Eighth Grade Social Studies: The Plains Indian Wars, Cultural Dispossession, and the Dawes Act
The rapid westward expansion of the United States following the Civil War resulted in three decades of intense military conflict with Native American nations, the near-extinction of the bison, and systematic federal policies designed to dismantle Indigenous sovereignty and cultural identity.
Diverse Societies of the Great Plains
Before European contact, the Great Plains of North America were home to diverse Indigenous nations with rich, sophisticated cultures, distinct languages, and complex social organizations. The introduction of the horse by the Spanish in the seventeenth century revolutionized Plains life, giving rise to the classic equestrian cultures of the nineteenth century:
- Nomadic Equestrian Tribes: Nations such as the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa lived a mobile, nomadic existence centered entirely around the migration of the immense herds of North American bison (buffalo). Expert horsemen and hunters, they lived in portable conical buffalo-hide shelters called tipis, which could be disassembled and packed onto wooden horse-drawn sleds called travois in minutes.
- Sedentary Agrarian Tribes: Nations such as the Mandans, Pawnees, and Hidatsas lived in permanent earthen lodges along river valleys, cultivating corn, beans, and squash while mounting seasonal buffalo hunts.
THE CENTRALITY OF THE BISON (BUFFALO)
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| THE BISON AS SACRED LIFE SOURCE: |
| - MEAT: Fresh food, pemmican (dried jerky preserves) |
| - HIDES: Winter robes, tipi covers, moccasins, shields, bedding |
| - SINEW & BONES: Bowstrings, sewing thread, needles, tools |
| - DUNG ("Buffalo Chips"): Essential fuel for campfires |
| - BLADDERS & STOMACHS: Waterproof water canteens and cooking vessels|
| - RELIGIOUS: Central to spiritual identity and Sun Dance ritual |
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To Plains nations, the buffalo was not merely an economic resource; it was a sacred, spiritual gift from the Creator that sustained life. Every part of the animal was used with deep reverence: flesh for nutrition, hides for clothing and shelters, bones and horns for tools and ceremonial implements, sinew for bowstrings, and dung for fuel on the treeless plains.
Encroachment, Treaty Violations, and the Sand Creek Massacre
As gold miners, cattlemen, and railroad crews pushed into western lands in the 1850s and 1860s, the federal government abandoned its earlier policy of treating the entire Great Plains as "One Great Indian Territory." Instead, federal negotiators sought to concentrate tribes onto defined reservations through treaties such as the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851).
However, whenever gold was discovered or fertile land desired, the federal government broke its treaty commitments, unilaterally shrinking reservation boundaries and sparking desperate armed resistance.
Tensions erupted into horrific atrocity on November 29, 1864, at Sand Creek, Colorado. A peaceful band of approximately seven hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho under Chief Black Kettle had encamped along Sand Creek, having been promised federal protection by the territorial governor. Chief Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white flag of peace over his lodge to signal their non-combatant status.
Despite these symbols, Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister turned militia commander, led seven hundred Colorado volunteer cavalrymen in a dawn surprise attack. Chivington had instructed his men to "kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice." The soldiers slaughtered between 150 and 200 Native people—the vast majority women, children, and infants—mutilating their corpses in a display of savagery that shocked the nation and triggered retaliatory raids across the central plains.
THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE (1864)
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| - Peaceful Cheyenne/Arapaho under Chief Black Kettle |
| - Flew American flag and white surrender flag over camp |
| - Col. John Chivington and Colorado militia launch dawn attack |
| - 150-200 slaughtered (two-thirds women and children) |
| - Result: Outrage, congressional investigation, war across plains|
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The Great Sioux War and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876)
Following Red Cloud’s War (1866–1868), in which Lakota warriors successfully forced the United States Army to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts, the federal government signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). The treaty created the Great Sioux Reservation, which encompassed the sacred Black Hills (Paha Sapa) of western South Dakota, guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain unceded Indian land set apart for their "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" forever.
That sacred promise lasted less than six years. In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a scientific military expedition into the Black Hills and confirmed the presence of rich gold deposits. Within weeks, thousands of white miners invaded the Black Hills in direct violation of federal treaty law. When the Lakota refused government offers to buy their sacred land, the Grant administration issued an ultimatum ordering all independent hunting bands to report to federal agencies by January 31, 1876, or be classified as hostile.
When sub-zero blizzards made compliance impossible, the United States Army dispatched a three-pronged campaign into Montana to force the tribes onto agencies. Lakota spiritual leader Sitting Bull and war chief Crazy Horse gathered thousands of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho in a colossal encampment along the Little Bighorn River (known to Native people as the Greasy Grass). Sitting Bull had experienced a sacred Sun Dance vision showing blue-coated soldiers falling upside-down into camp like grasshoppers, promising a great victory.
On the scorching morning of June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry discovered the encampment. Arrogant, impetuous, and operating under the false assumption that Indigenous warriors would scatter and flee, Custer divided his regiment into three detachments and launched a premature attack without waiting for infantry reinforcements.
Custer and his battalion of 210 men rode directly into a massive force of nearly two thousand veteran warriors led by Crazy Horse. Encircled on a dusty ridge, Custer and every single man in his five-company battalion were wiped out in less than an hour in the famous clash known as Custer's Last Stand (the Battle of the Little Bighorn).
THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN (JUNE 25, 1876)
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| U.S. 7th CAVALRY (Lt. Col. Custer) PLAINS ALLIANCE (Sitting Bull/Crazy Horse)
| - 210 men in immediate battalion | - ~1,500 - 2,000 veteran warriors
| - Divided force; no reconnaissance | - Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho
| - Attacked massive assembled camp | - Defending sacred hunting lands
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| OUTCOME: Custer and all 210 men killed ("Custer's Last Stand") |
| - Greatest Indigenous victory in Plains Indian Wars |
| - Prompted vengeful winter military campaign by U.S. Army |
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While Little Bighorn was a stunning tactical victory, it proved to be the ultimate strategic disaster for Plains tribes. News of Custer’s annihilation arrived in the East during the nation’s Centennial Fourth of July celebrations, sparking public shock and vengeful outrage. Congress flooded the plains with thousands of fresh infantry and cavalry troops, waging a brutal winter war of attrition. Over the next year, starving hunting bands were hunted down, Crazy Horse surrendered and was fatally bayoneted in 1877, and Sitting Bull fled into Canada before returning to surrender in 1881.
The Systematic Destruction of the Bison
The final military defeat of the Plains nations was achieved not primarily through battlefield victories, but through the deliberate, systematic extermination of their life support: the North American bison.
In 1800, an estimated thirty to sixty million bison roamed the Great Plains. By the late 1880s, that number had plummeted to fewer than one thousand.
This ecological catastrophe was driven by commercial greed and explicit military strategy:
- Commercial Slaughter: In the early 1870s, European tanners perfected a chemical process to convert tough buffalo hides into commercial industrial leather used for machinery drive belts in factories. Railroad lines transported thousands of professional hide-hunters into the plains. Armed with heavy, long-range Sharps "buffalo rifles," hunters slaughtered dozens of animals per hour, stripping only the hides and tongues and leaving millions of carcasses to rot in the sun. Special "hunting excursion" trains allowed wealthy tourists to shoot buffalo from passenger windows for sport.
- Official Military Strategy: High military commanders, including Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, actively encouraged the slaughter. Sheridan recognized that destroying the bison would force independent tribes to surrender and live on reservations:
"Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization."
Deprived of their food, clothing, and shelter, Plains nations faced the agonizing choice of starvation on the open prairie or submission to federal reservation rationing.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BISON HERDS
1800: An estimated 30,000,000 - 60,000,000 bison roam North America
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1870s: Commercial hide market boom + railroad access + Sharps rifles
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Military encouragement: Gen. Sheridan endorses slaughter to end resistance
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1889: FEWER THAN 1,000 BISON SURVIVE (Near total biological extinction)
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Outcome: Plains tribes starved into total dependency on reservation rations
Forced Assimilation and the Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
Once Indigenous peoples were confined to reservations, humanitarian reformers and the federal government embarked on a comprehensive campaign of forced cultural assimilation, determined to extinguish traditional Indigenous ways of life and remake Native individuals into the image of white, Christian, agrarian Americans.
Reformers were convinced that the root obstacle to Native progress was their communal tribal identity—the shared ownership of land and communal culture. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act (sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes).
The Provisions of the Dawes Act
The Dawes Act aimed to dismantle tribal sovereignty by dividing collective tribal lands into individual private plots:
1. Allotment of Land: Communal reservation land was carved into individual family parcels: 160 acres to each head of a family, 80 acres to single adults, and 40 acres to children.
2. Trust Period: The land was held in federal trust for twenty-five years to prevent white speculators from immediately buying it from inexperienced owners, after which the allottee received full legal title and United States citizenship.
3. The "Surplus Land" Swindle: After all eligible tribal members received allotments, the remaining millions of acres of reservation land were declared "surplus" by the federal government and sold off cheaply to white settlers, land speculators, and railroad corporations.
The Dawes Act was a catastrophic swindle that achieved the near-total dispossession of Native land. Between 1887 and 1934 (when the act was finally repealed by the Indian Reorganization Act), the total Native American land base was reduced from 138 million acres to just 48 million acres—a staggering loss of two-thirds of their remaining territory.
THE DEVASTATION OF THE DAWES ACT (1887)
COMMUNAL TRIBAL RESERVATIONS (138 Million Acres)
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Allotment to individual heads of family (160 acres per family)
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Remaining "SURPLUS" lands sold to white settlers and railroad syndicates
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1934: Only 48 Million Acres Remain (LOSS OF 90 MILLION ACRES / 65%)
Cultural Erasure: The Indian Boarding Schools
Parallel to land allotment was a systematic effort to erase Indigenous languages, customs, and religions through education. In 1879, former Indian Wars cavalry officer Captain Richard Henry Pratt established the first federal off-reservation boarding school: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Pratt coined the school's ruthless motto: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
The federal government forcibly removed tens of thousands of Native children from their families and transported them thousands of miles to boarding schools across the nation. Upon arrival:
- Children were stripped of their traditional clothing and forced into stiff European uniforms.
- Their sacred long hair was shorn short.
- Their traditional names were discarded and replaced with Anglo-Christian names.
- They were beaten or had their mouths washed out with lye soap if they spoke their native languages.
- They were immersed in Christian religion and manual vocational trades (farming, carpentry, and sewing).
This traumatic cultural rupture severed generations of Native children from their families, languages, and sacred traditions, inflicting deep psychological and cultural trauma that endured across generations.
The Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)
By the late 1880s, despair gripped western reservations. Confined to barren lands, dependent on meager government rations that were frequently stolen by corrupt Indian agents, and watching their children taken away, Plains people suffered severe spiritual and physical depression.
In 1889, a Paiute holy man named Wovoka experienced a profound vision during a solar eclipse. Wovoka taught that if Native people performed a sacred, circular dance—the Ghost Dance—and lived righteous, peaceful lives, a divine restoration would occur: the earth would be renewed, the white invaders would vanish from the land, the buffalo herds would return in immense numbers, and deceased ancestors would return to life.
As the Ghost Dance spread rapidly among the desperate Lakota on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota, dancers began wearing painted muslin shirts called "Ghost Shirts," which they believed possessed spiritual power to deflect white soldiers' bullets.
Terrified by the fervent dancing and fearing a general armed uprising, local reservation agents panicked and summoned federal troops. On December 15, 1890, reservation police attempted to arrest Lakota spiritual leader Sitting Bull at his Grand River cabin; a scuffle broke out, and Sitting Bull was shot dead, spreading panic among his followers.
THE TRAGEDY AT WOUNDED KNEE (DECEMBER 29, 1890)
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| - Chief Spotted Elk (Big Foot) leads 350 starving Miniconjou |
| - Intercepted by 7th Cavalry; escorted to Wounded Knee Creek |
| - Troops deploy four rapid-fire Hotchkiss revolving cannons |
| - Morning disarmament search; accidental scuffle/shot occurs |
| - Soldiers open fire with artillery and carbines |
| - 250-300 Native men, women, and children slaughtered in snow |
| - Outcome: Marks the final armed tragedy of the Indian Wars |
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The Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890)
Fearing retaliation, an elderly, sick Lakota chief named Spotted Elk (known to whites as Big Foot) led approximately 350 shivering Miniconjou Lakota toward the Pine Ridge Agency seeking safety. Suffering from severe pneumonia and coughing blood, Big Foot rode in a wagon under a white flag of truce.
On December 28, the 7th Cavalry intercepted the band and escorted them to an encampment along Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers surrounded the tipis and mounted four rapid-fire Hotchkiss revolving artillery cannons on surrounding ridges overlooking the camp.
On the morning of December 29, 1890, soldiers moved through the camp demanding the surrender of all firearms. During the search, an accidental gunshot was discharged—likely during a struggle with a deaf Lakota warrior named Black Coyote, who had not understood the order to surrender his rifle.
Instantly, the soldiers opened fire at point-blank range with carbines and the Hotchkiss cannons, which shredded the camp with fifty explosive fragmentation shells per minute. Defenseless men, women, and children fled through the snow toward a ravine, hunted down and shot by cavalrymen up to two miles from the camp.
When the smoke cleared, between 250 and 300 Lakota men, women, and children lay dead or dying in the freezing mud, including Chief Big Foot. A three-day blizzard buried the bodies where they fell. When the storm cleared, a civilian burial party dumped the frozen, twisted corpses into a mass grave.
The massacre at Wounded Knee marked the tragic and violent conclusion of four centuries of armed conflict between European settlers and Indigenous nations on the North American continent. The frontier was closed, the buffalo were gone, and the first peoples of North America were confined to reservations, beginning a new, enduring struggle to preserve their sovereignty, culture, and dignity in modern America.
Chapter Exercises
Exercise 1: Describe the central economic, material, and spiritual role of the bison (buffalo) in the equestrian cultures of the Great Plains.
Exercise 2: Analyze the causes, military events, and long-term consequences of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, identifying the key commanders involved.
Exercise 3: Explain the economic and military motives behind the systematic slaughter of the North American bison during the 1870s and 1880s.
Exercise 4: Detail the objectives and consequences of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, explaining how the "surplus land" provision affected the Native American land base.
Exercise 5: Describe the religious beliefs of the Ghost Dance movement, and explain how misunderstandings and panic led to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.
Solutions and Explanations
Solution 1: The bison was the sacred foundation of Plains life. Nomadic tribes used every part: meat for food and winter pemmican; thick hides for warm winter robes, moccasins, and tipi covers; bones and horns for needles, knives, and tools; sinew for bowstrings; bladders for water containers; and dung ("buffalo chips") for cooking fires on the treeless plains. Spiritually, the buffalo was revered as a gift from the Creator and served as the centerpiece of ceremonies like the Sun Dance.
Solution 2: Gold discoveries in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota violated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, prompting thousands of miners to invade. When Lakota warriors refused to sell the hills, the army moved against them. On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George A. Custer rashly assaulted a massive encampment at the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Lakota and Cheyenne warriors under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out Custer's 210-man battalion. Although a tactical Native victory, it triggered a massive military response that crushed Plains resistance within a year.
Solution 3: Commercial leather tanneries discovered that buffalo hides made durable industrial drive belts for factories, leading professional hide hunters armed with Sharps rifles to kill millions of bison for profit. High military commanders like Generals Sherman and Sheridan actively supported the slaughter as a military strategy, recognizing that wiping out the bison would destroy Plains nations' food supply and force them onto reservations.
Solution 4: Passed in 1887, the Dawes Act sought to force Native assimilation by breaking up communal tribal lands into individual private family plots (160 acres per family). The act declared all remaining land "surplus," which the federal government sold to white settlers and railroads. This resulted in a catastrophic loss of two-thirds of all Native land, reducing their total land base from 138 million acres to just 48 million acres by 1934.
Solution 5: The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement founded by Paiute prophet Wovoka, who taught that performing the dance would make white settlers disappear, bring back ancestors, and restore the buffalo herds. White reservation agents panicked, mistaking the peaceful dance for an armed uprising. When the 7th Cavalry intercepted Big Foot’s starving band at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, an accidental shot during a weapons search prompted soldiers to fire Hotchkiss artillery, slaughtering nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children.