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As American expansion continued, Native Americans resisted settlers' encroachment in several regions of the new nation (and in unorganized territories), from the Northwest to the Southeast, and then in the West, as settlers encountered the Native American tribes of the Great Plains. East of the Mississippi River, an intertribal army led by Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, fought a number of engagements in the Northwest during the period 1811–12, known as Tecumseh's War. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh's forces allied themselves with the British. After Tecumseh's death, the British ceased to aid the Native Americans south and west of Upper Canada and American expansion proceeded with little resistance. Conflicts in the Southeast include the Creek War and Seminole Wars, both before and after the Indian Removals of most members of the Five Civilized Tribes. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a policy of relocating Indians from their homelands to Indian Territory and reservations in surrounding areas to open their lands for non-native settlements. This resulted in the Trail of Tears.
In the 19th century, the incessant westward expansion of the United States incrementally compelled large numbers of Native Americans to resettle further west, often by force, almost always reluctantly. Native Americans believed this forced relocation illegal, given the Treaty of Hopewell of 1785. Under President Andrew Jackson, United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to conduct treaties to exchange Native American land east of the Mississippi River for lands west of the river.
The Native Americans had constant conflict with the Anglo settlers due to colonization, westward expansion, and the United States not keeping their promises on treaties signed with the Natives. There are many examples of this, including the Medicine Lodge Treaty. The Medicine Lodge Treaty is the overall name for three treaties signed near Medicine Lodge, Kansas, between the Federal government of the United States and southern Plains Indian tribes in October 1867, intended to bring peace to the area by relocating the Native Americans to reservations in native american Territory and away from European-American settlement. The treaty was negotiated after investigation by the Indian Peace Commission, which in its final report in 1868 concluded that the wars had been preventable. They determined that the United States government and its representatives, including the United States Congress, had contributed to the warfare on the Great Plains by failing to fulfill their legal obligations and to treat the Native Americans with honesty.
Due to American dishonesty and aggression in dealing with the Natives, Native American nations on the plains in the west continued armed conflicts with the U.S. throughout the 19th century. These conflicts were called the Indian Wars. Notable conflicts in this period include the Dakota War, Great Sioux War, Snake War, Colorado War, and Texas-Indian Wars. Many of these conflicts escalated due to the open range cattle industry and the expansion of the railroads into the West.
If you look at the map, the cattle trails go right through the Comancheria as well as several reservations (which seems crazy since it was their land to begin with) filled with Natives from the forced march from 1837: the Trail of Tears. Rather than the stereotype from the movies of warring tribes of cowboys and Indians, the real story is often more complicated. One cowboy who did see Native Americans wrote, "The people we saw, scattered about in small villages or begging [beef] from us, were not the 'savage foes' of Western lore but a sorry lot of starving human beings." By the time the cattle industry rose and fell, many of the Native tribes had already succumb to the imperial side of manifest destiny, and had already been forced onto reservations or eliminated altogether.
In July 1845, the New York newspaper editor John L. O'Sullivan coined the phrase, "Manifest Destiny". Manifest Destiny had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion for the U.S. took place at the cost of their occupied land. A justification for the policy of conquest and subjugation of the indigenous people emanated from the stereotyped perceptions of all Native Americans as "merciless Indian savages" (as described in the United States Declaration of Independence).
During the California Gold Rush, many natives were killed by incoming settlers as well as by militia units financed and organized by the California government. Some scholars contend that the state financing of these militias, as well as the US government's role in other massacres in California, such as the Bloody Island and Yontoket Massacres, in which up to 400 or more natives were killed in each massacre, constitutes a campaign of genocide against the native people of California. The population of California Indians was reduced by 90% during the 19th century—from more than 200,000 in the early 19th century to approximately 15,000 at the end of the century, mostly due to disease. Epidemics swept through California Indian Country, such as the 1833 malaria epidemic.
Shortly after the American Civil War, many freed slaves went West to escape racism, sharecropping, and persecution by Southern whites. Many of these freedmen joined the United States military and participated in the Indian Wars, these soldiers were called Buffalo Soldiers. There were many famous Native American war chiefs, such as Satanta of the Kiowa, and Quanah Parker; both of which repeatedly clashed with the United States military imperialism and westward expansion. Satanta and Quanah Parker both participated in the Medicine Lodge negotiations and witnessed the dishonesty of American officials, leading to famous battles such as the Battle of Adobe Walls and the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon.
The United States government made it illegal for Indians to leave their "reservations," they were given food rations, but as this cowboy pointed out, "rations are issued for seven days but last only three. After months of pleading with the government agent, Cheyenne braves were allowed to go on a buffalo hunt, where they found nothing but bones left by white hunters" (Olson, Allred & Proch 24). The Native People of the Americas had their land stolen, their families killed, were forced onto reservations, and because these were often in areas with little resources and no jobs, they also faced starvation. But the cattle industry, and the economy at large, was booming.
The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 set the precedent for modern-day Native American reservations through allocating funds to move western tribes onto reservations since there were no more lands available for relocation.
One of the last and most notable events during the Indian wars was the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. In the years leading up to it the U.S. government had continued to seize Lakota lands. A Ghost Dance ritual on the Northern Lakota reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The dance was part of a religious movement that told of the return of the Messiah to relieve the suffering of Native Americans and promised that if they would live righteous lives and perform the Ghost Dance properly, the European American colonists would vanish, the bison would return, and the living and the dead would be reunited in another world. On December 29 at Wounded Knee, gunfire erupted, and U.S. soldiers killed up to 300 Indians, mostly old men, women, and children.
As many as 100,000 Native Americans relocated to the West as a result of this Indian removal policy. In theory, relocation was supposed to be voluntary and many Native Americans did remain in the East. In practice, great pressure was put on Native American leaders to sign removal treaties. The most egregious violation, the Trail of Tears, was the removal of the Cherokee by President Jackson to Indian Territory. The 1864 deportation of the Navajos by the U.S. government occurred when 8,000 Navajos were forced to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, where, under armed guards, more than 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, and children died from starvation and disease.
After the Indian wars in the late 19th century, the government established Native American boarding schools, initially run primarily by or affiliated with Christian missionaries. At this time, American society thought that Native American children needed to be acculturated to the general society. The boarding school experience was a total immersion in modern American society, but it could prove traumatic to children, who were forbidden to speak their native languages. They were taught Christianity and not allowed to practice their native religions, and in numerous other ways forced to abandon their Native American identities.
In 1871, Congress added a rider to the Indian Appropriations Act, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant, ending United States recognition of additional Native American tribes or independent nations, and prohibiting additional treaties. The long and continuing battle for Native American sovereignty has been somewhat of a one-sided affair, with Native Americans suffering forced assimilation and the loss of their tribal lands and way of life.
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