Compare editorials from the
Rocky Mountain News with
congressional testimony that
followed.
“Their village consisted of one
hundred and thirty Cheyenne and
Arapahoe lodges. These, with their
contents, were totally destroyed.”
— Rocky Mountain News, 1864
Chapter 18: The Industrial Age: North, South, and West: 18-3d Outsiders in the Industrializing West
Book Title: HIST3
Printed By: Wint Phyu ([email protected])
© 2014 Wadsworth Publishing, Cengage Learning
18-3d Outsiders in the Industrializing West
The two groups that did not mesh with the way of life developing in the West were the
American Indians and the Chinese, and both were persecuted as outsiders.
Subjugating the Plains Indians

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As always, westward migration entailed conflict with Indians. Like immigrants in the
northern cities and African Americans in the South, American Indians suffered from the
white Americans’ racism, paternalism, and belief that the United States had a “manifest
destiny” to control all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (for more on
manifest destiny, see Chapter 13). Although conflict was constant, violence between white
Americans and Indians accelerated during the Civil War, as Union troops streamed into the
West to put down various local Confederate revolts. During those travails, it was often
difficult to tell where the Civil War ended and the escalating war against the Indians began.
These small “Indian Wars,” as the U.S. Army called them, became commonplace
throughout the second half of the 1800s. One conflict that epitomizes the violence is the
Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. During the early 1860s, the Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians
clashed with white settlers who had been drawn to Colorado by the 1859 Pike’s Peak gold
rush. As white settlers began to demand the extermination of the Indians, a handful of
chiefs sought peace. During one round of negotiation, a Cheyenne delegation near Denver
was told it enjoyed army protection until negotiations were complete. The next morning,
November 29, 1864, Colorado militiamen attacked the sleeping Indians. By the day’s end,
more than two hundred Cheyenne lay dead. As news of the massacre spread throughout
the Great Plains, anger turned to outrage among Indians, and battles between Indian tribes
and white settlers escalated.
The increasing violence between
Indians and settlers inspired General
William T. Sherman, of Civil War fame,
to call for the extermination of all the
Sioux. But, despite continuing conflict,
U.S. government leaders in
Washington, especially President Grant,
still declared a desire for peace. In
1869, Grant initiated a so-called Peace
Policy that consisted of empowering
church leaders to distribute payments
and food to the Indians. This “conquest
through kindness” aimed to turn the
Plains Indians, who had been offered
open reservations to continue their
traditional lifestyles, to the American
ideals of private property, settled
farming, and Christianity.
Notwithstanding this paternalistic hope,
Grant warned tribes that any Native
Americans unprepared to make peace
on his terms would be subject to continued military action. In essence, he told them to
accept his terms or face eventual destruction.
Chief Joseph.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–1438
Unfortunately, many Americans did not follow Grant’s Peace Policy, choosing instead to
continue to invade lands guaranteed to Indians. One such example is the 1874 military
expedition, under General George Armstrong Custer’s command, into the Black Hills of
present-day South Dakota. When Custer reported to eastern newspapers that there was
“gold among the roots of the grass,” American prospectors streamed into land not only
considered sacred by the Sioux but also promised to them in an 1868 treaty. When the
Sioux attacked some prospectors, Custer vowed to protect them. He was unable to do so.
On June 25, 1876, his force came upon an encampment of some 2,500 Sioux and Cheyenne
warriors, commanded by Chief Sitting Bull and his lieutenant, Crazy Horse. Despite Custer’s
belief that the Indians would cower to the white army, the two tribes annihilated Custer’s
division of some 200 troops along the Little Bighorn River, in today’s southeastern
Read the Dawes Act.
I do not come to fight the white men.
If you leave me alone I will harm no
one. I have been driven from my
home by the white men and am going
to the buffalo country to find another.
— Chief Joseph, according to his biographer
Montana.
The Sioux victory at Little Bighorn was short-lived. The winter of 1876–1877 saw a massive
counterattack that caused most of the Indian alliance to surrender. Chief Sitting Bull and
some fifty Sioux escaped to Canada. However, cut off from bison, they had a difficult time
finding food, and, in 1881, they too surrendered to U.S. forces. Other Indian efforts at
resistance also failed. For example, in 1877, Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé tribe refused to
be moved from their lands in Idaho to a reservation in Washington. Rather than fight,
Joseph led a brilliant retreat to Canada with about 250 of his warriors and 450
noncombatants. The army followed Chief Joseph’s party through 1,700 miles of mountains
before catching up to them and demanding their surrender.
The Dawes Act
By the 1870s, many reformers and U.S. policymakers decided that placing American
Indians on large reservations might not be the best way to bring order to white-Indian
relations. For one thing, reservations obstructed the routes of certain planned railroads.
Furthermore, reformers such as Helen Hunt Jackson criticized the U.S. policy on
humanitarian grounds. Jackson wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), which examined the
numerous treaties the United States broke with Indian tribes.
Arguments from these reformers led to the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act
(Federal law, passed in 1887, declaring that lands held by tribes were to be divided among
families, and the Indians were not allowed to sell their lands because the government held
these lands in trust for twenty-five years, after which individual Indians were to receive
title to the land and become U.S. citizens) , which became federal law in 1887. As with
Grant’s “Peace Plan,” the act demonstrated an attempt to alter the tribal nature of Indians.
It declared that lands held by tribes were to be divided among families and individuals. To
prevent speculators from getting title to the lands, the act did not allow Indians to sell
them; instead, the government held the land in trust for twenty-five years. At the end of the
twenty-five years, individual Indians were to receive title to the land and become U.S.
citizens. This was yet another attempt to wage peace by conversion. In the prevailing
American view, Indians were capable of citizenship, but they were not quite there yet, so
they needed to be treated as wards of the state until they learned the ways of American
citizens.
As it turned out, the Dawes Act did not
help Indians establish farms because
the arid land of the northern Plains was
unsuited to agriculture. In addition,
despite the alleged safeguards, tribal
lands were often lost by fraud or
coercion, so that, by 1934, white
Americans owned two-thirds of lands
originally reserved for Indians. Most
pointedly, the Dawes Act struck at
Indians’ greatest strength—their
communal ethos—by dividing many of
the reservations into individual plots of
land.

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Dire Circumstances
In the midst of these efforts, conditions
in the tribes became desperate. In
particular, the loss of the bison proved
devastating to the way of life that had
sustained Indians since they first occupied the Great Plains. In 1865, the number of bison in
the United States was some 13 million; by 1891, that number had dwindled to just 865.
Railroads and commercial hunters were responsible for most of this decimation. Without
bison to hunt, the Plains Indians had little means of subsistence. Confined to reservations,
they obtained only a meager living from farming the barren lands provided by relocation
treaties. The poor-quality food supplies from the U.S. government sometimes did not come
at all because of the widespread corruption in the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Starvation and epidemics pervaded the tribes, making it even more difficult for them to
defend themselves against further encroachment.
Last Attempts at Resistance
With little hope left, some Indians attempted to participate in a revitalization movement
similar to the one preached by Neolin before the Revolutionary War. The central ritual for
the Plains Indians became the “Ghost Dance,” (The central ritual for the Plains Indians,
this was a dance lasting five days that would supposedly raise the Indians above the
ground while the land below them was replaced with new land, effectively sandwiching the
white men between the two layers of sod, removing them forever) a dance lasting five days
that, if done properly and at the right time, would supposedly raise the Indians above the
ground while the land below them was replaced with new land, effectively sandwiching the
white men between the two layers of sod, removing them forever. But, when too many
Indians began attending the mass meetings, they attracted the attention of the U.S.
government, which sought to arrest several of the leaders. When an attempt to arrest a
Sioux Indian who had fired at the army at Pine Ridge Reservation ended in a small battle,
killing the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, a group of Sioux seeking to intervene agreed to the U.S.
Army’s command to encamp near the army at Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29,
1890, an accidental rifle discharge led soldiers from the U.S. Army to fire on the Sioux.
After what became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890 conflict in which the U.S.
Army fired on the Sioux, triggering a battle that left 39 U.S. soldiers and 146 Sioux dead) ,
39 U.S. soldiers lay dead, while the Sioux suffered 146 deaths, including 44 women and 18
children.
Wounded Knee was the tragic and grisly end of the federal government’s century-long war
against the Indians. The next forty years witnessed continuing efforts to break up tribal
sovereignty—most notably in Indian territories, where the government forced the
liquidation of tribal governments. By 1900, the Indian population had reached its lowest
point in American history, bottoming out at just 250,000. The “Wild West” of cowboy-and-
Indian lore was gone.
The Chinese Exclusion Act
In addition to subjugating the Plains Indians, white Americans in the West also targeted
another population—the Chinese. In the 1850s, Chinese immigrants began traveling to the
American West in search of gold and other lucrative minerals. Most never discovered those
riches, but ample work for the railroads provided another impetus for migration, and by
1880, more than 200,000 Chinese immigrants had settled in the United States, mostly in
California.
Accounts of their lives suggest that most white Americans initially saw them as
hardworking people, but as the number of Chinese immigrants increased, many white
Americans challenged their right to be in the United States. In the early 1850s, the
California legislature passed a tax on “foreign miners,” which led most of the Chinese
immigrants to search for work outside of mining. Many found jobs in the railroad industry,
which was booming after the Civil War. Indeed, Chinese laborers made up 90 percent of
the laborers who worked on the western half of the first transcontinental railroad. Once
the American system of railroad tracks was mostly completed, many Chinese immigrants
moved to cities, such as San Francisco, and developed an expansive “Chinatown.” Most of
the urban Chinese worked as laborers and servants, but some rose to prominence and
positions of leadership within their communities. These leaders often joined together to
handle community disputes, place workers in jobs, and dispense social services.
San Francisco’s Chinese quarter of the 1870s evolved into today’s sprawling
Chinatown.
North Wind/North Wind Picture Archives—All rights reserved © Thomas Peter/Alamy
In the workplace, however, Chinese laborers gained a reputation for working for lower
wages than their white counterparts. This situation led to interethnic hostilities, especially
among workers. Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant who created the Workingman’s Party
of California in 1878, made the issue of Chinese immigration a political one. By the late
1870s, anti-Chinese sentiment extended along the entire Pacific Coast.
In 1882, Congress responded to Californians’ demands that something be done to restrict
Chinese immigration. At the behest of California’s senators, Congress passed the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 (Act that banned the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years
and prohibited the Chinese who were already in the United States from becoming citizens) ,
which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and prohibited the
Chinese who were already in the United States from becoming citizens. The bill was
renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. It was the first repudiation of the United
States’s long history of open immigration. While the bill was most certainly racist, it is
worth noting that, until 1917, there were few restrictions on wealthy Chinese immigrants,
and in 1898 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the children of Chinese immigrants who
were born in the United States were still American citizens.
Chapter 18: The Industrial Age: North, South, and West: 18-3d Outsiders in the Industrializing West
Book Title: HIST3
Printed By: Wint Phyu ([email protected])
© 2014 Wadsworth Publishing, Cengage Learning
© 2013 Cengage Learning Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may by reproduced or used in any form or by any
means – graphic, electronic, or mechanical, or in any other manner – without the written permission of the copyright holder.