Unit IV: Resistance, Reservations, and Allotments, 1850-1934

Introduction

This unit chronicles one of the most dismal chapters in the history of the Indians of the United States. In 1850 everything west of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was Indian land in theory, and much of that vast area remained Indian land in fact as well. The Plains cultures, stimulated by the acquisition of the horse and European trade goods, had flourished; the brilliant equestrian culture that resulted provided an evocative image of all that was glorious and romantic in Indian life. After the hardship of removal, many of the eastern tribes had found new homes in the West; these lands, they had been assured with the most solemn promises, would be theirs forever. But even in 1850 an ominous shadow had spread across the West. Under the rubric of “Manifest Destiny” and in the hope of riches, thousands of non-Indians had already crossed the fragile border into “Indian Country,” and, with the admission of California to the union, the frontier had reached the ocean. Three decades later the tribes of the West had been largely confined to small reservations surrounded by rapidly expanding non-Indian settlements; the vast buffalo herd of the Plains, cut in two by the railroads, had been all but exterminated; and their way of life which had captured non-Indian imaginations had been destroyed. In the following forty years, Indian land-holdings were reduced to a scant forty-seven million acres, much of which was arid, marginal land that no white man had wanted. In part this destruction was accomplished by the most violent men on the frontier, men who believed that the “Indian problem” could be solved by exterminating the Indians. In part the dispossession was achieved by greedy men who saw nothing wrong with obtaining Indian lands by fraudulent or illegal means. But the violent, the avaricious, and the unthinking men and women on the frontier were not solely responsible for this tragedy. While some non-Indians accomplished their selfish purposes illegally, in contravention of government policies designed to protect the Indian, many violations of Indian rights and reservation integrity were, in fact, abetted by federal programs which had been designed by men and women of the loftiest humanitarian ideals, the highest intelligence, and the best of intentions. Those who drafted the policies rarely foresaw their disastrous consequences; well into the twentieth century, believing that they had ensured the survival and progress of the Indians, many of these “friends of the Indian” remained blind to the devastation that had resulted from their theories.

The unit begins with a visual survey. Part of the history of America’s Indians in the nineteenth century can be easily read in the images which record the story of disease, warfare, dependency, reservations, and boarding schools. But the visual record also preserves evidence of another aspect of that history: a series of objects made by Indian artists and craftsmen who used materials, images, and techniques introduced by non- Indians to create dynamic Indian art forms. Nowhere was that development more rapid or more striking than on the Plains, where brilliant Indian cultures flourished and captured the imagination of non-Indian Americans even as the Plains peoples were being destroyed by the westward movement of non-Indian civilization.

The second and fourth lectures of the unit chronicle that great wave of westward expansion, the Indian resistance which met it, and the treaties and agreements which eventually confirmed the dispossession of the Indians. The third and fifth lectures explore the government’s attempts to design, implement, and reform an Indian policy capable of responding to and in some measure controlling these rapid changes. The end result of that policy was the reservation system, which preserved small islands of land on which the Indians were to be protected until they could take a place in non-Indian society.

As the pace of non-Indian expansion increased, however, so did the rate at which Indian policies were recognized as impractical. The concept of an “Indian Country” had guided American policy for almost a century; the idea of reservations was tried and rejected in a period of little mere than thirty years. By the 1880s a new concept had come to dominate the field of Indian policy: to transform the Indians into English-speaking, Protestant, self-supporting, independent farmers (and thus ensure their survival), it was argued, the government would have to break up tribal structures and assign each Indian a plot of land which he could farm. That policy was intended both to protect Indian land titles and to hasten the process of assimilation. Its development is outlined in the sixth lecture of the unit; it’s implementation, modification, and effects are examined in the seventh lecture.

In this critical period of Indian history, the fate of the Indians and the process of forging a workable Indian policy attracted widespread public attention. A growing number of men and women, seeing the failures of previous Indian policies and the injustices inflicted on America’s Indians, began to take an interest in reforming the government’s Indian programs. The eighth lecture of the unit examines a series of attempts at reform and their consequences. Ironically, most of the reform proposals, embodied in legislation, soon became the cause of injustices more grievous than those they were intended to correct. By the l920s the allotment policy, the last of the series of nineteenth-century reforms, had had devastating effects which its high-minded but naive proponents had not anticipated. The lecture concludes with a glimpse at the early twentieth-century reform effort which investigated the failure of that policy and led, eventually, to the far-reaching reforms of the 1930s.

The history of Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century is a narrative of defeat, but it is also an account of resistance, resourcefulness, and the many Indian leaders who tried to meet the threats posed by European-American expansion. The ninth lecture of the unit presents visual images of some of the civil, military, and prophetic Indian leaders who shaped the course of Indian history in America.

Finally, the focus lecture follows the history of four tribes through this period: the Seneca, who had adopted many aspects of non- Indian culture but resisted allotment; the Cheyenne, whose equestrian Plains culture fell victim to the violence typified by the Sand Creek Massacre, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the subsequent disasters of reservation life and allotment; the Cherokee, whose recovery from removal was halted by the trauma of the Civil War and who were eventually, despite the most solemn guarantees, subjected to allotment; and the Navajo, who survived the “Long Walk,” returned to their homeland, and preserved their reservation through this difficult period.