1870-1900 The West and The Indian Wars - PowerPoint Presentation

1870-1900 The West and The Indian Wars

The Homestead Act The Homestead Act was signed by Abraham Lincoln in May of 1862 It gave anyone who wanted to move westward 160 acres of land That land would be free if the settler stayed, built a house, and cultivated the land for 5 years The led to a huge increase in western settlement and expansion

Land Grant Grids The Federal government broke up the land in the west into grids and this land was sold either to settlers or to the railroad The land would be in 1 square mile blocks and it would alternate which land was the government’s and what land was the railroads

Westward Ho! By 1900, 80 million acers of land had been distributed to the public Families were picking up and moving westward to try their luck Movies about the “Old West” are usually based in this timeframe

Covered Wagons

The Dawes Act This act shows the shift in how the government and many white people approach Native Americans The idea was that if Indians became more “white” by dressing like white people and farming they would become civilized and not be a problem anymore The Dawes Act broke up the reservation into individual plots of land that were then allotted to members of the tribe This was in an attempt to break up the tribes and encourage farming their own land

The Result of the Homestead and Dawes Acts There was a flood of settlers coming into the west due to the Homestead act, this caused more conflict between them and Natives and pushed many Natives off of their land Any land that was not allotted in the Dawes Act became federal property and if the Natives could not farm their land it could be taken away

Native Resistance In response to this influx of white settlers, several of the tribes attempted to do something about it Some of these attempts were peaceful and some were violent, in the end they all ultimately failed

The Fort Laramie Treaty The Federal Government attempted to limit the amount of conflict between settlers and Natives They convinced some of the Lakota Sioux to sign a treaty that said they would give up their Nomadic lives and settle of a reservation in South Dakota Most of the Sioux did so, but some continued to roam the plains

Gold is Discovered General Custer and some was sent into the Sioux Reservation to find a place for a military outpost While there, he and the men he was with discovered gold in the Black Hills (mountains sacred to the Lakota and part of their reservation) Soon word spread and miners were flooding into the Lakota reservation

The Black Hills

Rising Conflict The U.S. Government attempted to buy the land from the Lakota which they turned down The government they said all of the Lakota needed to report to a reservation for a census When many Lakota did not show up, causing them to labeled “hostile” T he government then sent in the military to round up the wandering Lakota

The Battle of Little Bighorn George Armstrong Custer was the commanding officer in charge of the attack on a large gathering of Lakota and Cheyenne Custer was greatly outnumbered but was a proud man and refused to wait for reinforcements In the ensuing battle, Custer and his troops were wiped out It was a clear and decisive victory for the Lakota It unfortunately didn’t last long, the military sent in more troops and confined the remaining Lakota to the reservation and took the Black Hills anyway without compensating the tribe

Mount Rushmore

The Destruction of the Buffalo Because of the new railroads in the west, there was a big problem of trains hitting buffalo and getting derailed Because of this and for the hides, buffalo were killed in droves It was a pass-time for men to shoot at buffalo while riding on the train Buffalo Bill Cody was hired to kill buffalo for the railroads. He killed 4,000

The Destruction of the Buffalo The government also encouraged the killing of the buffalo in an attempt to weaken the tribes that relied on them for survival Buffalo once roamed in herds of millions They were driven nearly to extinction before conservation efforts began to protect them Now there are between 150,000 to 200,000, but only one herd that roams freely

The Massacre at Wounded Knee The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement by the Sioux U.S. troops were sent to end the Ghost Dances and arrested Sitting Bull who in the process was killed The Cavalry rounded up a group of Ghost Dancers near Wounded Knee Creek The Ghost Dancers were told to lay down their weapons One Lakota man who was deaf didn’t understand and refused to give up his gun resulting in a fight with a soldier A shot was fired and the Cavalry responded by massacring 300 Lakota Sioux half of which were women and children The Cavalry lost 25 men

Those Killed at Wounded Knee

Geronimo Geronimo was an Chiricahua Apache from Arizona He hated the Mexicans for killing his wife and children in a raid He would go on crazy rampages, killing Mexican soldiers He also hated the white men who started to invade his land after the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty was signed

Relocation The Chiricahua Apache were a nomadic tribe but they were forced to settle on a reservation but was at least part of their ancestral lands They were then forced off of this reservation and put in the larger San Carlos Reservation with other Apache tribes Geronimo and his followers were able to break out of the reservation twice and were difficult to locate because they were familiar with the land unlike the Americans

Capture Geronimo was able to evade the military for a long time but was finally forced to surrender in 1886 He and many other Apache were forced into exile in Florida, then to Alabama, and finally in Fort Sill in Oklahoma Geronimo appeared at a few public events but ultimately died at Fort Sill “I should never have surrendered, I should have fought until I was the last man alive”

Assimilation Geronimo marked the end of the Indian Wars Americans now decided to force the assimilation of Native Americans Children were required to go to boarding schools away from the influence of their tribes The largest of these schools was Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”

Boarding Schools Children were forced to go to the boarding schools and were rarely allowed to return home to visit In some cases the military was sent to retrieve children from the reservations when parents refused In one case, 19 Hopi men were arrested for refusing to let their children be taken away, they were imprisoned on Alcatraz These schools lasted well into the 1900s

Phoenix Boarding School