, Sitting Bull’s Canadian exile and return, confiscation of the Black Hills, and shrinking rations did. (A twentieth-century Court of Claims / Supreme Court line in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980) treated the taking as illegal; the Sioux have refused the monetary award because they seek the land. That sequel is context, not a date you must hang on 1876.)

Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, 1890

By 1890 reservation confinement, ration cuts, and the commercial and military destruction of the bison herds had produced destitution. The Ghost Dance, associated with the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka (Jack Wilson), promised renewal: the dead returning, the bison returning, white domination ending if people lived righteously and danced. Among some Lakota the movement mixed theology with crisis politics. Agents demanded the Army. On 15 December 1890 Indian police killed Sitting Bull while trying to arrest him. On 29 December 1890 the 7th Cavalry surrounded a Miniconjou Lakota band led by Spotted Elk (Big Foot) at Wounded Knee Creek. A shot during a disarmament—witnesses disagree on who fired first—became a massacre. Hundreds of Lakota died, many of them women and children. Independent teaching should call Wounded Knee a massacre that closed the Plains Wars, not a “last battle” between two symmetric armies.

Dawes Severalty: allotment as a land-loss statute

The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 (General Allotment Act) was sold as humanitarian reform. Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881) documented broken treaties and shamed eastern readers; her novel Ramona (1884) did similar work for California Indians. “Friends of the Indian” at Lake Mohonk conferences decided that tribal landholding blocked assimilation. Severalty—individual title modeled on the homestead—was their instrument.

Reconstruct the machine, step by step:

1. The government surveyed a reservation and allotted parcels to individuals—commonly 160 acres to a family head, with smaller tracts for single adults and children, on the homestead analogy.
2. Title sat in federal trust, typically for 25 years, supposedly to prevent instant sale to speculators.
3. Native people who accepted allotments and adopted so-called “habits of civilized life” were placed on a path to U.S. citizenship. That citizenship hook made allotment look like inclusion rather than confiscation. (Universal statutory citizenship for Native Americans as a class came later, in the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924; do not collapse 1887 into 1924.)
4. Acreage left after allotment was declared surplus and sold to non-Native settlers and speculators. Surplus sale, not only later individual deeds, was the first great dispossession under Dawes.
5. Fractionated heirship then shredded what remained: when allottees died, undivided interests multiplied until one 160-acre tract might have dozens or hundreds of owners, making farming, leasing, or unified use a legal maze. The Burke Act of 1906 later allowed early fee patents, which sped sales—know it as a sequel, not as the 1887 text.

Textbook tallies used in later Indian New Deal debates hold that Native-held land fell from on the order of 138 million acres around 1887 to about 48 million acres by 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act halted allotment. On an exam, argue direction and mechanism (allotment + surplus + fractionation). Do not describe Dawes as a generous homestead program that “just failed because of dry climate.”

Oklahoma’s Unassigned Lands rush of 1889 and later openings of reservation “surplus” show the same logic in Indian Territory: federal law converted Native domain into settler real estate while calling the process development.

Carlisle and cultural policy

Land policy traveled with cultural policy. Captain Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879. Pratt’s program—often summarized as “Kill the Indian… and save the man”—took children from reservations, cut hair, banned languages, imposed English and Christianity, and drilled wage work. Carlisle became the model for an off-reservation boarding-school system. Disease, abuse, and family separation were built into a design that treated Native identity as the defect to be removed. Pair Carlisle with Dawes: one privatized land, the other tried to privatize identity.

Environment and dispossession as one process

Market hunting for bison hides, railroad subdivision of the Plains, Black Hills mining, hydraulic and timber assault, and shrinking reservation acreage were environmental facts with political authors. An exam passage may pair a map of collapsing bison range with Dawes or Wounded Knee. The supported reading is not that climate alone ended Plains nations. Federal policy made land “public” for the railroad-homestead-mining complex by breaking the 1868 map and then privatizing what the reservation system had left.

Sequence to lock in